Off to the ROCKS FINALLY!!!

151 miles as the crow flies to Laingsburg. Bruce and I are leaving before sunrise - to miss the traffic - the road we'll take goes North, then Northeast. The Cape Fold & Thrust Belt looks for all the world like sort of distal Laramide thin-skinned deformation around Laingsburg. The sediments - Carboniferous to Permian - shallow marine, overlain by tillites, overlain by shallow marine, overlain by turbidites. The collision was late Permian or early Triassic. The strata is planar, full of neato marker beds, trace fossils, petrified wood. Low greenschist facies I think. The elevation is high, climate is arid, sheep ranchers and onion farmers occupy the terrane. Water and wind gaps provide dip-parallel road cuts. Introductory mapper's dream.

The CF&TB is folded - supposedly - around the syntaxis (yellow dashed line), a linear highland extending from the cape to the Great Escarpment (Gods Must Be Crazy!). I have yet to dig into the lit to find out whether it's really folded - like the Alaskan syntaxis, it seems to be a matter for debate. Also - events called "paroxysms" keep popping up in the literature. Supposedly 3 paroxysms, or possibly 5, are responsible for the formation of the CF&TB. So does it mean orogenies? There are more issues. N-S stress is blamed for the E-W trending folds. Fine. Then Local E-W stress is blamed for some local doubly plunging E-W anticlines. NOT FINE! Thank you Casey for teaching me about high strain, fold axis rotation, sheath folds. Maybe I will work on this. Maybe it would be a sin, like publishing on Poleta. I will find out. Anyway, the paroxysms have dates, like 245 +/-3 Ma. From white mica. There's lots more to do here in ZA.

Did you know that the Chinese made Gods Must Be Crazy III, IV, and V? Called, and I am not making this up, An African Buddist Monk, And Hong Kong Goes Crazy, and The Gods Must Be Funny in China, aka An African Superman. Well I'll be. Wonder if netflix has these - dubbed from Mandarin to Afrikaans maybe?

In other news - my buddy got promoted. Yay Sila! He's now 2nd mate on the Avik. I'm so proud of my career man. He says it's muddy in the Bethel area at the moment. He says that about everywhere he goes I think, except maybe the islands. Come home soon sweetie! I love you.