An existential rort through Karoo highlands
I am high.
Can you get so deeply involved and enthralled by something that when you get spit out the other side it feels like you have been thrashed about in a time machine?
Twelve hundred and fifty kilometres, or 1,000km of dirt road in three days. It’s no wonder they call it the high Karoo. We were totally wasted, physically, emotionally, mentally by the experience.
We criss-crossed the three provinces — ours, Western Cape and Northern Cape
— so often that it became an official nothing, though one of our foursome did laugh at how the painted lines on the road near vanished the moment we were informed we were leaving the Western Cape. One farmer said the roads were graded or degraded depending on which province you were in!
The chosen area for our Old Bals existential excursion — the retired engineer from The Crags, the abalone expert from PE, the legendary old bullet climber and Kingswood College English teacher and the penniless, kneeless hack, was the Northern Cape, but the true destination was, I durro, the vast, endless, achingly beautiful and brutal interior of the SA heart.
You peeps clustered and clinging to the coast take note: there is a destiny that lies awaiting you in this welded, dusty, vast land which cannot be ignored.
For here the hilly space just rolls on and on, with the occasional farmstead, and little dorpies, we find we also each exist in an otherland of us. Places like Carnarvon, Loxton, Richmond.
As the sun sank, I was in the dreaded crash zone. The ride to our campsite at Joosteswerwe on a farm near Vosburg started with a rush. A famed superhighway of dirt so smooth that Delores was hitting 100km/h, and the engineer with the slowly recovering broken knee, was klapping 140km/h on his German bike.
We like to think the desert stretches out in a silent, boring eternity. Nope. This desert comes rushing at you like a mal storm tumbling over the mountainous rim, twirling and braiding. Fixating. Up ahead the mates throw dust. A backlit faded dayglo orange spume like Trump’s hairdo gone sideways, for once, wild and true. Look away, look up, balance, forward momentum!
We stopped at Pampoenpoort to celebrate this joyous rort through the Karoo with the ever present ring of mountains on the blue horizon, and fell into the rubblestrewn darkening cave of Hell.
We were lost, the road was truly kak, and we had to endure a long, endless run to safety. When the hill shadows came we plunged from sunset gold visibility into a grey blur. The spoer had narrowed to a foot-wide voetpad piled high either side with rows of fine gravel. Naturally, being the clumsy oaf, my front wheel hooked the soft stuff and Delores and I began that drunken dance involving a vertical expression of a horrible horizontal conclusion. In a fug of exhaustion I heard myself yanking the clutch, the engine whining in protest. But the gods were with us and we pulled upright and got back onto the hard stuff.
We made it to the tarred RD386 but we were finished. How lovely it was to find a typical Northern Cape camp site. Farmer Ma-a-a-a-rtin, not Martin ne, was there to greet us at his newly revamped farm graveyard. All the old agricultural machines had been carefully laid on the side like pieces of sculpture, a site-specific installation, framing sites of brick squares, round raised fire pits, electrical points, narrow, but functional stairs leading into his crisp, delicious dam, all under an enormous umbrella of trees and a windpomp The carnivores were supplied wheels of wors and tjoppies and we settled in for a night under the celestial canopy.
I woke up at 2am with both legs cramping and tried to keep my agonised groans to a muffled manly wimper and had to put on all my motorcycle gear to finally get warm.
The English teacher bal woke up fresh as a hardy desert flower and sent this note to his lover in Makhanda: “Dawn creeping incandescent over the scarped desert highland, the karee trees in the campsite still redolent with karee spangling of the stars ...”
It was a good morning indeed, and after tightening Delores’ chain and getting her a cuppa of oil, we vowed to have an easier day and roared off on tar to a really great cup of coffee and warm slice of melktert at Loxton Lekker.
In this joyful state we lit out homewards, and nearly plotzed. Roadworks and wind had left the first few kilometres of the R381 “main” gravel road to Beaufort-West a lumpy morass of corregated waves. I meerkatted (stood on the pegs), hung onto the bars and doof-doofed up the hill. Looking down, the entire dashboard looked like a moron in a mosh pit. I was convinced the entire front would finally be catapulted into the veld, leaving my gal with her under wiring all exposed and scrawny and me crumpled and overweight in the hot-white grit.
But the bikes stayed up and the road “repairs” gave way to a glorious dirt highway, which got ever better when we took our turn to the left onto the Krom River road and into the Nuweveld mountains.
If there is one road an internal travel lover shall ride or die riddled with regret, it is this 90km minor gravel road. It winds its way through hills and rivers, often with clear ponds, through to the N1 between Three Sisters and Nelspoort.
For adventure riders with creaky knees, it had everything. The road texture was manageable with little runnels and sandy gullies and humps to thrill but not terrorise. It just curled and dipped on and on.
We hit the N1, dodged large trucks, skipped onto Nelspoort, and belted across a beautiful stretch to Murraysburg. Hillocks, lost and found, translation and meditation.
Home to the farm, through incredibly beautiful passes on the R63 to Graaff-Reinet, and the final hard descent down the farm road cuttings, to Gite du Pondok, where the kitty booi peeks out the cat door, the couch behind him dotted with mouse heads, and says: Back already?