Semigration heads westward ho!
At last! The vlakte of nothing!
How we have striven, days behind the handle-bars, for simply this: behind are kilometres of faintly undulating pale yellow-white grit, ahead of us, the road that leads on and on. To nowhere.
It is a fine day in the desert! Our ride through the Northern Cape started in failure.
Both the Makhanda Bal’s KLR and my darling Deloris had mechanical breakdowns on the day of departure on the longest motorcycle adventure ride of my tiny life.
It’s 3am and I am parked on my milkman stool peering out from my perfectly appointed, ultra-modern outdoor pondok at the cosmos, the spray of stars above the weirdest campsite in Seffrica.
Star Wors is meticulously constructed in a deserted, ancient bouldery koppie overlooking Nieuwoudtville way below us.
Everything is branded with Star Wars iconography, from the steampunk metal sculpture at the centre of a galactic warrior, blade flying, gun blatting, face grimacing, as he faces the next Zorg.
Am I in the right movie? Around him lie heads of the enemy, a garden of sci-fi skulls. Plenty of spotless loo and shower units are built into the outcrop, walls packed and painted to match the rusty rock.
Stone benches, braais with views, fireheated jacuzzis - so much neat, carved, filmic detail, I find it hard to see where I really am - camping in the hills with three mates on ysterperde.
We are on our journey through the Karoo to the Richtersveld desert near the mouth of the Orange. Our experience of ‘semigration’, a term from the oracle, who has travelled to 43 countries, starts after hundreds of kilometres of dirt.
After abandoning our beloved KLRs, the Bal is perched on his nippy DRZ desert skippertjie and I am on the bridge of mothership, Hetty, the 1200 GSA.
I have practised on the pudgy river silt with Big Dom recently. But the proper sands of the Richtersveld are a frightening unknown.
Hetty’s front wheel washes out on day two as we wind up a pass towards Fraserberg. Yes passes! Up we head high into the Northern Cape escarpment beyond Beaufort West, the national park to our right.
Indeed mountains, with crags, tall hills, valleys! Where are the so-called vlakte of the NC? Everything is new today! The new Karoo is being discovered.
Hetty leans like the Titanic. This is a big freakin’ bike to put down. For the first time since we started dating, I do not panic and yank at the bar. Let the bike do the work, let the bike… I just keep the throttle steady. Maybe a slight tweak, but mainly allow the heffalump to right itself, and it does.
Those damn, obsessed Teutonic German ancestors have built in a calm steadiness, and this German-Jewish SA canis Africanus lets their innate design sally forth.
A bike, I muse, is merely a physical manifestion of some clever engineer’s intellectual creativity.
In a blue afternoon, with storm cumulous billowing ahead, we are lost. The Bal’s famous Garmin, his finely tuned desert rat nose, has failed us.
The unmarked turnoff to our campsite is far behind. So Fraserberg it is, as soon as we possibly can.
Earlier, at noon, we trundled into a place which evoked these thoughts: humans actually eat, drink, pray and make more
Supper is bread drizzled with olive oil, a pot of freshly chopped raw onion, pepper and tomato, and a can of pilchards in tomato sauce. Washed down with tea, it is a meal for kings
people right here? Impossible, but there is Rietbron. We take a breather under a tree next to a house.
The only sign of a garden are some diggings in shale - “the oke preparing his own grave” we remark. And into this stillness roars four more bikers, okes from Jo’burg and Cape Town. We baljaar, they all talk bike.
The ‘semigration’ is on! That crew had set up base in De Rus and looped out for onenight stays in guesthouses 150km away then back to base to their stockpile of beer and braai.
That was many hours ago. Though there is faint cirrus, dry heat is withering, especially in our heavy motorcycle jackets, pants and boots. Being a Slumdog, I rip off my shirt.
In the trucking town of Beaufort-West my mates turn a blind eye, and two women in tights sashay past like models on the ramp from their hangout on the pavement next to the budget overnight rooms for long haulers. That too is in another time in our endless winding day.
Die Kliphuis in Fraserberg is full. But the Bal is charming, cracks the Clint Eastwood joke of “don’t let the old man in” which I had passed on from Ted Keenen, and we are in.
A tiny patch of lawn next to the pool! We cannot believe our luck. Bikes in a laager, two tents go up - the Bal dosses under stars - and we get to it.
Supper is bread drizzled with olive oil, a pot of freshly chopped raw onion, pepper and tomato, and a can of pilchards in tomato sauce. Washed down with tea, it is a meal for kings.
The place is filled with horses and farmers in vellies on a jol to redo the ancient wagon supply route from Cape Town to the Kimberly diamond hole and north.
The place is amazing. Lots of stonework, a braai courtyard using the old maize milling wheel for the braai, the rooms look out on to a windpump in a corner.
In fact there are two, clanking and turning gently, filling a tall dressed-stone square dam.
In the bar-lounge I charge my phone under a TV cranking out The Boss, Bruce Springsteen in sultry concert with his wife, Patti Scialfa.
That is followed by the Hantam orkes doing their thing. I ask to be taught langarm and jive.
At night buffo Africanus starts up an orkes which gets closer to my tent as the night draws longer. These bullfrogs perform a duet which is as loud and long as it is extraordinary.
The Bal says he was tempted to leap up and grease the windmills’ bearings. The rate is budget, the company uplifting.
This is reminiscent of Eastern Cape Karoo dorpies that worked.
‘Semigration’ is real. People who have lost patience with urban looting and conniving are heading west. Yes, aquifers are drying out, climate breakdown is experienced as drought, but these mense will find a way to harvest enough water to keep on living in this brutal and beautiful world.
The bikes! They have niggles. The Bal has a slow leak in his front wheel, Hetty’s windscreen and headlight cover lose bolts but there are always cable ties and tape.
Mechanical issues are essential to a big ride, and over 14 days I expect some. But this morning, at 5am, after a hot shower in Yoda’s cave. I am ready for an epic trek to Springbok. Or a little pre-dawn nap.