Tea with a South African mapmaker and a fat dog

There are maps that show you the road and give you the distance. And there are other maps that open up worlds of possibilities. Don Pinnock has tea with Peter Slingsby and his wife, Maggie, who make the second sort.

You really wouldn’t want to go to Bokfontein. But if you absolutely had to, you’d probably find it isn’t there. In fact, it isn’t anywhere, although generations of maps have it faithfully marked as being somewhere in the Koue Bokkeveld.

Things that move around are a mapmaker’s nightmare, so there’s a temptation to be lazy. Up until 1952, there was a Bokfontein, but it moved 30 kilometres away and became Op die Berg. Peter Slingsby, arguably South Africa’s finest mapmaker, found this out by going there. But when he looked at maps not of his own making, he found they all still had the mythical dorp where it no longer was. So he noted this on his website, listing eight incorrect maps. Stung by his exposure, map publishers reprinted their maps with the town’s name as Op die Berg, but forgot it had moved.

‘There’s no substitute for actually going to the places you map,’ Peter tells me over a cup of rooibos tea at his home in Lakeside, Cape Town. ‘I can’t draw a map unless I’ve felt its atmosphere. My wife, Maggie, and I arm ourselves with every conceivable bit of information – trig maps, local pamphlets, photographs – and get in a car and drive the roads or hike the trails. You can’t swipe information from other maps and put it in unchecked.  at’s what I call the Sauer Syndrome’

‘Why Sauer?’ I ask. ‘Sauer’s almost more fun than Bokfontein. On every other publisher’s road map, you’ll find it on the R399 between Piketberg and Velddrif, marked with a dot that indicates a village. One map – a German one – has Sauer but not Hermanus. Another shows it as having a caravan park and golf course. If you go there, you’ll find something quite diff erent – four sheds, three with their roofs blown off . Nothing else.

‘That’s the whole of the city of Sauer, internationally famous on road maps and atlases everywhere. What I call the Sauer Syndrome is the tendency cartographers have of ripping off untested information.’

Peter’s an old-school cartographer, obsessed with detail and accuracy. His rightly famous map of Table Mountain, for example, has every contour, path, sign, kramat, peak, bush and a bit of history where it helps. You’ll find the limit beyond which dogs are not allowed, cairns, rock shelters, the ruins of an old woodcutter’s house, faces, gullies, the best months to climb, how long paths take to hike and even the route of an old railway track up in the clouds.

Whether it’s a hiking map or a touring map, Peter believes that, like a good directory, the more information a map has, the more use it is. ‘That’s not a principle that’s always been appreciated in a country where many commercial maps are very uninformative or just plain wrong,’ he says. ‘But you win people over with quality. When you’ve used a map you know you can trust, that’s the one you go back to.’

So where did this love affair with cartography begin?

‘Back in what feels like centuries ago, I went on a hike with student friends down the Witels River (near Wellington). We were the first party through after the 1969 Ceres-Tulbagh earthquake – there were still aftershocks. We’d traced a scruff y map off a trig survey, very inadequate, so when I got home I drew a larger map with all sorts of personal details to give to my fellow hikers. It had contours and other useful advice.

‘Guys at the University of Cape Town hiking club got excited about it, so I ran some off for them. That was my first map. Next I did a bad one of Table Mountain, then a better one of the Garden Route.

‘ Table Mountain was in demand, so I decided to do it properly. I got friends together and, with them, Maggie and I tramped every path. Actually, that’s where we did our courting and learned to read contours um, no connection intended. It took six months and we left not a stone unturned.’On the strength of these endeavours, Peter, who was a schoolteacher by then, pitched for and got the contract to do maps for the planned National Hiking Way, an idea to link Cape Town and the Northern Transvaal with connected trails. ‘I thought, “Wow, here’s my big break.” We moved to Kleinmond and did a number of maps. Then the money ran out and I didn’t have a job, so we started a school wilderness programme that kept us going for quite a while. I also did a Cederberg map.’

By the late 1980s, however, computer-based mapping had arrived and the cost made Peter realise he’d been priced out of the game.

‘The software was unaffordable for guys like me and, when universities started making maps, it was overs for me.’

Peter’s passion for the wilds resulted in a new direction: a book on Cederberg rock paintings and some acclaimed children’s novels. Maggie busied herself writing school textbooks. Years later, Peter and Maggie met a German couple in the Cederberg who were struggling with a map. Peter took a look and was appalled by the quality. ‘  is was the new South Africa and tourists were pouring in,’ he says. ‘I realised that the standard of existing local maps was terrible. In the meantime, the price of PCs and software had come right down, so we jumped back into business.’

It was good news for travellers. What followed were fine-detailed maps of the Cape Winelands, Cederberg, Wild Coast, Garden Route, Overberg, Baviaanskloof and Cape Town. On the strength of these, he was endorsed as cartographer for the new Table Mountain National Park. He produced five spectacular maps covering the park and the Hoerikwaggo Trail from the city to Cape Point – most on waterproof paper. From his pen followed a trails guide, Walks With a Fat Dog, the mongrel in question sitting adoringly at his feet as we talk.

So what about the threat of the GPS to paper mappers?

‘A GPS is like looking at the world through a keyhole,’ Peter responds. ‘You can see only a tiny bit of the country. It will tell you where you are, but you can’t really plan a trip on a GPS. Maps and global positioning are complementary.

‘I use everything when I make a map. First I stitch together digitised maps and load them into my laptop – for example, for the Wild Coast it took 38 of them. Then I add paper trig maps and we hit the road. There we collect all the guff from hotels and tourist agencies.

‘In the Transkei, we drove the roads and walked the footpaths – and we discovered that villages move. They do! I’m not sure why, maybe because a hut in which someone dies cannot be used, or the people follow their fields as they rotate. They also change their names. It’s a bit of a nightmare. Afterwards we go to Google Earth and fill in all the gaps. That way we layer in information from a whole range of sources.’

‘Where’s the next project?’ I ask. ‘It’s not a map, it’s a book. About a flower and the man who found it. Every year, Maggie and I head up to Sevilla in the Cederberg. We hunker down in a little cottage there with no phones or cell reception. No demands. That’s where we write. It’s an extremely creative atmosphere. I’ve done a couple of my novels there and Maggie wrote a whole foundation reading series.’

Peter fetches some of his maps to show me and Maggie digs out his books, several translated into a number of languages, even Thai. The table fills up with a lifetime of creativity and I think to myself that the most interesting people are those with a passion. After another cup of tea, I take my leave with some fine maps under my arm.

‘Come again,’ says Maggie.
‘Cheers. Thanks for the chat,’ says Peter.
‘Woof,’ says the Fat Dog.

To view the Slingsbys’ maps, web http://www.themaps.co.za.
To enquire or order, e-mail issues@themaps.co.za.