Camping in the Cederberg

This weekend we were lucky enough to go camping at Jamaka in the Cederberg :) Camping is something we do fairly often in the summer and normally I/we start preparing about a week in advance, checking all the crates of camping stuff, making sure everything is clean and everything is there and restocking what needs to be replaced. Food shopping is normally done about 2 days before the time, except for the stuff that needs to be bought at the last minute.

This time however, we only knew for certain on Wednesday that Trevor (and the other people going as well) had leave, so shopping, packing and everything else had to be done on Thursday evening as we were leaving early Friday morning. It was a big hectic, but all got done - if a bit haphazzardly LOL

*sings* It was a long and winding road......LOL well not really, but it was long and hot and I was grateful for our cars aircon.

There were two stop/go areas along the way in both there and back we had good luck, mostly just driving on through, but at the most we had to wait about a minute and a half :) When we arrived I was pleased to see that there weren't many people there, which I prefer as this is a LARGE campsite and the ablution fascilities, although nice enough, aren't really enough to cope with a full campsite. Setting up camp went well with a bit of 'sun tracking' to decide where the best place to pitch the tents would be to keep them as much in the shade as possible.

As you can see, Trevor was taking a well deserved rest in the hammock after doing most of the setting up. I did help though LOL. On the whole, the weather was nice if a bit too hot at times. The main problems were the strong gusts of wind (it was quite windy the whole weekend) and most of all, the midges, which were REALLY annoying *sigh* Luckily the swimming pool in the river is lovely so we spent a lot of time cooling down in it.

The campsite is lovely, with LOTS of trees, but you do need to pick your site carefully if you're there in the hot weather. Some of the sites are in shade all day, but others may have morning or afternoon sun or partial shade only. The website for the camp has a map of the (old) campground and if you click on the number of the site, you can see a pic of the site  http://nieuwoudt-farm.com/Welcome/index.html The mountains and vegetation is beautiful and this was the view from out tent in the morning...

On Saturday morning, Trevor and I decided to take a walk to look at the 'new' campsite and look for the horses that are there, because I wanted to take some pics of them. This is apparently where I got sunburned without realizing it :( because I didn't put on sunblock :( When we got near the new campsite and were crossing the logs across the drift with Trevor going first, I saw 'somebody' running to meet him LOL

He was a real cutiepie and followed us everywhere like a dog.

 I called him Bokmakierie but I have no idea if he has an actual name.

 Every now and then he would butt behind Trevor's legs, not with any malice, just a kind of pushing :) He even followed Trevor into the ablution block LOL. He followed us when we started back to our own campsite but when we got to the gate, we had to leave him behind, he wasn't impressed.....

Later in the day, the 'herder' drove the whole herd of goats and sheep through the campsite.

The rest of the weekend went by great with lots of swimming in the lovely cool water (luckily not too cold or I probably never would have got in).The temperature was 44 on the last day. This is the second time we have been to Jamaka and we'll definately go again because thank goodness its not tooooooo far along the gravel road and we found a better gravel road to travel on to get there, through Clanwilliam - much easier on our car.