Laughter drew me to a large rainwater puddle. The heat was intense and children were dashing across eroded dongas to splash in the muddy water. I sat and watched them, thinking how appropriate it was for them to be enjoying water in the Waterberg.
It felt so far away from the frantic city I'd left earlier that morning. This area, northwest of Gauteng and fringing the Botswana border, has always been a remote, inaccessible wilderness which attracted adventurers, gunrunners, outlaws, runaways and hardy pioneers of old. When Pre-sident Paul Kruger of the old Transvaal Republic was irritated with a troublesome citizen, he was often heard to mutter: "Give him a farm in the Waterberg." Today, it's still relatively unknown to many and has been described as South Africa's best-kept secret.
Spectacular rocks of the Waterberg Massif rise out of the bushveld lowlands, stretching more than 150km from the Marakele National Park in the southwest to the Masebe Nature Reserve in the northeast. Iron and manganese give the cliffs and buttresses distinctive red, orange and purple hues which glow in the setting sun.
I would have loved to join the kids in the puddle to cool down, but I needed to get to Zeederberg Cottages and Backpackers before sunset. That evening a baboon barked, reminding me of another son of the Waterberg. In the early 1900s, Eugene Marais - naturalist, healer, poet and morphine addict - moved to the Waterberg's wide-open spaces to try to find peace for his brilliant but troubled soul. Despite having no medical training, he soon won the respect of the local farmers and miners by diagnosing illnesses and administering cures.
But Marais was by nature a recluse and baboons passed no judgements about his addiction. He found them increasingly fascinating and took to wandering among the kloofs of the region, often disappearing for weeks at a time. In those days, the area was teeming with wildlife and provided a rich laboratory for his ever-curious mind. For three years, on a farm named Rietfontein near the present Mookgopong, he befriended, and studied the interactions of, the chacma baboons.
His findings on the social framework of the troop and his theories on the innate and learned behaviours of baboons broke new scientific ground. Together with his study of termites, it provided prescient insights into the nature of mind itself. His writing can be found in The Soul of the Ape and My Friends the Baboons. He also discovered a rare species of cycad endemic to the Waterberg.
A fascinating feature of the rocky hillsides is the abundance of flora related to Cape fynbos. Another link with the south is the Cape vulture. It used to be a common sight on Table Mountain, but now the most important breeding colony for these creatures is on the Groothoek cliffs in the Marakele National Park. Officially proclaimed in 1994, Marakele is an area of 50 000ha with some of the most spectacular scenery in the Waterberg.
Further north an easy climb to the rocky outcrop revealed a beautiful Bushman representation of an elephant hunt and a leopard attack on a hunting party. There was also rougher artwork by Pedi artists.
The Waterberg has a long history of human occupation and was inhabited by a succession of people over hundreds of thousands of years. From Stone and Iron Age people to hunter-gatherer Bushmen and Khoikhoi herders, all have left their traces in the form of paintings or iron-smelting furnaces. Their ghosts quiver among the hot, craggy rocks and soaring buttresses.
It's a land thick with the past and is emerging as one of the most important archaeological sites in South Africa - worthy of the world's finest natural history museums.
The next day it was raining. I thought of a quick escape. But, what the heck? It would be a good excuse to hang out in the water mountains for a bit longer.
