Mud pies

After years of threatening to do so, I finally hauled my ass (and dragged the Gilb’s too, of course) to the Ficksburg Cherry Festival – thanks to my sis and Mom’s hiking club, which arranged the trip.

We met up with the rest of the tour group at 9pm on Friday (my Mom’s friend drove us there at a painstakingly slow average speed of 90 km/h. “In England no-one drives like these hooligans!” was her reply to our pleas to accelerate to the speed limit). We awoke to a miserably drizzly Saturday morning, drove out to a Fouriesberg cherry farm (quaintly named Loskop), where we determinedly marched out onto the farm and tried to get our entrance fee’s worth of (wet) cherry picking/eating, then drove into Ficksburg for the (soggy) festivities. Not armed with umbrellas or raincoats, the Gilb and I made a nifty solution: we emptied out the white promo packets they gave us at the entrance, and used them as hats to keep our expensive Joburg hairstyles intact (we looked alarmingly KKK, but all in the name of frizz-free hairdays, I say). The day’s memorability was greatly enhanced by having to slodge and shluck through ankle-deep mud – half of the visitors abandoned their shoes, the other half bought those yukky plastic crocs thingies that were on sale at a few of the stalls.

Now, call me a born-and-bred Gauteng-a-leng, but I expected much more from the festival in terms of taking advantage of the economic opportunities afforded by such an event. For one, there were no umbrellas being sold at the entrance (in Jozi, on the first day of summer rains, the traffic intersection salesmen are all fully stocked – and I would have paid virtually anything at that point for a brolly), but more importantly, there was no cherry pie, cherry strudel, cherry cheesecake, cherry sorbet, cherry hot chocolate, cherry syrup, glacéd cherries etc in sight. One thing there was in reasonable quantities (and varieties) was cherry alcohol.

So I made the most of the limited diversity of cherry products and bought what forms I could. The spoils of my spree include:

Cherries (the simplest and arguably best form)
Cherry rolls (sweetened dried boiled cherry pulp flattened into sheets and rolled for a snack)
Cherry jam
Cherry sweets
Cherry liqueur
Cherry wine
Normal wine (sigh! Bought MORE wine! Couldn’t resist – there was a wine-tasting tent and I found some bargains)
Cherry cider (they ran out of cups, so we bought a 2lt bottle full, and they warned us “keep opening the top to let out the carbon dioxide – the cider’s still fermenting! It’ll get stronger and stronger if you keep it for a while!” We didn’t – very thirsty, you understand
Cherry vinegar (got the last bottle!)

Highlights of the festival included solving the mystery of what happened to tv star from my childhood Amanda Forrow, who we spotted doing a Pick ‘n Pay cooking demonstration; and a blind kid singing kak boeremusiek choons dreadfully on stage (some dude commented in passing on how admirable his performance was, to which my tactless yet hilarious boyfriend responded “not only is he blind, but completely tone-deaf, too”).

On Sunday we did a hike in some breathtakingly beautiful Fouriesburg mountains, then stopped off in Clarens on our way back to Jozi (again, our return journey took us an inexplicable 5 hours)… and here we are again at the start of what promises to be a hectic work week. Gimme mud any day.