The path is steep and descends into a winding section where the vegetation changes rather dramatically from harsh, dry and rugged bush to dense and luscious forest with deep greens and the gentle sound of dripping water. There’s a small stream that runs between two mighty pieces of Earth and it feels like you’re right in the middle of a giant fault, like the Earth split and cracked and this little stream flows like it’s coming from the deepest part of the Earth’s core.

It feels at any given moment like the Earth could swallow you whole, and in this section of the path running through the ancient forest there are large strelitzia nicolai plants standing ten metres high and down in the fault there is a brilliant sense of serenity and stillness. The wind stands fair against your skin and then quite suddenly it is gone. Even the air seems to rest in this little sanctuary.

As you walk along the bank of the small stream with the sounds of silence and the gentle drip of the water filling the noise, the trees and the leaves begin to take a presence of their own and the forest no longer feels still but alert. There is a gathering sense of life which is subtle at first but then absolutely unmistakable. It almost feels like you are prey being quietly observed by some unseen watcher unbeknown to you, not in threat but in gentle awareness.

image host A decaying Yellowwood stump along the Salt River, Nature’s Valley, photographed by Obie Oberholzer.

There are smaller rocks covered in dark green moss and the air is cool on the skin as the towering boulders on either side of you offer shade from the piercing African sun. When you walk down the steep steps into the fault, the sounds that vibrate in your ears change and it’s like the silence becomes so loud that you can hear it and your body becomes light and your steps become soft and you can hear the stillness too, initially as a light ringing until it completely dissipates.

The sound of your arm rubbing against your side is so clear and crisp in the raw stillness that you’re unsure whether or not the sound is coming from behind you, in front of you, or even from one hundred metres away. The crunch of the brush under your bare feet comes from inside your eardrums and your heart beats through the veins running along your temples. Such silence and such tranquility is bewitching.

As you continue walking and gaining awareness of this increase in energy, you lift up your head and all of a sudden stop dead in your tracks as a glorious old Outeniqua Yellowwood tree catches your eye, taking up the entire width of the path and standing thirty five metres high and three meters wide. The size is seriously quite unfathomable and it immediately becomes clear to you that you were seen first and not the other way around. Perhaps you even let out a gasp at the immediate moment that the majestic tree catches your eye and perhaps a few tears run down your cheek at the sight of such beauty and such wisdom and such strength and you feel an achingly wonderful sense of safety all through your body.

After a while of flowing with this little stream, you suddenly stop dead in your tracks again as you turn around a bend and another marvellous old Yellowwood stands staring at you, gazing softly into your subconscious and you feel happy and at peace and you knew you were going to see something majestic as you were walking because you could just feel the energy heightening as you moved along, like something monumental was near. God what a privilege it is to share space with something so old and so powerful, so alive.

image host An ancient Outeniqua Yellowwood at dusk, Nature’s Valley, photographed by Kent Andreasen.

There are about ten of these ancient Yellowwoods in this section of the forest by my estimation. You can’t see them all because of the density of the bush so there may possibly be more. You get to the end of this section after walking in the fault for about one hour where the quiet little stream flows into a large lagoon with good fishing, and a few hundred metres further from here the beach starts running out closer to the ocean. The Grootrivier is a larger river that flows into the northern part of the lagoon and originates in the Tsitsikamma Mountains approximately thirty to thirty-five kilometres inland. It’s fed by a network of smaller tributaries draining the forested slopes and it flows southward through deep gorges before reaching the valley.

image host The Grootrivier Lagoon and the Tsitsikamma Mountains, Nature’s Valley, photographed by Obie Oberholzer.

The Salt River is just over two kilometres west from the lagoon and too rises in the Tsitsikamma Mountains, roughly twenty kilometres inland, before bending into a stunning horse shoe meander right before it meets the sea at the mouth where jagged stone formations slice up anything that goes near them and darker meteor-like rocks sit at the bed of the water. The water in the shallow parts is brown like tea, a refreshing brown that seems to be pure and rich in minerals, and in the deeper sections it’s a clear blue like crystals. You can hear fish eagles squawking as you descend from the ridge down towards where the water is.

image host Mermaid’s Cove and the Salt River mouth, Nature’s Valley, photographed by Obie Oberholzer.

