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Another Sunday. Another great day. Another isolated little world to discover in South Africa.
The back road to Van Wyksdorp
Awoke shortly after dawn. Lay in my bunk listening to the stream gurgling past our door. The golden retriever stretched himself across the entrance, and the domestic geese at the edge of the stoep craned their necks, making loud demands. I shoo-ed them away. Peace returned to the dew-laden, sun-filtered surroundings.
The stream chuckled; the robins sang.
Life is wonderful, even after 78 years of it.
Nicky slept perilously below a hanging horse-saddle; oblivious; on the edge of snore-land. He had ridden his motorbikie for eight hours yesterday, through heat and dust in a helmet too heavy for any armoured knight. Wearing a leaden tool-chest round his waist, and a pile of camera equipment on his back, he had moved as slowly as a grounded spaceman,. It had been a perfect day in which we had climbed the Karoo heights under a blue-sapphire sky before plunging the shadowy depths of its rocky ravines. We travelled; from the tumbling Komsberg Mountains to the mysterious Moordenaar’s Karoo; from the rock-dead Rooinek Pass to the rock-wild Seven Weeks Poort - to rest at last in this twisting green valley
Groenkloof at Kruis Rivier shelters beneath the second-last bastion of the Karoo, in the folds of the mountains that hide it from Calitzdorp and Oudtshoorn.
But the Karoo is Nick’s story.
Now I was on my own, with one last possible ‘adventure’ before getting home.
It was bliss, driving the Jeep on the sharply twisting dirt-road through a chain of oases tucked in the rock-hills. Nothing stirred - except the scores of ostrich chicks running in their paddock beside the car, and seven other varieties of birds which flitted among the lush growth as I emerged from the homestead’s gate-way.. All the other farmyards scattered along the river bank seemed to be observing the Sabbath in silence.
Rounding a bend, I suddenly came upon stone cliffs, blazing in the early light. It was the ‘Red Stone’, Nicky had been talking about. A geological feature seen only here, in this pocket of mountains, and in Arizona and in . . . China, was it? Or Syria? Some of the Red Stone looked like giant, blunt molars erupting from the earth. Some of it formed tortured, pockmarked hills. And some of it stood in high, vertical cliffs.
Though I drove slowly, the Red Stone was swiftly gone. I entered the flat bed of the Langkloof valley, and approached a tarred highway with some foreboding. My intention was to leave the smooth comfort of this tar as soon as I could find petrol, then abandon the valley and head for one of the last crumbling, hand-built mountain passes left in southern Africa. My problem was that I might never find petrol on a Sunday in this empty part of the world – nor air for my leaking tyres.
Tyres had been the main thing on my mind ever since I began this trip. Two perfectly good Michelins had been immediately destroyed on the Karoo flints, and new Bridgestones had to be sent from Cape Town to Calvinia to replace them overnight. Later punctures, to the Bridgestones as Michelins, had been repaired – so now there were plugged tyres on the back wheels – and two spares. However, one was dressed with a band-aid and given an inner tube, and the other was still badly wounded. I’d been warned to use them only to hobble to the nearest help. So… where would I find more air at a service station in this place at this hour on a Sunday? I cruised to the nearest civilization, Calitzdorp, with increasing foreboding.
It boasted the only petrol station within miles and miles – but it was open on this still Sunday morn before church! I filled my tank and filled my tyres, and – filled with joy and hope – I abandoned the direct route to the Western Cape and headed for the hills again in search of hidden mountain passes.
First indications were ominous.. I came upon a tyre cemetery!
“Perhaps, its just an old-age retyrement home”, I said aloud . . which indicates how stressed I’d become. There was no sign of life from horizon to horizon, so I could not determine what the tyre farm really was. However it was clear that many had been hung on the wire fences and painted white to remind the ostriches they were not on the open veld. But surely the elaborate fence and ground tyre patterns had a deeper purpose than ostrich padding or art for arts sake?
I stopped to check my own badly wounded tyres and to take a photo of the fences on which were assembled their artificial-rubber forebears.
Then things improved. The thin road narrowed. The mountains closed in. A tortoise, too big to fit under a 4x4, blocked the path. I failed to coax it off the road with a sliver of biltong, so I had to bend down and cart it away. (There goes my back again). The Jeep realized it had entered a Nature Reserve, and began purring like a 2007 model. Despite twinges of pain, I felt the same way.
The track wound up the valley, passing several abandoned houses, then suddenly zigzagged upwards. I could see ancient ramparts of dressed stone trying to hold up the path above my head. This was akin to a 19th century Baines’ engineering feat, but more simple, more ambitious and trusting to God rather than road-building technique. Fortunately God was not far away from the top of these would-be mountain passes.. When I adjudged I was nearly at the top (in truth the climb had hardly begun) I paused to take in the panorama (and check the sagging tyres again). I left the Jeep and climbed some steep, and somewhat smooth, rock-cladding on the mountainside to examine succulents - and to converse with nature, and obey its call. The view from there offered mountain ranges layered to the northern horizon in a blue haze.
I slid down to the jeep – and saw a pick-up truck waiting on the track above me. I waved it forward, but it would not move. I drove closer; pulled into the cliff-side and urged it to pass. Our traffic mirrors almost overlapped as the passing was negotiated. A blonde girl was alone in the other vehicle, looking neither at the sheer drop on her other side, or at me nearly touching her. She stared straight ahead, not even blinking., before plunging down a hairpin bend and disappearing into several more zigzags.
Her’s was the only vehicle I encountered on the dirt roads that day. What a magical place this was, alone on the top of this lonely, protected pass. No, it wasn’t the top. There was more climbing on a track guarded by a line of jagged rocks that stood out like broken teeth.
Whizzing over a sudden flat stretch through green fynbos, I braked to behold the sight below my front bumper. Great ravines plunged into the Langeberg Valley. Beyond to the south stood the last ramparts which separate the Karoo from the coast. The track twisted and turned down to where I could see it as a ribbon, flattening out far below and vanishing into the west. Soon I would be in Van Wyksdorp, I thought. . . but the downside of this road was as duplicitous as the upward journey had been. There was another – steeper more twisting – downward passage at the end of the flat stretch, ending at the imposing entrance to another game reserve where, again, there was no sign of human life. Only another road, twisting back into the foothills.
I missed Van Wyksdorp, but doubled back round a hill to find it – a tiny village with a yellow-walled church and blazing jacarandas. A few people had gathered for Sunday service. I tried not to layer them with dust as I wove through the narrow unpaved streets, seeking a way back to the “main” dirt road.
In the past 24 hours the Jeep had negotiated at least seven mountain passes, including Rooikloof, Rooinek and Rooiberg. Now there was the choice of Cloete’s Pass and the notorious Swartberg Pass, which wsas far higher - but less fearsome - than several just climbed. Also before me, only 40 kms of stone and dust away, lurked the tarred road of Garcia Pass, breaking through to the coastal route and Riversdale.
My new, wounded, tired tyres seemed to sigh at the choice.
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