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| Thanks to clever slip control, the Renault Duster easily goes up 4x4 roads with only front wheels to pull. |
This is the original Ferncliffe after which the suburb below was named and if fairies and goblins were real, this is the space they’d call home.
The park and surrounding areas are not maintained by the City, but by a group of dedicated volunteers who banded together under a non-profit company to restore and re-wild this fragile section of the mistbelt forest.
The work they do is invaluable and fresh hands are always welcome. As their website explains, “We work to clear alien vegetation that is strangling venerable old trees and clogging grassland. We plant and nurture appropriate species, encourage re-wilding and record the change. And we create work opportunities.”
The area used to be very popular — first as a weekend escape for the Mason family who gave Mason’s Mill its name; later with the legwarmers-and-Lycra crowd who joined the hiking craze in the 1980s; and of late, with bike riders who are doing the steep, erosion-prone trails no favours.
The Mason family spend their weekends and holidays at Ferncliffe Cottage, a beautiful old sandstone house constructed by Pietermaritzburg’s first stone mason, Jesse Smith (1825–1900), but of which only the walls are still standing.
Around it, once can find many of the boulders and stones quarried by the Masons. One can access the area by driving up the well-maintained and cobbled Town Bush road until it becomes Warwick, or take the more challenging wet and muddy option up English Road.
Keeping its maker’s promises
With a 1,5 diesel-burning Duster Zen to test, courtesy of Renault, I took the challenging route. I have been praising the value offering of the 1,6 petrol Duster to the point where a school chum bought herself one out of the box, and was looking forward to see if the diesel can keep the promises Renault makes on the Duster’s website.
There they state: “Nothing stops the all-new Renault Duster, neither sharp slopes, nor steep tracks. Hill start assist and hill descent control let you drive anywhere with ease.”
Long story short, I was blown away by how this 4x2 SUV kept those 4x4 promises.
English Road runs alongside a section of the World Championship Downhill Track, so the route certainly falls in the steep category, especially where the track peters out into a “twee spoor” with a high “middelmannetjie” and deep puddles.
After the recent rains, the uneven muddy cover was also more slippery than a Pfizer shill trying to explain away the growing number of studies pointing to serious and long lasting injuries from their experimental jab.
Despite the axle benders and steep, slippery slopes, the 1,5 dCi 4x2 crawled up the hills so effortlessly I had to get out and check underneath to make sure it was a 4x2 and not a 4x4. The secret sauce lies in the clever slip control, which is like having a diff-lock on the front axle. Add to this a six-speed auto that sends the engine’s 66 kW and 210 Nm smoothly to the front wheels and it is as Renault boasts — nothing stops it.
Selling for R342 900, the Zen is seriously good value for money in the fiercely contested mid-size SUV segment, facing competition only from Indian and Chinese brands.
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| The Duster riders, (from left) Conrad Van Rooyen, Alwyn Viljoen and sons Luke and Kallum in front of one of the many large boulders quarried by the Mason family in the mid 1800s. PHOTO: Conrad Van Rooyen. |
The interior is spacious even for us fat old balies and the console boasts all the bells and whistles to connect phones and playlists. The cherry on top is the set of quality speakers, which made the most of the heavy metal compositions favoured by said fat old balies.
I could quibble that Renault’s five-year or 150 000 km mechanical warranty is shorter than that offered by Hyundai, or that Renault’s 15 000 km service intervals do not allow a lot of space for resale value in the three-year or 45 000 km service plan, but these numbers are on par with industry averages.
When we stopped at Picnic Rock, none of these concerns worried us. This picturesque spot is where the first of many overgrown old road signs point to the Bat Cave and Picnic Rock.
The trails used to be well maintained, with stairs cut into the soil on the steeper parts and those old road signs posted at every junction. But alas, that was 40 years ago and much of the once popular trails are now inaccessible due to invasive species growing in every spot of sunlight. These are the trees that the Ferncliffe volunteers are waging war on to save the indigenous species. These local species are hanging on by their root tips in the remnant of a biome that originally stretched over about 2 000 hectares in the mistbelt above Pietermaritzburg. Note, only 0,5% of land in South Africa is forested and the humid mistbelt forest above Pietermaritzburg makes up a precious, rare fraction of this.
The area still contains an astonishing diversity of life. We saw a bushbuck hop away in the bush and spotted tracks of bushpig and a caracal. Ferncliffe workers have also sported unusual millipedes, amphibians, a carnivorous snail and the enormous, monkey-catching crowned eagle.
The area is certainly worth preserving and definitely worth a visit, even if you have to walk to get your there. But I recommend riding up in a Duster.