It’s fitting that this section is called Mermaid’s Cove because you almost feel like you could have once been a sailor heading to these shores, like you were drifting on a shipless ocean waiting for the land to enfold you, like these two large pieces of Earth that form the valley could be on a small island floating somewhere in the Indian Ocean in its own enclosed ecosystem, and the mermaids on the rocks sing to you and call you over but they then say to come back tomorrow and you’re left to fight the tides and the waves. And you return the next day to find your one true love laying on the sand close to where the water is blue like crystals, and she’s bathing in the sun and shining golden like the morning light.

image host Crashing waves at high tide, Nature’s Valley, photographed by Obie Oberholzer.

In between the cove and the lagoon is a hamlet with four roads each around two kilometres in length running parallel to the sea and another seven roads a few hundred metres each in length that all run across the four. The homes are carefully and deliberately configured so that they seem part of the bush and surrounding vegetation and not separate from it. There is a road that runs for about ten kilometres from inland down towards where the hamlet is. It starts from the same elevation as the giant boulders that you see when you’re standing on the bank of the little stream close to where the Yellowwoods are, and it winds down through the fault and into the valley.

It’s a valley of intense greenery where the rawness of life seeps under your skin and enters your bones and clears your vision so that you see the infinite nature of reality, how everything that is has always been and how everything that’s been will always be. The good people of this village spend their time in the afternoons laying in the sun close to the water’s edge.

image host The village from a lookout point on the way to the Salt River mouth, Nature’s Valley, photographed by Obie Oberholzer.

The Garden Route of South Africa is sacred land and stretches forty kilometres east from this valley towards the Storms River mouth and one hundred and seventy kilometres west towards Mossel Bay where it ends. From Mossel Bay, it’s another four hundred kilometres to Cape Town where the great mountains meet the cold Atlantic, and that landscape too carries an ancient reverence, one need only glance at Table Mountain to understand.

Yet one can’t seem to shake the sense that the Garden Route holds something slightly different. Perhaps the forests here feel undisturbed in a way that is harder to find around the Mother City today. Scattered pockets of indigenous forest around the Cape Peninsula were also once home to large Yellowwoods and Stinkwoods and other hardwood species before the Dutch East India Company cleared them in the 17th and 18th centuries, using the timber to repair ships and to build homes – homes that still stand today with their striking white gables, whitewashed brick, and thatched roofs emblematic of the distinctive Cape Dutch architecture. The forests were later replaced with pines, gums, and other alien species.

I find myself picturing these original pockets of forest in Cape Town as much like those found here in Nature’s Valley and Storms River – towering Yellowwoods existing in ravines clinging to the wetter folds of the mountain in Newlands and Constantia and Hout Bay, and leopards and elephants roaming freely in what is today a network of streets and modern day suburbia. Perhaps it is this that shifted the feeling of the land slightly, and perhaps the lower population density in the Garden Route has left more space for the wilderness to remain itself.

We know that our earliest human ancestors moved through both the Cape and the Garden Route long before roads or names existed. The Khoi and San people lived in deep relationship with the land and they saw spirit and presence within rivers and animals and trees. The cave paintings found along this coastline, including those at Robberg Point in Plettenberg Bay some fifty kilometres east of the Salt River mouth, were left primarily by San shamans thousands of years ago as expressions of trance and healing and communion with the unseen world.

Even the coelacanth was rediscovered off the coast near Mossel Bay after once thought extinct, as if the ocean itself still guards remnants of deep time. The massive Yellowwoods I speak of in the valley are not alone either. More stand throughout the Garden Route in Knysna sixty-five kilometres west and in Wilderness another forty-five kilometres beyond, growing in similar forests that surely feel much the same as they would have centuries ago.

Perhaps the most fascinating fact of all is that almost the entire stretch of land that has been described above is covered in indigenous bush and vegetation found nowhere else on Earth other than here. The magical fynbos biome is a truly remarkable phenomenon. Along these slopes grow fragrant buchu and wild rosemary, silver-leafed snowbush, rose-scented Cape geranium, the soft medicinal presence of African wormwood as well as numerous other plants that have lived here for millennia and that carry both healing and memory within their leaves.

It is not foolish to imagine that landscapes such as these may have shaped early Homo sapiens into the humans we recognise today. When you immerse yourself here, it feels like what the Bible describes as the Garden of Eden and you feel like you’re Adam and your woman is Eve and life unravels itself moment by moment, step by step, and the expressions on your faces are neither happy nor sad because you’re permanently in a state of contentment.

image host The Grootrivier lagoon running out closer to the ocean, Nature’s Valley, photographed by Obie Oberholzer.

