HIGHWAY SURFER
Heading south on the N9, Paul Ash enjoys some tunes and tales of lost trains on one of South Africa’s great drives
AS I crested the long, low Free State hill and saw the tin roofs of Springfontein gleaming in the sun, the uneasiness that had followed me like a lost black dog from The Smoke melted away in the breeze.
My mood had not been helped by my listening to Sibelius’s Finlandia, which may be great music to drive to but perhaps only in Finland.
I reached Springfontein later than I’d hoped but too early to call it a day and spend the night at Springfontein Lodge, a fine guesthouse that belies the town’s dishevelled appearance.
I turned off anyway and spent half an hour driving slowly around the town’s wide gravel streets, soaking up the silence.
Then I put foot for Colesberg and by the time I crossed the Orange River, I had ditched Sibelius for the Kalahari Surfers and decided I had at last found the best road-trip music ever.
Soon, the cone-shaped bulk of Cole’s Kop loomed up out of the plain and I thought of the sweating gunners of the First Essex Regiment, who’d hauled a pair of 15pounder guns up to the summit in 1899.
Then past Colesberg. There is the garage at which a mate and I once spent a freezing July night in his Citi Golf on the way to Grahamstown, me hugging, of all things, a conga drum for warmth. And over there, the silver top of the classic Dutch Reformed Church at the top of Colesberg’s main road, glimpsed for seconds between the koppies that hide the town from the road.
I paused at the junction where the roads split and watched the cars and trucks heading off into the midday sun on the N1, pleased that I was heading south on the N9 — one of South Africa’s great drives.
From here, the road leads across spectacular country, where plains roll off to flat-topped koppies on the horizon. After Middelburg, it attacks the northern slopes of the high, cold Sneeuberge that form a protective arc around the Camdeboo and Graaff-Reinet.
The road is in excellent shape with few big trucks to foul the air and spoil the view, and on this fine May afternoon I had it all to myself.
I had been told that the best slap chips for 500 miles were to be found at the Railway Institute in Noupoort and I was hungry when the scruffy town hove into view a little after 2pm.
I like exploring railway towns — although most, like Noupoort, have fallen on hard times after being abandoned by the state railway. Noupoort looks rough but there’s a spark of life in the old dog yet, thanks to the Christian Care Centre, which has filled some of the void left by the departing railwaymen.
The centre’s residents have come from all over southern Africa — “we even have a guy from Nigeria,” one of them told me — to this desolate spot to grapple with their various addictions, and it was to their restaurant in the Railway Institute that I now hurried.
I waited for the chips in a dining room decorated with crucifixes and pictures of steam trains. The young man who served me was halfway into a 52-week stretch.
“It’s hard,” he said, “but you learn about self-discipline here.”
I could tell. In the road outside, a crocodile of young men marched past with rakes and shovels, led by a guy wearing what looked like old army fatigues. “Moooof,” he said, and the group trailed off down the road. “How are the chips?” asked the waiter. “Lekker. The best in 500 miles, easy.” When I got back in the car and drove away, I felt … lucky.
I blew through Middelburg, taking
instead a quick detour to Rosmead. Once upon a time, when there were still trains to Burgersdorp and Graaff-Reinet, Rosmead was an important place. Now the GraaffReinet line is closed and much of the track to Burgersdorp has been stolen by scrap thieves.
Rosmead dozed. A trio of purple locomotives stood in the rail yard, waiting for a train that might never come. The only signs of life were a puppy chasing its shadow and a young girl staring through the latticework of the footbridge. I continued southwards.
This is my favourite part of the journey. The road and railway run side by side for nearly 30km until the hill becomes too steep for the railway. At a glorious farm called Mazeppa it dives into a kloof, not to be seen again until it meets the road on the far side of the mountain.
The road clambers up to the Lootsberg summit, from where you have a brief glimpse of the plains of the Camdeboo in the faraway haze. It gets cold up here and many motorists have been caught out by winter snowfalls.
It had been a most satisfying day on the road when I called a halt in Graaff-Reinet.
I found a room at Kambro Cottage and went to The Coldstream, a Graaff-Reinet institution, for dinner and rewarded myself with a fine lamb shank and two large goblets of Protea cabernet sauvignon.
Afterwards, I toured the nearby GraaffReinet Club, a time capsule of militaria and stuffed animal heads on the walls and an exquisite model of one of the locomotives that once steamed up the Lootsberg. Barman James Speelman pointed out the scars on the bar counter from the bullets fired into it by high-spirited Coldstream Guards in 1902.
“Crazy,” he said, shaking his head, “crazy.”
In the morning, I went looking for old railwaymen who had worked the pass and found Sam Erasmus, a spry and clear-eyed 84-year-old, working in his garden. He drove trains up the Lootsberg for 20 years.
“It was quite hard with snow and misty rain, the wheels slipping,” he said. “We struggled a lot. But we went over the mountain anyway. And the fire kept us warm.”
Talla Crouse, station foreman at Bethesda Road in the bitter winter of ’65, remembers when snow all but closed the line and he had to inspect it daily on foot.
“I had to walk from Lootsberg to Blouwater [about 14km] through the snow, to see if the trains could get through,” he said.
For six weeks that winter, Crouse lived in a tiny wood and iron cabin at Blouwater siding. He draped a tarpaulin over one side of the lean-to kitchen and stuffed the stove with the coal that passing engine-men threw from their locomotives. “I let that stove burn red-hot,” he said. “Even the baboons came to sit close, they were so cold.”
I could have spent all day listening to their stories but the road was calling.
And a fine road it is. I rolled across the plains of the Camdeboo, past Aberdeen and the grassy floodplain that used to be the Beervlei Dam and into the twisties beyond. Seduced by the loveliness of the road, I flew past Willowmore and Uniondale and chased the sun down a valley of pretty farms with names like Molenrivier and Speelmanskraal, gawking at the Outeniqua and Swartberg mountains marching along on each side.
Near Camfer, the road splits again. I would have driven into the sunset but there were people waiting for me on the other side of the mountains. Thirty minutes later, I was dangling my legs over the viewpoint at the top of the Outeniqua Pass. After the brown Karoo kilometres, the coastal plain shone like an emerald.
Down there in the green was the end of the road but the sun was warm on my back and the air smelled sweet and I was in no hurry.