A place to lay my head

- The "Three Hogs" mountains outside Hogsback -

As I mentioned last Sunday, for just over two years after university, I worked for Outward Bound South Africa (OBSA) and was based for much of the time in Hogsback, a sleepy little village in the Eastern Cape Province.  It is fabled that J.R.R. Tolkien of Lord of the Rings fame spent time there, and used it as inspiration. That’s debatable, but one could actually imagine little Hobbits and other mythical creatures running around the misty forests, past the Madonna and Child and Kettlespout waterfalls and across the hills overlooked by the rough-hewn, striking Three Hogs and Gaika’s Kop mountains.

- The one-and-only dirt road to the village -

I was very much the new recruit, and so didn’t exactly get to choose my accommodation. My first “bedroom” was in the more basic of the instructors’ houses, which I shared with three colleagues. I had a closet for my few belongings in the lounge, and slept on a wooden ledge above the open-plan kitchen, which was accessed by a make-shift ladder. The ledge was slightly wider than the mattress itself, and for privacy there was a thin curtain slung across its length, hiding my snoring from the communal area below. Fortunately I didn’t sleepwalk, but getting to the bathroom, half asleep, for mid-night emergencies was a challenge. Whenever anything aromatic was cooked below (bacon being a good example) I enjoyed the fragrance in bed for hours after. But it was at least better than my first-year’s “field accommodation” – a big old tarp and thin, blue foam mattress. 

Fortunately, whenever an instructor left those who had been there longest got to choose a new room, and so I gradually moved up in the accommodation sweepstakes. My next room was in the slightly better house, which was prized for its fireplace. Here the kitchen was on the lower level, and my room was once again attached to it – this time in the cool, damp basement, with a Hobbit-height door, low roof and little window to the outside. Whenever anyone walked on the floorboards above I would hear them, and once again I was awakened whenever the kitchen was used. 

We used two kinds of fuel when out in the field – reasonably harmless methylated spirits for the students’ stoves, and the much more volatile benzene for our high-pressure stoves. Anyway, so one chilly evening I volunteered to start the fire at home and used a jug of ‘meths’ to get the damp logs going. The next thing, I found myself dazed and very unpopular behind the couch – I had used benzene by mistake and had blown the chimney off. That I wasn’t injured was a miracle, but it’s given me something to talk about around many a barbecue (and here).

My final interesting spot to rest my head in Hogsback (after the wooden hut I mentioned on Sunday) was a walk-in cupboard. We had run out of bedrooms, and I was out in the field most of the time with students anyway, so I was housed in the cupboard at the end of the passage. It was wide enough for a mattress, had plenty of shelves for all my gear and felt perfectly private. Fortunately, after having slept in a one-man tent for so long it felt just like home. 

And it makes my current one-room bachelor pad seem quite palatial. 

- Our playground, along with Hobbits and the like -