About eight kilometres inland from where the houses are, along the windy road up on a ridge lies a piece of land called Khoinania. This is a place where wild spirits roam freely and where the wind too stands fair and rarely shouts but gently whispers, and when she does shout it hits you like a wall and you feel it deep within your breast like the rumbling of a thousand djembe drums vibrating through the ground and into the feet up along the spine and into the skull penetrating right behind the eyes.

She rarely shouts though and all the time she whispers, she whispers songs of love and peace and she tells you that you are safe and that you can release the tension from your body and give in to the present moment. And let me tell you, dear reader, the feeling of distraught and terror that one feels when they become aware of the possibility of the Earth swallowing them whole, crunching them between two of her enormous rocks – the same feeling that you feel in the fault on the peaceful bank of the stream looking up at the boulders towering over you on either side – those feelings vanish in Khoinania.

Every space of what you perceive here has a feeling of safety, and you have the distinct impression that what you are perceiving is the highest state of existence that one can reach in this human body. The forest here is also thick and luscious and your strides on the dark nights are always light and soft and the gentle glow of the moon hovers as the purple black skies lighten the path ahead of you and you think to yourself how whatever corner of this land you find yourself in at any given point in time is exactly where you’re supposed to be and that that moment was no better or no worse than any other moment that was unfolding simultaneously anywhere else on Earth.

Travellers and wanderers take refuge in the dormitories and the gypsies like to camp in the open spaces under the trees. There are fairies who live down by the river and the witches sit around two fire pits close to where there’s a large wooden deck with a wonderful large roof and a spacious kitchen and a view of the valley that’s dense and a deep verdant green.

The deck is connected to a beautiful old wooden cabin that has a charming sitting room with a piano and a large shelf of books. There’s a lovely amphitheatre feel where the fire pits are. There are paths intertwining at slightly different levels creating little corners and tiers and the branches of the overhanging trees spiral out like veins and the attached emerald leaves create the perfect contrast of light shadows as the warm rays shine through. Here in this specific spot, the angels sing and the djembe drums are beaten.

The children run around giggling and dancing and singing and shouting and they splash in the pool that sits just below the tiered levels. When the angels sing, this little part of Khoinania becomes a cathedral and you sit down and listen, bewitched by a holiness that travels up the spinal column and washes through the hidden chambers of the soul like warm holy water along smooth polished stone.

The divine spirit sits down beside you and her eyes shine like the moonlight on a quiet river, her hair beams golden like the sun and her skin is soft and faintly scented with sandalwood. And in that moment as you look out over the valley, you become aware of the lightness of it all, the playful dance that life becomes when we choose to live consciously from a place of love and truth instead of letting fear and evil take over and lead us away from ourselves.

It occurs to you too that the most wonderful people on this Earth are the ones who carry a deep awareness of the self, of physical space, of intimacy and union. Such a sincere and gentle awareness. They hold the body in high regard and understand that it is the temple in which Christ consciousness arises and they respect the sacred union of the physical. There are no expectations, no hidden agendas, no quiet undercurrents of pain. There is only a pure and steady love for one’s fellow human and there is serenity in the divine power that allows two paths to cross. It is only these wonderful people who roam the lands of Khoinania and the surrounding valleys.

image host Playful gatherings, Wild Spirit Backpackers Lodge, Khoinania, Nature’s Valley, photographed by Gianna Marais.

Further along a path, a few hundred metres from where the old cabin is and closer to where the gypsies camp under the trees, there is an open field and a large tent where the elders would share their wisdom and where you would learn about the ancient breath of life. You would learn about the infinite nature of reality, how nothing truly ends and how life simply moves from one form to another, how every space, every particle is filled with living energy, how it too lies within us humans, within all things.

Every person that you see is a reflection of yourself and you see the most gorgeous and lovely parts shine through. There is no right and there is no wrong. Every action that is taken by every living being and every decision that precedes said action is precisely the correct expression that is required of the specific moment when the action takes place – nothing more and nothing less.

It’s like your mind forgets the outcome of your thoughts and you lose connection to the expectation that thinking about said outcome creates, and the concept of beauty ceases to exist because everything that your eyes fall upon carries a magical sparkle, almost like you can see the soft energetic field that undulates around all beings.

The force of life flows through your hands and your movements are determined solely by this subtle current that streams out of the fingers, your every single move is guided and life becomes this wonderful and graceful dance where time slows down. There would be times when this current would match the same flow as another’s and the two of you would dance like swans along a glassy lake and then you’d soar through the sky across streaks of white cloud, she like a heron and you like a buzzard.

