THIS ISN’T WHERE WE THOUGHT WE WERE

We had been cycling for 26km before our mapped route from Curry’s Post to Glenrock game and trout farm came to a dead end. “What do you mean the road ends?” said Rouen to Rosanne. This was my sixth cycling trip led by Rouen, and I had long since learnt to adjust my expectations to his optimistic assessment of time, distance, and danger. Every trip we get lost. Every trip we cycle double the agreed mileage. Rosanne, on the other hand, who was driving the backup vehicle, was on her first trip.

“I mean this road ends in a Zulu village, and goes no further.”

“But on the map, this road is a continuous line.”

“And on Google Maps, this road keeps going,” Sam added.

“The map must be wrong,” replied Rouen. “My intuition says this way.”

It was at this point I asked to be shown where we were on the map, and Rosanne, with her major in geography and experience in teaching map-reading, stepped in: “We don’t know.”

“But can’t you trace where we began, to where we are now?” I asked.

“The problem is we have a map of where we are now, but we don’t have a map of where we began.”

“It was too expensive,” said Vanessa, Rouen’s wife.

“So we never actually knew which road, on this map, we were on, because we never had a starting point to trace from.” “So we were always guessing.”

“And now,” said Sam “every part of where we thought we were, we are not.”

The sun was beginning to cast slanted rays over the villagers, who had gathered to look at the 16 of us, our bicycles, our back-up car, our signal-less phones and our half-map, which we may or may not have been on.

“I suggest you give me the map,” said Rosanne, “and I start ferrying people to our destination.”

I hopped into the car. It didn’t take long, once we had signal, to line up our moving dot on Google maps with our 1:50000 road map, and to discover that both maps were right, and that for the past hour we had been cycling away from Glenrock. (A farmer, who later pulled up next to Sam in the dark, said in the 40 years he had lived there he had never heard of Glenrock.)

“I’m going to take a photo of that map section and whatsapp it to Rouen and Sam,” said Rosanne.

“I don’t think they can read maps,” I replied. “Better a clear message like ‘See big pine trees, turn left’. Something like that.”

Back on the road, Rouen had said his gut feel was left, Sam said right, and so they had decided to stay put, in the middle of a plantation road in the dark, with five children and one headlamp, to huddle down for the night. It was there that Rosanne found them.

“What’s funny,” Vanessa said, (and this may have been before or after everyone made it to camp at 8pm that night), “is that you all keep coming back. I mean this happens every year, but you all keep coming on these trips that Rouen organises.”

“What happens every year?” Rouen said.

Do you have a funny or quirky story about your travels? Send 600 words to travelmag@sundaytimes.co.za and include a recent photo of yourself for publication with the column.