It’s midnight on the wrong side of the tracks. A late-night cargo flight has roared overhead at full climb power. A couple of sport bikes are dicing down the M5, the howl of their engines slicing open the night. The fridge chatters. The cat scratches at a piece of packing tape in a cardboard box. The hamster is running on his hand-built wooden wheel. Clunk-clunk-clunk goes the wheel.
At 5am the first train hoots for the level crossing. Two long blasts of the airhorn, three if there’s a brave car driver trying to slip past the booms.
The airhorns are my steel rooster. They are, as city noises go, quite gentle. They are nothing like the train hooters from Hollywood movies, jangled chords of C, D#, F# and A#, which tell you, like nothing else, that you are in a rough part of America.
Still, the dawn airhorns and the rising hum of traffic are a reminder that we are surrounded by noise and only when the clamour ceases do we understand that it is making us slowly but irrevocably crazy.
Where to go, then, to escape this madness?
One place would be Pretoriuskloof, just north of Graaff-Reinet, and in particular to a farm called Letskraal.
After hours in a car, the silence at Letskraal is at first unsettling. The kloof has a profound stillness. Yes, there is the chatter of birds in the trees and the windpump clatters and squeaks and water gurgles into the round cement tank behind the house. But that is all.
No phones, no generators. No hum of electricity or TV or cellphones or radio. No fridge.
Apart from the occasional passing bakkie, which you may or may not hear according to which way the wind is blowing, there is no traffic hum. And even though a railway runs through the property, it has been a long time since any trains ran past Letskraal as they did when Johan Minnaar, the local optometrist and now owner of the farmhouse, grew up here.
While studying at Wits Tech in the 1980s, Minnaar used to catch the weekly train between Mossel Bay and Johannesburg.
His father would phone the Graaff-Reinet stationmaster and ask for the train to stop at Letskraal to pick up the young student.
There was no platform at Letskraal. While the entire trainload of passengers looked on, Minnaar would battle to hoist his trunks aboard, his mother waving goodbye with her hanky.
“It was quite embarrassing,” he says.
Then, with a great eruption of locomotive noise, steam and smoke and steel wheels screeching on the rails, the train would drag itself out of the kloof and into the mountains beyond.
That’s all just a memory. Now, sitting in the shade of a cypress and gazing across the valley of the Sundays River to the blue smudge of mountains beyond, the silence is so thick and enveloping it roars in my ears. Or maybe that was just my heartbeat.
Walking with giants
For some, the silence at Letskraal may be too much. That or the heat, which can fall like a hammer on the valley.
Head west, then, to another kloof, this one on the southern slopes of the Langeberg that marks the first barrier between the green, watered coastal plain and the beginning of the Karoo.
I am staying at a tented camp called Highlands View, as low-impact a place as you can expect to find in this part of the world.
Each safari tent has a double bed, a simple bathroom at the back and a deck from where you can look on the Langeberg range and into the valley below.
I am here for the redwoods. They are survivors of scattered Sequoia redwood plantations that foresters planted in the Western Cape to feed the colony’s insatiable demand for houses, ships and wagons.
The largest stand comprises more than a dozen trees. These messengers from another time are part of a surrounding nature conservancy that includes the Grootvadersbosch Nature Reserve, whose 250ha of Southern Afrotemperate Forest is the largest surviving forest of its kind in the region.
Along with the redwoods, which are protected despite being classed as exotic trees, the reserve has almost all the typical species of the forest, including ironwood, yellowwood and stinkwood.
The slow-growing redwoods could potentially reach the lofty heights of their US cousins, says Highlands View owner Andrew Frost.
“They are at least 50m tall,” he says. “And they’re still growing.”
That the redwoods grow deep in the kloof is one reason they have survived. From Highlands View it is a steep, stiff climb down a mountainside and then along a jeep track into the forest.
The only sounds are birdsong and a gurgling mountain stream the colour of tea.
As I hike up the track, I am thinking of a writer named R Murray Schafer whose landmark book The Soundscape describes the world’s descent into noise.
