Heart of the Eastern Free Sate: Part 1.
Hi everyone, hope you all are doing well.
I have been working on this for quite a while now, since I was introduced to Steem it, I don’t normally write about something historical and I am no writer, so this will not be long editions of boring reading. This history and nature is just too unique not to share it with you. I don’t think there is a lot of people that really know what happened here and not just that I want to share a part of my life with you all.
Living on the farm now for about +- 8 months, it totally changed me, I never had any time for myself or anything for that matter, especially not my artistic side. Waking up every morning and looking at the beautiful nature just takes my breath away. Breathing in clean air and looking at nature, it really is something to be thankful for. Just take a look at this and imagine waking up to this peace and quiet, I must say photos don’t really justify the real beauty of nature.
Just a little bit of insight about De Hoek, My father in law is the 3rd generation farmer on this farm; we are now going to be the 4th. We produce sugar beans, corn and Nutri Feed. Our dairy milks 135 Jersey and Holstein cows two times a day we produce +- 1900 litres in summer and in winter 2500 litres of milk. We also have 114 sheep that graze all day long. The house my in laws lives in was build in the 1800’s all out of sand stone.
In the 1800’s the Basothos were hiding here on our farm in the mountains during the war and they drew drawings on one of the rocks in a cave, unfortunately during the years the cave gave in and one big rock fell to the bottom of the mountain. On this rock you can still see some of the drawings. This is the mountain in the photos below and if you look closely you can see were the trees stop down below there is a big stone, which has the drawings are on. This mountain only has one point where you can drive on to it and the scenery is fantastic, you can see as far as The Drankensburg and Maluti mountain range. In part 2,I will upload a bit more about the drawings I still have to walk the 4 kilometers to the rock LOL.
Just take a look at these photos that I took over the weekend the nature is absolutely awesome.
This tree is called an Bloekom tree and it’s more than 50 years old.
Sugar beans under irrigation.
This is the first dam that was build on the farm, the fish in this dam is called fresh water trout, this type of fish is very scares in South Africa and can only be caught if you can fly fish with a fishing rod. We only allow people to catch and release due to the scarceness of this type fish.
This dam my father in law build himself, it was just a small little steam running going nowhere and he turned it in to a beautiful dam filled with fish like large mouth black bass and yellow tail carp. We enjoy a lot of our summers here; we ride boat, catch fish, braai (Barbecue), jump of this rock in to the dam and enjoy something cool to drink.
The beautiful wild plants growing on the rocks near the water.
Well everyone, I having a lovely sun downer and enjoying the nature hope you enjoyed part 1, I have much more history and nature to share with you. Stay tuned, cheers for now!
All photos were taken by me using Samsung S5.