Photograph: Not baboons, tandem cyclists!

When I finally reached the toll gate an official ordered me to cross over to the right hand side of the road, across multiple lanes that carried traffic in both directions, around the gates and then cross the lanes once again to reach the extreme left-hand side of the road. I couldn’t figure her logic but fortunately there was no reprimand for my being a cyclist on her toll road.

Luckily the off-ramp to Nature’s Valley was only metres ahead. I took it and enjoyed the best early morning ride of my life through a fairy land of yellowwood trees, fynbos, strings of old man’s beard growing over the foliage. The road was completely in the shadows.

Men in forestry uniforms greeted me in Afrikaans, obviously on their way to work.

The road emerged out of thick forest to the crest of a hill where I stood gasping at the view down below of Nature’s Valley lagoon, wedged between thick forest and a long beach.

I heard a grunt and expected it to be from one of those baboons I had been warned not to feed, or face a five hundred rand fine. But no, it was a pair of cyclists on a tandem bicycle!

COMMENT: What do you feel about strict laws against feeding baboons?