The road to the heart of your country

The heart of South Africa is not really beating in Cape Town or Johannesburg. To feel the centuries-old pulse of a region, you have to leave the noise of the city behind, writes Marita van der Vyver after her recent book tour through the country.

There is really nothing like taking a road trip through the platteland to help you truly feel the heartbeat of a country. I realised this again and again as I spent 15 months travelling around three continents. My recently retired Frenchman and I sold our house, our car and a few other possessions so that we could afford a “grey gap year”. We travelled footloose and fancy free, in trains and busses and a variety of hired cars, deeper and deeper into the heart of each country we were exploring.

We were especially captivated by the North American and South African landscapes. It is more difficult to find unpopulated areas in Europe. Even if they are uninhabited now, you will usually see the ruins of buildings that were erected centuries ago. Churches and convents and castles. Ancient Greek columns or Roman amphitheatres. In Europe you can’t throw a stone without hitting something that was made by humans.

But in North America, as in South Africa, you can still lose yourself in openness and emptiness and spaces where people haven’t yet left many marks on the landscape. I am also crazy about cities but, just as the heart of America does not truly beat in New York or Washington, I don’t hear the heart of my motherland in Cape Town or Johannesburg. To feel the centuries-old pulse of a region, you have to leave the noise of the city behind, take a detour off the main road and turn towards its more naked parts. Just as you must lift your shirt to allow a doctor to place a stethoscope against your skin so that they can listen to your heartbeat, so must you draw closer to the bones of a country to monitor its quiet pulse.

IF YOU TRAVEL SLOWLY, with your heart as open as your eyes and your ears, strange things will happen to you. Like they did last year in the dusty landscape of New Mexico, where we unexpectedly came across the grave of Billy the Kid. Yes, indeed, the remains of the cowboy who has been the subject of so many movies are resting in a godforsaken graveyard close to where sheriff Pat Garret shot and killed him.

I still can’t explain why this grave in the middle of nowhere touched me more deeply than so many notable museums and famous buildings in America. But as I stood before that pathetic heap of soil,

Billy the Kid suddenly became more alive to me than he had been in any film or book. The glorious myth of the Wild West, boiled down until just the essence remains, like a cube of instant stock: violent men who died violent deaths. I experienced many other overwhelming moments in the so-called Wild West and the Deep South of America. Most of them did not occur in cities. The most intimate emotions choose silence and isolation, it seems.

An abandoned cotton plantation on the Blues Trail in the Mississippi Delta, near towns like Sunflower and Roundabout, where, in early winter, there wasn’t a single other tourist or even employee in sight. On notices, we read stories about the legendary blues musicians who had worked here – names such as Charley Patton, Howlin’ Wolf and Roebuck “Pops” Staples. We pressed buttons to listen to the music that originated here drifting spookily through concealed loudspeakers. Voices that followed us as we wandered outside among humble buildings.

On one unforgettable night we were the only campers in a state park beside the Mississippi. We climbed a wooden structure several stories high, step by step, to watch the sun sinking far below us into the mighty river. On that night, in the pitch darkness next to our campfire, with a blaring riverboat passing us by every hour or three, the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn made sense to me for the first time. Not only as stories that I had read when I was young, but as a reality that I could feel beating in my chest.

There were other nights when we were also the only living souls in state parks and national parks. (This is an advantage of travelling in winter.) In Northern California, we were surrounded by gigantic sequoia trees that whispered all night long, like grown-ups telling stories that children aren’t allowed to hear. These are the oldest and largest tree variety in America, some of them older than 2 000 years, with crowns that disappear into the clouds and trunks as broad as dozens of other trees that have been bound together. You cannot linger between these dinosaurs of the tree world without attempting to decipher what they are saying. It’s a centuries-old language that you interpret with your heart rather than your mind.

I ALSO OFTEN FEEL this way in the platteland of the country of my birth. As if the fynbos and rock formations of the Western Cape are speaking to my heart, the aloes on the stone ridges of the Eastern Cape, the bright spring flowers on the Knersvlakte, the buchu bushes of the Cederberg. And the remote isolation of large parts of the Karoo.

I find the Valley of Desolation outside Graaff Reinet more impressive than the Grand Canyon in Arizona. (And its name is far more poetic.) Just as “our” Bagdad Café outside Vanrhynsdorp was more attractive to me than the “original” Bagdad Café of the eponymous American film, which we visited in California last year. This year we coincidentally drove (twice) past Bagdad Café’s South African sister on the Knersvlakte. We stopped, bought ginger beer, and smiled at the framed notice in the women’s toilet, above the basin where you would normally find a mirror: “Don’t worry, you look alright.”

Speaking of American films and South African farm shops: On the road to Cradock, we stopped outside Willowmore at a restaurant and antiques shop with the heartrending name (if you have watched the film starring Meryl Streep) of Sophie’s Choice. I don’t understand why anyone would give such a tragic meaning to a place that offers such great moerkoffie, but then I suppose I also still do not understand Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Outside, the old dolls with wilted hats posing beside decrepit bicycles reminded me of various stops along America’s legendary Route 66, where similar dolls are displayed with vintage cars. In one town, on the roof of a former shop, we saw a white Cadillac with an Elvis Presley doll behind the wheel. There he sat, high and dry, like a misplaced Santa Claus in his sleigh on the roof of a house.

And in Oro Grande, California, we stopped at a “bottle farm”, which reminded me of Miss Helen Martins’ famous sculpture garden in NieuBethesda. Here, an eccentric man by the name of Elmer spent decades collecting bottles, other glass objects and bric-a-brac that he transformed into “glass trees” and other art installations; a breathtaking free exhibition for anyone who has the time to spend wandering around. (Google “Elmer’s Bottle Tree Ranch”.)

This is how the platteland in North America and South Africa mirror each other, to the joy of any traveller fortunate enough to get to know both parts of the world.

In our most recent platteland road trip in spring, the West Coast was drenched and covered in flowers, the Karoo wetter and greener than I have ever seen it. In some areas it was more like England than the dry southwest of America, of which it had previously reminded me.

Yet the South African platteland will always remain unique. When I travel here, my heart always beats a little differently after a week or two, in rhythm with the pulse of the place. Then I know, deep in my chest, that this is how it feels to come home.

“If you travel slowly, with your heart as open as your eyes and your ears, strange things will happen to you.”

Still