“Secluded mountain retreat. Peaceful. Off the beaten track.” — a website written by a sociopath.

A survivor’s account · Cederberg, Western Cape · May 2026

I want to be very clear about something before we begin: I did not sleep. Not Friday night. Not Saturday night. Not the nap I attempted at 2pm on Saturday when I lay down in my tent with an eye mask on like a person who has simply given up on dignity. I did not sleep. The Cederberg did not allow it. The Cederberg had other plans for me, and those plans involved Kurt Darren.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I arrived Friday afternoon, windows down, Cederberg air doing that thing it does where it hits you in the face like a rumour of something better. Rooibos and fynbos and the specific clean coldness of altitude. I had deleted Twitter. I had put my phone on aeroplane mode. I had bought a small Moleskine notebook in which I intended to write Things. Thoughts. Perhaps a poem. I had, in other words, completely lost the plot in the most aspirational way possible.

Internal monologue · 15:42″This is it. This is the reset. This is who I actually am when I’m not being slowly destroyed by a group WhatsApp.”

I pulled through the farm gate. And there, already installed like a semi-permanent government, was the first family. I will call them The Venter Situation. There were many of them, I never got an accurate count because they moved in packs and the children were frankly indistinguishable from one another at speed ,but the core unit appeared to be two dads, two moms, somewhere between four and nine children, three Boerboels, and a trailer that had been unpacked with the logistical confidence of a D-Day operation. There was a gazebo up. There was a braai already lit. The braai was enormous. The braai was not a braai so much as a philosophy.

Internal monologue · 15:51″That is not a braai. That is a retired industrial furnace. That thing smelted ore during the Anglo-Boer War.”

One of the dads, broad, sunburned, wearing a Springbok rugby shirt that had been through things, caught me staring. I did the nod. The South African male nod, which communicates everything and nothing simultaneously, which says “I see you, I acknowledge your existence, I will never learn your name, we are both men in the mountains, let’s leave it there.” He nodded back. We had a complete relationship in 0.4 seconds. It was the most honest exchange I had all weekend.

· · ·

On my other side: a couple, late thirties, aggressively good-looking in the way of people who do outdoor things for fun rather than out of some broken desire to escape themselves. Trail running shoes. Matching Hydro Flasks. A tent that went up in six minutes with the quiet competence of people who have their lives together. I hated them immediately and completely.

Internal monologue · 16:05″They’re going to wake up at 5am and run up a mountain. Voluntarily. They’re going to come back glowing and talk about their heart rate zones. I’m going to lie in this tent listening to a generator and age visibly.”

The woman smiled at me when I wrestled my tent poles into something approaching a structure. It was a kind smile. A generous smile. The smile of someone who had not watched me try to insert pole C into slot D for eleven minutes before realising I had the fly sheet on backwards.

“First time with that model?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

Internal monologue · 16:17″It was the third time. I bought this tent in 2019 and have used it four times and it defeats me every single time like a recurring nightmare I paid R2,400 for.”

· · ·

By 5pm the braai was at full operational capacity. The smoke from The Venter Situation’s furnace was doing what braai smoke does, which is travel directly into your face regardless of where you stand, as if guided by a personal vendetta. One of the dads, there was a second one I hadn’t clocked initially, taller, wearing a cap that said BOLAND WINGERD in sun-faded letters, was performing the sacred ritual of the braai master: standing before the fire with arms folded, staring into the coals with the focused spiritual intensity of a man receiving divine instruction. Nobody disturbs the braai master. Nobody speaks to the braai master unless spoken to. The braai master is in communion with something older than us all.

And then the speaker connected. And then the JBL, it was the large one, the one the size of a toddler that costs more than my first car, made its little connection sound. And then, from somewhere deep in a Spotify algorithm that had clearly been built by someone who wanted me personally to suffer, came the opening bars of Kaptein.

Kurt Darren’s voice filled the Cederberg mountain range with the inevitability of a geological event.

The rocks had stood for five hundred million years. They had survived continental drift, ice ages, the formation and collapse of entire civilisations. And now they were vibrating, gently but unmistakably, to Kaptein, span die seile. The eagle that lives somewhere on the krans above the campsite, I had seen it earlier, soaring in total majestic silence, banked left and flew away. I don’t blame it. I would have left too if I had wings.

