Hitching A Ride
A while back, having spent five glorious days hiking the Otter Trail, Nicky and Quinten de Louw loaded up their vehicle after lunch and drove the seven hour journey home to Gordon’s Bay, arriving at about 10.00pm.
Pleasantly tired, they unpacked the car and went to bed. They were awoken at 6.00am the following morning to the sound of scuffling and breaking glass in their garage and Quinten leapt out of bed to investigate. The last thing he expected to find was a furry little dassie or rock hyrax, sitting on top of his workbench saw, and then it dawned on him that five days earlier, when he was parking the car at the Storm’s River Camp, someone had shouted to him to stop as a dassie had run underneath.
He climbed out to look for it, but it had disappeared and he thought it had run into the bush. It now dawned on him that it had not run off, but instead had found a nice warm place to sleep. Realising that nobody would believe this story, he went to fetch his camera to capture images of the stowaway, which posed obligingly before scuttling away to jump back up into the engine of the car.
On further investigation, when he opened the bonnet, the evidence (and powerful accompanying stench) of dassie droppings and urine were all over the engine bay, and by now the stowaway had deposited further little ‘gifts’ all around the garage shelves and floor.
Quinten decided to push the car out onto the driveway to prevent injuring the dassie in order to give it free reign to run off. After about an hour he saw it hesitantly climb down from beneath the car, but it took a further 30 minutes before this intrepid little traveller scuttled off onto the adjacent vacant mountainside plot.