Steytlerville soyourn

Well, safely back from two days geological sampling in the Steytlerville district in the company of these two mad characters. Don’t you feel sorry for me already?

Angelique needs rock samples to study quartz intrusions into the rocks of the Cape fold belt mountains for her doctorate so we went on a collecting trip. Here we are in the vicinity of Haaspoort and from there to Waaipoort and then Noorspoort, you guess it, poorts is where it’s at because the rock is exposed there.

Sometimes it is hard work to get the sample out of the rock so dad comes in handy at times, especially when the temperature climbs to 43 degrees Celcius.

Fortunately, on arrival at the Noorspoort farm where we were to camp for the night we could cool off in the pool before we set out again to collect some more samples at road cuttings.

The campsite or boma looked rather bleak when we arrived and a strong wind didn’t help either. Fortunately a nice thunderstorm sorted things out and we had a lovely, cool, windless evening by a nice fire.

This morning the main focus was on Draaikrans, a rather impressive rock wall with lots of folds. From the top of it we had lovely views of the area, see if you can spot me in the picture:

It took a while before we had collected all we needed and on the way home we still explored a few farm roads hoping to find a few more sites when we met this local inhabitant who got rather cross with me.

Rock Monitor (Varanus albigularis)

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