Internal monologue · 17:23″Is this my life. Is this actually my life. I drove three hours. I have no signal. I am sitting in a camp chair eating a provita with sad peanut butter watching a man conduct an entire Kurt Darren concert for the Cederberg wilderness. The wilderness did not ask for this.”

One of the moms got up and danced. She was good. She was genuinely, unselfconsciously, wonderfully good, moving in the way that people who have danced to this song at every braai since 2003 move, which is with the muscle memory of a religion. The children joined. The Boerboels circled them, tails going. The braai master did not move. The braai master does not dance. The braai master tends the fire.

· · ·

Saturday. I had not slept. Kurt Darren had given way to a full Afrikaans playlist that ran until eleven-something, at which point it was replaced not by silence, silence was apparently not on the weekend’s itinerary, but by the generator, which they ran until 1am to power what I can only assume was a small industrial refrigeration unit, because who needs a generator at 1am in the mountains for anything that isn’t a medical emergency or a walk-in cold room full of vleis.

Internal monologue · 01:14, Saturday”What are they chilling in there. What requires this. It’s May in the Cederberg. It’s already cold enough outside to preserve a body. Why is the generator on. Why is there a light. Who is awake. What is happening in that camp that requires electricity at this hour. I need to know. I will never know. This is going to bother me for the rest of my life.”

When the generator finally cut at 1:37am I know the exact time because I had been lying in my sleeping bag with my eyes open like a man who has been cursed by something ancient, cataloguing sounds, a dog, somewhere, making a decision about something; a child who woke up briefly to ask a question about juice and was answered and went silent; the guy in the Subaru Forester two campsites down who had arrived alone, said nothing to anyone, and whose tent I had watched go up in the dark at 9pm with a head torch, who I had privately named Gerald and whose whole situation I found deeply relatable and also deeply concerning.

Internal monologue · 01:38″Gerald understands. Gerald came here for the same reason I did. Gerald is also lying awake in there. Gerald and I are the same person except Gerald had the wisdom to arrive after everyone was asleep and I arrived into the full chaos like a man walking into a surprise party thrown for someone else.”

· · ·

Saturday morning arrived the way mornings arrive when you haven’t slept: sudden, cruel, and lit with a brightness that felt personal. The trail runners were already back from their run. They were making filter coffee on a Aeropress. There was steam rising from the cups. They were talking in low, happy voices about something they’d seen on the mountain.

I emerged from my tent looking like a man who had been left in a tumble dryer. My hair had made a choice. My face had made several choices. I was wearing a fleece that I had put on inside out at 3am and had not corrected because correcting it had felt like an act of optimism I couldn’t sustain.

“Morning!” said the trail running woman. Brightly. Beautifully. From a face that had slept perfectly and run eight kilometres up a mountain at dawn.

“Morning,” I said.

Internal monologue · 07:04″You have everything I want. The sleep. The coffee. The whatever-you-saw-on-the-mountain. You are what I thought I was coming here to become and instead I became this: a fleece in the wrong orientation holding a gas canister I can’t figure out how to light with hands that have lost all fine motor skills from cold and sleeplessness. We could not be more different. Yet here we are. Neighbours. In the Cederberg. Both pretending this is fine.”

By Saturday afternoon Kurt Darren returned. Of course he did. He had never really left. He was simply resting, coiled somewhere in the JBL, waiting. The Venter Situation had been to the river and back and the braai was lit again and somebody had introduced what sounded like a second Bluetooth speaker, networked to the first, because the mountain was clearly not quite full enough of Kaptein. One of the children, the one with the hollow ancient eyes who had screamed at the void on Friday, came and stood in front of my camp chair and stared at me for a long time.

Internal monologue · 14:51″What do you want. What do you know. Why are you looking at me like that. You have the eyes of someone who has seen things. You are seven years old. What have you seen. Stop it. Stop looking at me like that. Go away. No don’t go away. You’re the only one here who seems to understand the weight of existence. We are kindred. We are both trapped. Go. Go now. Please.”

He turned and walked away without a word. I watched him go. He rejoined the organism of children and was absorbed immediately, gone, as if he had never been there. I will think about that child for years.

