The wind whips at my moustache and tries to wind it around my ears as I soar high above the Langkloof. It feels like I can reach out and touch the beams of golden sunlight pouring over the peaks of the Outeniqua Mountains and onto the quilted wheat fields in the valley below. Morné Jonker nudges the nose of his microlight sideways and points to something, but the engine drowns out his voice.
I’m lost in thought anyway. From up here, I can see that Fiela Komoetie was right: No three-year-old could cross the mountains north of Knysna and make it into the Langkloof on his own. If only the magistrate could have gone up with Morné, he would have agreed, but then Dalene Matthee’s book Fiela’s Child would have been much shorter and we would have missed out on a wonderful story.
I’m visiting Morné’s guest farm Louvain, about 64km west of Uniondale, with John van den Berg – owner of Bhejane Adventures. We’re on a scouting trip to work out a new tour that follows in the footsteps of the characters in Dalene Matthee’s forest novels. If you enjoy South African literature, you’ve probably read Fiela’s Child, Circles in a Forest and The Mulberry Forest. I read them in high school and to this day, I can’t help thinking of Knysna as the place where Saul Barnard crossed paths with Oupoot the elephant, where Benjamin Komoetie was sent to live with a different family, and where Silas Miggel met the silkworm farmers.
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