And when you sang she would sing too, and the sounds would carry you back to a place that felt older than time. And this meeting of energies happens not one time but many! You meet your one true love a hundred times in a single day, each time in a different body, and you have the urge to float through your days with her but she is not known for she is all around you.

There is no telling the difference between dream and reality, between light and dark, and you look out over the valley and the only word that describes how you feel is alive. You are alive and so is this ground whereon you stand. The sun pours into you turning your skin bronze and you feel the warmth in your bones, and at night you kiss the sky and the stars pull you in and suck you through the warped black fabric of the cosmos.

There is a constant vibration humming, beating, reverberating that you can feel in the centre of your chest and it feels like you’ve been visited by your ancestors and they sing songs that make you wail. It’s like you can hear their voices before they even start singing, like they were always singing in your head before you heard them in the physical. You remember that the current moment is all that you’ll ever know, and your whole body is filled with loveliness at this thought.

How truly wonderful it is to be a wandering child who doesn’t quite know what tomorrow holds. You decide that all you’ll ever be is a being who is in service of others. You expect nothing. You give your love to all and you want nothing in return. The rocks will soon swallow you and you’ll become the eagle that soars into the blue abyss.

image host Slow mornings, Wild Spirit Backpackers Lodge, Khoinania, Nature’s Valley, photographed by Gianna Marais.

There is a fascinating phenomenon that occurs within the mind of he who finds himself in these kinds of spaces, the spaces described throughout this text – spaces of pure warmth and love and safety and serenity, spaces where there are gatherings of Gods and Goddesses who carry the essence of what beauty is in all dimensions of the human experience. He feels as if these people are family and he need not even know their names and the connections are instant and magical and they need not be explained, and he finds himself in a scenario where even when he’s still experiencing a moment, he’s thinking about what it will be like when it’s over and he has the urge to remember as much of it as possible so that he can reminisce about it in the future instead of experiencing it for what it is while it is unfolding.

It’s like how the writer attempts to convey a specific moment as accurately and as vividly as possible to give the reader a feel for and an image of what said specific moment was, and while he was experiencing it he was thinking about how he was going to write about it after it ended. And not just that but he too feels like it’s his duty to do so, like that is his calling, his destiny. And so too does the photographer attempt to capture an image for the viewer and the painter to render a scene for the observer and the musician to compose a melody for the listener.

But this fascinating phenomenon, the wonderful and profound thing that happens on this land and in this valley is that the urge to capture the moment almost fades. The impulse to store the experience away for later quietly dissolves and you stop trying to remember the moment while you are still inside it. You find yourself having no words large enough to describe it, no colours bright enough, no sounds rich enough to contain what you are seeing and hearing. You are simply there, entirely within the present, and the beauty of it is too complete for the mind to hold.

When the drums are beating and the strings are strumming and the shakers are shaking and the singers are singing, the combination of sounds goes out into the air and becomes one with nothingness. Nothing more and nothing less. And although here I sit with my pen and my paper, giving a true and honest attempt at capturing this unique part of the world using words that seem to arrive from somewhere beyond myself, with photographs from photographers who themselves gave honest and true attempts at capturing it in their own medium of choice, it occurs to me that the most wonderful moments and memories are the ones that I cannot remember, the ones that came and went and will only be known by the people who were there with me, living inside something fleeting.

If there’s anything that we can take from this passage, my dear reader, it is that these otherworldly pockets of magic that we sometimes find ourselves in wherever they may be on this Earth – places where the experience feels completely unique to that land and the people who gather there – may not be unique to the place and the people at all. Perhaps what we are feeling in those moments is simply a return to a state that is natural to our species, a way of being that has always lived quietly within us, almost as though it is the state the divine creator intended for us to live in.

And so when we depart these places of high spiritual frequency, we carry with us the magic that the place and its people helped us remember – a state we return to and take with us wherever the wind happens to blow us until the day we take our final breath and the wind blows us no more.

There are many things that I do not know, my dear reader. I do not know where I’m going because I haven’t been there and I do not know whether death exists for it hasn’t yet greeted me. One thing I am certain of is if I end up taking my final breath here in this valley, at the foot of one of the old Yellowwoods or in the crystal waters of the Salt River mouth or at the top of the ridge on Khoinania amongst the buchu and the impepho looking down over yonder beside my one true love, I know that I’ll rest gently for eternity.