In 1959, Canada manufactured $8.6m worth of chainsaws. A decade later, that number had risen to $26.9m.
It is not just what the chainsaws did to the sorts of ancient trees I am about to see but also the noise they brought to the world.
A chainsaw produces a racket — calling it a sound is too kind — of between 100dBA and 120 dBA. In a quiet forest that cacophony can be heard up to 10km away.
In 1974, Canada made 316,781 chainsaws whose clatter could, if cranked up at the same time, blanket one-third of Canada’s 9.2-million square kilometres with their snarl.
This naturally was at odds with the people who had lived for centuries among the old growth forests of western Canada.
A First Nations elder taught Schafer how to listen to the voices of the trees through the bark of their trunks. They told the story of her people, she said.
When the Europeans arrived in British Columbia, they could not teach the First Nations people how to use mechanical saws or how to chop down one tree so as it fell it would take down four others.
“When the spirit of the deity inhabits the tree, one hesitates,” Schafer wrote. “Today as the jabber ware of the forest industry bevels down the woods, no-one hears the frightened cries of the tree victims.”
One more bend in the track and I am suddenly among some of the biggest trees in the land. Their rough, thick-barked trunks reach 30m or more up into the sky beyond the forest canopy.
But for the stream somewhere down there in the greenery, it is utterly silent.
I do, as the old woman said to, embrace one of the trees. My arms do not reach even a quarter of the way around its trunk.
I stand there a long time, holding tight, listening to the river, breathing in the smell of bark and sap and dank forest.
Two sides of the same mountain
I found more silence not far from Grootvadersbosch. But for the mountain range, it is so close a person could walk there in a day.
It is an entirely different world, a Karoo landscape spread as far as the eye can see with not a building or a cellphone mast to disturb the harmony.
It was also very, very quiet.
I asked the driver to stop and we get out of the car to stand enveloped in the midday silence.
This is Sanbona Wildlife Reserve, a 62,000ha game reserve made up of old farms restored to wildness. There are elephants here, and giraffes, springboks and kudus. There are also as many apex predators as the reserve, as big as it is, can carry — three lions and six cheetahs.
Restoring that wildness includes returning the soundscape to its prehuman shape.
It is a place I would like to bring Bernie Krause, a US musician who gave up LA’s easy promises and spent the next 40 years recording the world’s natural soundscapes. His archive contains recordings of long-gone forests and wildernesses, burnt, mined, developed, sold.
In his book The Great Animal Orchestra, Krause says there are no places left in Africa where the biophony, the natural soundscape, is fully intact.
He should come to Sanbona.
On my second morning, ranger Jordan Davidson woke me early for a hike to the top of a koppie above the camp.
We watched the light float over the blackened plains. The landscape emerged from the night, trees on the ridge of far-off hills, the dry river winding through the camp.
There was not even a zephyr of wind, only the quiet of an old land waking up.
Later that morning, Sanbona offered us an unforgettable lesson in biophony.
Ambling along a track in a game vehicle, Davidson caught a flicker of movement off in the scrub. He pulled over and switched off the engine.
It did not matter that we could barely see the cheetah crouched behind a shrub for we could hear him. He was tearing into the carcass of a freshly downed springbok. He ate fast, pausing only to sit up and scan for lions.
Amid the thick silence of the Karoo, there was only the sound of the cracking ribs and muffled grunts as the cheetah ate.
It felt wrong to even whisper. So we sat and listened to the world as it was before we came with train hooters, chainsaws and hamster wheels.
If you go
Letskraal (www.letskraal.co.za; 083 977 8917). Rates from R600-R1,800pp per night depending on number of guests, minimum three nights.
Highlands View (www.highlandsviewfarm.com; 083 982 9435). Rates R1,000pppn (R1,600 for two people).
Sanbona Wildlife Reserve (www.sanbona.com, email reservations@sanbona,com). There are two lodges and a tented camp. Rates from R7,535 per adult per night at Gondwana Family Lodge and Tilney Manor, from R8,480 at Dwyka Tented Lodge.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.