It all started on a thick wheel old style bicycle, modified with carriers back and front, heavily laden with rations for a week, a sleeping bag, ground sheet, a fire kettle, tin cup, billy can, matches, a pair of binoculars and one extra shirt and short trousers, today exactly 50 years ago.
Besides the exploration and survival utensils this mother of all mountain bikes carried, it also bent its sturdy, real steel framework and wheels under the weight of 65 kilograms of adventure lust poised at discovering the legendary Kransberg, a mystical mountain massive outcropping in the western regions of the Waterberg, rising for one kilometre above the surrounding bushveld savannah from where ants and dung beetles crawl for a living, up into the deep blue skies where vultures and black eagles have forever been soaring majestically millennia after millennia.
The rest is history, as the saying goes. One and half billion years of geological history preserved as exquisitely water colour painted rock strata in Waterberg sandstone, petrified ripples in sand from ancient lake floors and riverbeds. On this uneven rocky canvass nature started painting the story of Life hundreds of millions of years ago with biological artistry and finesse in festivals of colours, shapes and forms.
No wonder then that 1986 saw the birth of the Kransberg National Park, today the Marakele National Park, for one of the best reasons in the history of conservation. Where else on earth can one find such extraordinary collection of natural and cultural wonders, testament to an age old deep connection of humans, animals and plants to a harsh but friendly, eerily inviting landscape of constant biological evolution and change? Where can mankind’s growing consciousness, spurred on by his endless and relentless future directed ambitions, evidenced by the archaeological finds of the stone and iron ages, can today be re-discovered and explored by humanity than in this fantastical mountain recluse? Where better can Life find new territories of expression of vibrancy and fulfilment than in this forever kingdom?
Welcome to the Kransberg Conservancy, a synergy seeking family of humans of all creeds and kinds, a young and tangible effort of exploration of the wonders and age old wisdom hidden in the remote, almost forgotten realms of the Waterberg.
