The joy of the journey
Road Tripping South Africa, edited by Thea Grobbelaar, Map Studio, R150
“IDON’T know if I got directions for where you’re goin’,” the ambulance driver said. “I think there’s a Nameless down the Shepardsville Road.”
“When I get to Shepardsville, will I have gone too far?” “Ain’t no Shepardsville.” “How will I know when I’m there?” “Cain’t say for certain.” “What’s Nameless look like?” “Don’t recollect.” “Is the road paved?” “It’s possible.” That was a brief moment of road-trip madness, beautifully recalled by writer William Least Heat Moon in his book Blue Highways.
The writer — recently bereft of job and dumped by his wife — decided a long journey was the cure for his ills. He bought a van, named it Ghost Dancer and hit the road to find his country and, with a little bit of luck, himself. The most important thing about Blue
Highways is its title: Least Heat Moon stayed off the interstates and stuck to the back roads — the blue lines on American maps.
The long and winding road trip is one of travel’s most enduring fantasies. A car, a girl — or a boy — a dog, a map and a vague plan are all it takes to have a brilliant adventure. Yet with South Africa’s tens of thousands of kilometres of road and all its unexplored vastness, how often we speed on by, focused on getting there instead of taking time on the journey to look around. Map Studio’s Road
Tripping is an attempt to change that. It is not a travel memoir like Blue
Highways or Dana Snyman’s The Long Way
Home — a book any would-be South African road tripper should read — and nor does it pretend to be; this is a guide, pure and simple, to some of South Africa’s greatest journeys.
The routes are a mix of back-country rambles, established tourist routes and day trips that will take you to places you may have never heard about.
It begins with the grande dame of them all — not the N1 from Johannesburg to Cape Town but 2 000km of R-roads, interspersed with brief stretches of national road. The route takes you to Clarens and the sandstone buttresses of the Eastern Free State, on to Graaff-Reinet via Bloemfontein, then across the Karoo to Murraysburg, Victoria West, Sutherland and back into the greenery and mountains at Ceres.
At the other end of the scale is the bucolic meander from Hilton to Karkloof in KwaZulu-Natal and “Tumbling Waters”, a circular day trip around the waterfalls and sights of Sabie, Graskop and the Blyde River Canyon.
Some 20 journeys are described in all, covering most of the country from Maputaland in the east to Springbok in the west. There is a golfing road trip and a surfing road trip and excursions to our many battlefields.
Each route is introduced as a red line on a map alongside a description of the important stuff such as driving conditions, whether kids, dogs or lowslung cars will enjoy it, the best time to go and things to see on the way.
The following sections describe the journey in more detail. There are tips, maps and plenty of pictures to get the wanderlust juices bubbling.
Veteran adventurers Fiona McIntosh and Jennifer Stern did most of the travelling but there are contributions from other travellers who have made a name for themselves as writers and photographers.
In an age when it is difficult to not get cell reception, sometimes the best thing is to switch-off and go low-tech with maps — and a car, a dog, a girl …
That way you may be blessed to have a strange encounter with a country ambulance driver about a road he has never seen to a town he cain’t remember.