Picnics glorious picnics

My mother disliked picnics of any sort, but the rest of us loved them.  One of our best picnic spots was situated about ten kilometers away, on the banks of the Wilge river, a tributary of the Vaal.

With excitement mounting we would turn off to the right, just before the bridge, which crossed over the river the led up to the Lloyds farm, and make our way to the lower banks of the river to park our car under the willow trees.

Once the ground sheet had been laid and the car unpacked, we would scramble down the embankment to inspect the state of the river.  This particular part was divided into two sections.  A narrow stretch of water, as well as a much wider stretch, separated by a sand bank island.  This sand bank, made a wonderful sun bathing beach.

The river was full of boulders and stones, which were treacherous to negotiate without wearing tackies.  Many of them had been rounded through constant tumbling over the years.  Sometimes when the river was low,we would discover barble or yellowtail sunning themselves in the water between the rocks.

There were many significant parts to this stretch of river, and each one had to be religiously visited in turn.  The huge, hot, black boulders with holes gouged out of them through erosion, and often filled with rain water.  Wonderful hot rocks to warm up on when the sun disappeared behind a cloud, or we had been in the river for far too long.  Further up was a sloping waterfall, which we always slid down using old hessian bags.  It wasn't the smoothest ride, but we felt compelled to crawl our way to the top and make our bone-jarring, bumpy way down again.  Old habits dye hard!

The best part of the whole day, was to find a broken off dead branch of one of the willow trees, drag it into the river and using the current, float all the way down to the bridge  and beyond.  The speed at which we were swept down the river, depended on the amount of rain we had had that season.  Good rains would produce a thrilling ride.

When we went under the bridge, we always shouted and sang in order to hear our echos coming back to us.  Just past the bridge was a set of rapids, and this is where we would abandon our "raft" and make our way to the side of the bank.

Our weary trudge back to the picnic spot was filled with the high pitched singing of the cicada beetles and the intense heat of the sun beating down on our shoulders.  We always came away from those heady days at the river, burnt and stiff and feeling like life couldn't get any better than this.  And so we would wend our weary way back home, a satisfied bunch of frazzled children.