Delmas

A Foggy Morning

- 31 December 2013 -

My trip to Delmas had been delayed due to my brother asking me to babysit my niece, Jade,  before Christmas, but eventually I made it out there on the last day of the year.

I set my GPS in the direction of Delmas and headed out at about 4:00am, Delmas is about 60km from Pretoria so I took the Rigel Road / Delmas Road leading out from Moreleta Park.

About 30km before Delmas the sun was rising and the clouds were really beautiful, although my objective wasn't to get the sunrise, the colours were just too tempting. Occasionally along the route I decided to stopped to get some interesting photos.

The previous evening I had marked off a couple of spots on Google maps which looked interested, but when I neared Delmas I saw a thick low lying cloud on the other side of the town, this changed my plans and I headed straight for the cloud.

When I looked again I was in the middle of the cloud and kept heading in the direction of the thickest parts. The previous night I had checked out the weather to see if there would be morning fog, but Weather SA said there wasn't going to be be any.... the facts proved them wrong. I also decided I would take the Daihatsu 4x4, which turned out to be a good idea because from this point forward I was going to be mostly off-road.

The idea of coming to Delmas was to get some photos of the farming landscapes in the already very green and wet year.

It was surprising to see that once I had left the main road onto the dust roads, there wasn't any more fencing, it was as if I was driving on the farms themselves. This is always refreshing when doing photography as avoiding the fencing is always a pain.

I continued to follow the thickest fog and soon arrived at a relatively muddy road near a river (if I'm not mistaken it was Wilgerivier). The 4x4 was proving very useful and I can honestly say that if it wasn't for the 4x4 I wouldn't have got through this part. I even found myself engaging the diff lock from time to time.

Turns out that going this route with the 4x4 was lucrative for my photography. The river and mist / fog combination was absolutely breathtaking. 

It was hard to believe that it was so beautiful and peaceful just 60km outside Pretoria and Johannesburg. The fog isolated the view a bit almost making it feel as if I was in some foreign land.