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We don’t get away very often, and the barefoot man has an interesting view on our lives – he thinks that we’ve shaped and chosen them quite carefully (now and through many trials by fire on both sides) and we find ourselves in a very special place – the place where you love so much about your life that you don’t really feel the need to take a break from it very often.

And yes, we know how fortunate that makes us. But fortune favours the brave, they say, and we have had to take a fair number of single-jump leaps to get here.

And yet, there is still something to be said for changing your context every now and then and breathing different air. It changes you, somehow. It seems to re-route your neural pathways and things that were obscured and fuzzy and hidden can become clear in one deep breathe.

For us it was a weekend (that we agreed, on leaving, could easily have been a very lovely week) in a little guest cottage on a farm in the Biedouw Valley in the very north of the Cederberg, where the rough edge touches the Tankwa Karoo.

A green and brown world of resting mountains, winding rivers, rocky forbidding terrain and enough silence and space to unpack all the clutter from your head into and let it all just be for a while.

Our cottage was near the Biedouw river, much to Phoebe’s delight since this is a dog-friendly spot, and also on the edge of the roughly hewn grassy runway.

Yes, runway.The owners of the farm are a lovely German couple who decamped from an apartment in Munich to this farm 7 years ago, had a baby almost immediately (followed by a second little boy a year later) and then, as they say bluntly, “the real work began”.

And since then they have slowly turned the farm into a functional property that also boasts several cottages of various sizes and shapes, several happy dogs, three curious horses, a pool room….

a stone labyrinth, a swimming dam with wooden decks …

and a YAK 18-T – which is basically a little flying tractor with 4 seats.

Little and loud it may be, but it gave the barefoot man a chance he says he never thought he’d get – to see all the highlights of the Cederberg from the air, each of which he has previously sweated and strained to reach on foot before with a hiking pack on his back and the sun beating down as it does here.

In fact, the barefoot man showed the German pilot some places he had not yet seen by air like the Maltese Cross and the Cracks. We also saw the Arch, the waterfall at Eselfontein, the hut and peak on Sneeuberg, and Tafelberg from both sides.

It really was a spectacle, we even felt a little rockstar spoilt waving at the people standing on the Cross as we swooped down over it, knowing they had taken hours to get there and we were just cruising by.

And while it was really stunning to see all these places from the air, the most striking thing for me was the reality of just how inhospitable this terrain is.

From the air the Cederberg is not just sheer rock face and impressive jutting peaks, it is a moon-scape full of massive boulders and jagged outcrops and crumbling rock that scales off and slides underfoot, making passage almost impossible.

Flying over the mountain ridges around the farm we quickly came across a couple of little settlements (not even towns) deeper into the non-tourist Cederberg and our friendly pilot told us it would take hours to get here from the farm on the dirt track road. It had taken us under ten minutes to fly the distance. By foot it would probably be days. It’s certainly no Sunday picnic living out there, and yet people do. One couple works on the farm and comes home to this town to build their house-in-progess on weekends.

It’s that kind of place – the kind you would probably never choose to be in, but if you know it well, you can’t even think of leaving.

Our hosts were telling us of a recent shopping trip to Cape Town (in the YAK) with one of their staff – she went to visit family with her two young kids – and by the time they got back on the plane to come home they all agreed that they would be hard pressed to live in the city again. They felt unsafe, the children complained of no space to play and had to be entertained and everything seemed busy. They had a lovely time and then were very happy to get back to their civilisation on the wild side of the Cederberg.

And that, I guess, is what Einstein was on about really. Everything is measured against your starting point, nothing else. We measure our life in the city bowl with it’s glorious views, interesting restaurants, shops and an easy walk up the famous mountain against the silence and space of the Biedouw, and they do the opposite.

But it’s only by going out to somewhere relatively wild and scary that you can look back down on your life and remember what it is you love about it.

When I asked the barefoot man what he enjoyed most about the flight he seemed almost surprised at his own answer: it’s like being on the top of a mountain all the time, and I guess that’s what I really love most about mountains actually.”

And maybe business is the same. It’s only by going out into the wild unknowns of the spaces we work in; by investigating other relative categories or places or ways of doing things that you can both learn and reapply the good things, and also remember what it is you love about your business now. It’s easy to forget how much you love your place in the world if you never step outside it and leave it behind for a bit.