NAMIBIA AT ITS BEST

Late one morning in July last year, I was travelling south along the C15 through the red dunes of the Kalahari. My three-week trip to Namibia was nearing its end. Those three weeks had renewed my appreciation for the country’s wide-open spaces and the effect such space has on one’s soul. But I must admit that I was also tired and a little irritable. The effort of pitching my tent and packing up camp every day was wearing me down, and so was the messy state of the Renault Duster I was driving. My flip-flops had vanished somewhere inside three days previously, never to return.

I was deep in yin-yang thought when the rear wheels of the Duster suddenly veered to the left and the acoustics of the dirt road changed: a flat tyre.

No trip to Namibia is complete without changing a wheel. It didn’t take me long to fit the spare, but then my troubles began: I couldn’t fit the flat tyre back into the spare wheel carrier under the vehicle. The tyre had ripped from the rim and the steel belt was frayed and sticking out in every direction. The flat tyre had a much smaller diameter than an inflated tyre and the wheel kept falling out of the carrier. And there was absolutely no space for it inside the car.

I drove away and watched in the rear-view mirror as the alloy wheel fell into the road for the umpteenth time. In a huff, I yanked up the handbrake, got out, grabbed the mag and hurled it onto the shoulder of the road. May it rust in peace.

To calm myself down, I reached into my bag of droëwors. It was empty. Things had taken a turn for the worse but luckily Koës was around the corner – I just had to make sure I didn’t lose another tyre.

Fences, thorn trees and lockedup farmsteads passed by. Then something caught my eye: a stoep full of people.

I made a U-turn and drove through the gate of the farm Volmoed. The men walked over to welcome me, each carrying a glass of white wine. They were holidaymakers: Louis le Roux and Pikkie Maree from Wellington, their friend Neels Zeeman from Wolseley, and their wives Louche, Lucresia and Jacolene. Biltong and droëwors hung from the rafters on the stoep – springbok and gemsbok, the men told me, busy drying in the wind.

The holidaymakers asked where I was from and where I was going. I gave them the highlights and bashfully admitted that I’d left the Duster’s mag wheel in the veld. Neels immediately drove off to retrieve it. I tried to explain that there really hadn’t been space inside the car, but no one was out to second-guess me. They gave me a glass of wine and a piece of droëwors. On this stoep there were no problems, only solutions.

We chatted and hung more biltong. Neels returned and trimmed the frayed steel belt, then he gave me directions to another farm about three farms away, where a man would be able to fit a working tyre to the rim.

The Duster’s mag wheel was forced in among my camping gear without ceremony. Then I said goodbye, but before I left I was given biltong from the rafters to take home.

I will never forget those friendly people at Volmoed. Once the biltong had dried in the wind in Cape Town for a few more days, it was the best I’d ever tasted.