(Azalea) Bush Bashing with Bertie

Yes I am BACK and managing to stay awake for at least five hours a day. I have unpacked; caught up with two parents (2), one brother (1), one sister-in-law (1) and my friends Maire-Aine and Dave; wandered around Dublin’s city centre looking at all the shops and restaurants that weren’t there the last time I wandered; commented on how cold it is and been told – every time, without fail – that this isn’t cold. (I have clearly missed a Seminal Bonding Experience by not being here for the Great Freeze of 09/10. I have no story of being trapped in the snow in unsuitable clothing and therefore will have to renounce my Irish citizenship.)

With no snow stories, I have to fall back on Tales from Zimbabwe. So, let’s see: when I left off (to get emotional and sentimental and sing the Littlest Hobo) we were at the Inn at the Vumba. The next day, we drove up the road about 10km to a place called Seldom Seen.

I could have stayed for weeks. Our cottage was Crimson Wing (if you’re ever booking a stay at Seldom Seen, make sure you have this cottage – it’s the best) and it was at the end of the road. If Inn at the Vumba was 1960s colonial, Seldom Seen was 1960s National Geographic. It was a little bit Born Free, a little bit Jane Goodall … a wooden cabin with green trimming and floral curtains; iron daybeds, bamboo furniture. It even had a pantry. It was perfect. (Oh, and there was a stash of vintage National Geographics.)

Here’s the verandah:

My room (Robbie said it looked like a nun’s room – the question is, how would he know??? But yes, it does look like a nun’s room):

The pantry:

The view:

Although tempted to stay and work on my memoir of raising a lion cub, we did leave for a few hours to go for a walk.

Well, I say walk … it was more of a crawling, scrambling, shimmying, pushing, fighting, leaping (and falling) affair. We went to the cottage where Robbie’s Uncle Patrick used to live, at the foot of a mountain covered in montane cloud forest (doesn’t that sound magical? It’s a kind of evergreen forest that gets its water from the clouds.) But to get to the mountain proper, we had to fight our way through what remained of the garden.

Holy moly. We jumped across drainage ditches (I fell into one) and crawled under the vicious azalea hedge. We pulled brambles, spiders, birds nests and twelve kinds of dirt from our hair. I’ve never seen anything like it: in less than two decades, nature had completely reclaimed a once-tame garden. Occasionally Robbie recognised a tree or shrub, but it was invariably surrounded by thick undergrowth.

We made it to the forest eventually (absolutely filthy) and I caught my breath, while Robbie continued the good work of getting rid of non-native pine trees.

There was a brief interlude for tree climbing,

and then we got to the savannah and the whole point of the walk.

At the edge of a plateau, the ground just fell away – way below was more forest, and beyond that the view stretched far, far to Mozambique. The photos really don’t do it justice (for a start, you can’t make out how far below us the drop was, but it was at least 100m and probably more). Without any exaggeration, it was one of the most beautiful things I have seen in my life.

Our walk back to the car, through the forest, was much more sedate. We did see gingerlilies growing wild, though. But the afternoon wasn’t anticlimactic. Oh no. Because after the walk, we went for tea at Tony’s Tea Shoppe. This deserves a post all of its own (and also I need to wait for Robbie to send me the photos.)