SboNdaba Dance; Loess Valley, China: Heatwave resilience; Kahlil Gibran
PS: The SboNdaba Dance company is performing in art teacher and artist Jill Trappler’s 15 May Art Retreat line up. Three spaces still available. Book by reply email.
PPS: May is a super autumnal time to walk the Green or Blue Mountains. And then there is the floral splendour of August and September. Two ways to walk, join a group or gather your own. Enquire by reply email.
Good Morning
The scale of conservation in The Loess Valley Project, China, is hard to comprehend. The valley is home to around one million people. This last week two Green Mountain hikers shared their experience of working for the World Bank on this Chinese project. I think they said they worked there for fifteen years. Both agricultural scientists, they recalled how it was one of those rare experiences where you could see physical environmental change happening in your own lifetime. A remarkable project, well worth a good read, starting with Helen Davidson, The Guardian’s ‘All the Birds returned’.
“The Loess plateau, an area spanning more than 640,000 sq km across three provinces and parts of four others, supports about 100 million people. By the end of the 20th century, however, this land, once fertile and productive, was considered the most eroded place on Earth”, according to ecologist John D Liu.
“Generations of farmers had cleared and cultivated the land, slowly breaking down the soil and destroying the cover. Every year, the dust from the plain jammed the Yellow River with silt (this is how the river gets its name), sending plumes of loess, a fine wind-blown sediment, across Chinese cities – including to the capital, Beijing.
And so in 1999 the Chinese government took drastic emergency action with the launch of Grain to Green, a pilot project backed by World Bank funding, to regreen the plateau and reverse the damage done by overgrazing and over-cultivation of the once forested hillsides that would become what the bank described in 2004 as ‘the largest and most successful water and soil conservancy project in the world’’. The Guardian, Helen Davidson, March 2025.
Me, now feeling encouraged to tackle the Jackal River flood rehabilitation while dreaming of a world bank type funder.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines resilience as ‘the ability to be happy, successful, etc. again after something difficult or bad has happened’ and ‘the ability of a substance to return to its usual shape after being bent, stretched, or pressed’.
The Green Mountain Trail ‘medal’ for Resilience goes to a group of forty and fifty something year old hikers from Lusaka, East London, Johannesburg and Cirencester, Gloucestshire for completing the full four day Green Mountain Trail in last week’s heat wave. Never awarded before, this ‘medal’ was achieved through 06h00 starts, attentive guides, good spirits and extreme resilience which enabled being off the mountains and on a wine farm for a lingering lunch just after 11h00.
Each day they quickly bounced back into shape over a wine farm country lunch. This group voted Oak Valley’s wines tasted over a hiker’s special lunch at The Table, as their most favourite lunching experience. Oak Valley’s Gordon Basson got a special mention for his taking them through the farm’s wines. Gordon’s mum, Megan, is equally praised for her hiker massages here at Wildekrans Country House. The hikers, making up a group of nine, arrived as strangers and left as friends.
The extreme heatwave that hit the Western Cape last week challenged farmers still in the harvest season, with temperatures going to the 40 degrees Celsius mark. Farmers irrigated their orchards and adjusted working times to beat the heat.
The week before was a lot cooler. A delightful art loving group of lifelong friends are pictured here, including two brothers who did pottery classes with renowned sculptor Wilma Cruise when they were in pre pschool. Clever mum.
Three works of Wilma’s stand proud in the Wildekrans Country House collection.
In a world with much to fear, moving forward with these lines by Kahlil Gibran
Fear
It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.
With love