· · ·

Saturday night: a new development. Someone arrived with a guitar. Of course they did. It is a law of this country, written somewhere between the braai regulations and the biltong standards, that if more than six Afrikaner families gather in a natural space on a long weekend, a guitar must appear. The guitar arrived at 8pm. The guitar would not leave until after midnight. The guitar was not unpleasant, this is the maddening part, the guy could actually play. He played the guitar beautifully into the cold Cederberg night while Kurt Darren took a brief rest, and people sang along softly, and the fire went low and orange, and I lay in my tent fifteen metres away listening to all of it with the fury of a man who cannot even be angry about something this genuinely lovely and that impotent rage is its own kind of torture.

Internal monologue · 22:30″I hate this. I love this. I hate that I love this. I came here to be alone and instead I am being force-fed community by a man with a Takamine and I cannot leave because I’m in a tent in the mountains and also because, I cannot stress this enough, he is genuinely good. This is not fair. None of this is fair. I paid for silence and received a folk concert and somewhere out there Gerald is also awake and we will never speak about this and that is also not fair.”

Gerald’s headtorch clicked on briefly at 11pm, swept once across the inside of his tent and went off. I took this as communication. I nodded into the dark. Gerald nodded back, probably. We understood each other. That was enough.

I packed up Sunday morning before anyone stirred. Rolled the sleeping bag. Collapsed the tent. Drank instant coffee from a gas stove that took four attempts to light, crouching in the cold like a man performing a ritual that had lost its meaning. The mountains were doing their thing, pink light on the rock faces, mist in the valley below, the whole enormous indifferent beauty of it just sitting there, fully unbothered, as it has been for half a billion years and will continue to be long after every single one of us has turned to dust and taken our generators with us.

I loaded the car in silence. Real silence. The first silence of the entire weekend, arriving now, at departure, like a refund nobody asked for. Even the Boerboels were asleep. Even the child, the one with the ancient hollow eyes who had stared into my soul twice and found it wanting, was somewhere inside a tent, dormant, recharging whatever cursed energy source powers him. Gerald’s tent was still up, still sealed, still giving nothing away. Gerald and I would never speak. That was always the deal.

Internal monologue · 06:48″I should feel something meaningful right now. The mountains are right there. It’s golden hour. This is the moment. This is objectively the moment. Any normal person would stand here for five minutes and have a thought worth keeping. I have been awake for approximately forty-one hours. I feel nothing except the specific hollow sensation of someone who has been Kaptein’d into a new and permanent psychological condition.”

I got in the car. Started it. Pulled slowly out of the campsite, over the cattle grid, that final clunk-clunk of the cattle grid, the mountain’s way of saying alright, you can go now, we’re done with you and onto the dirt road that winds down through the fynbos and the proteas and the cold clean air that smells of something so good it makes you want to weep, or it would, if you hadn’t lost access to your emotions sometime around 2am Saturday.

I drove. The mountains opened up on either side. The road curved. I reached for my phone, still on aeroplane mode, I was keeping the bit going, I had come this far and plugged it into the aux. I needed something. A podcast. An album. Anything to fill the silence now that the silence had finally arrived and turned out to feel less like peace and more like the ringing in your ears after a concert.

Aeroplane mode means no streaming. Which means the phone defaulted, as phones do when they have decided to destroy you, to the last thing playing locally.

I want to be absolutely clear that I do not own a single Kurt Darren song. I have never purchased, downloaded or knowingly listened to Kurt Darren in any context in which I had a choice.

The phone had other ideas. Somewhere in the forty-one sleepless hours, in some moment of 3am derangement I have no memory of, I had apparently opened Shazamed Kaptein presumably to confirm the name of my tormentor, to put a face to the crime and the app had helpfully, automatically, with the cheerful malice of all technology, downloaded it.

The opening bars filled the car.

I was deep in the Cederberg. Dirt road. No signal. Proteas on both sides. Mountains above. The eagle, my eagle, the one that had fled on Friday, the one I had felt a kinship with, was back on the krans, a small dark shape against the pink rock, absolutely motionless, watching me go.

Internal monologue · 06:59″No.”

I reached to skip it.

And then I didn’t.

I don’t want to talk about what happened next. I will say only that the road was empty and the mountains were very large and nobody saw anything and there is no evidence and the Moleskine remains blank because some experiences are not for writing down, they are only for surviving, and I am home now, and I am fine, and I have already, totally unconsciously, in a fugue state, while making coffee this morning, started humming it.

Kurt Darren wins. Kurt Darren always wins. The mountains knew. The mountains have always known.