The Cederbergers gave it to Johan de Smidt from the shoulder during a family-friendly roundtrip that takes you away from the crowds.

Oom Dial from Langkloof suddenly became very ill during the long winter rains,” Rika recalls. “He lay there in the house where he lived with his wife, children and grandchildren for ten days before they could get him out.

“Meanwhile, the floods had washed away their clay oven. It was their only means of baking bread, so they had very little to eat.”

Rika du Plessis, CapeNature’s reserve manager at Matjiesrivier, pauses to sip her coffee as she warms to her subject − the characters of the Cederberg she has come to know in the six years she’s been in this`wilderness area between the Cape West Coast and the Karoo.

Characters such as Oom Daniël “Dial” Veloen, in his seventies at the time, who in July last year fell ill during the relentless winter rains, which often cut settlements here in the Cederberg off from the outside world.

“How did they get him out to hospital?” I wonder.

“No, he was dead.”

Welcome to the Cederberg: an honest, straight-shooting world where the sparsely covered soil seems to support only the bare minimum and they call a cowpat a cowpat.

Rika tells of a meeting where a farmer suggested cedar tree saplings needed fertilising. The saplings, she replied, needed no such thing, as “a cedar tree doesn’t grow in sh*t”.

Still, among this apparent harshness is where baby pink March lilies reveal why they’re also called naked ladies as they perch atop elegant bare stems after mammoth displays of spring flowers, where a trinity of grey rhebok scamper up the mountainside and where a francolin pair with twelve chicks have a twilight dust-bath.

These contrasts make for the Cederberg’s allure, drawing snow-seeking tourists who, along with inhabitants of the scores of little hamlets, can suddenly find themselves isolated from the outside world for more than a week by floods, while the withering sun can turn the area into a dustbowl at the end of a long dry summer.