Accidental Tourist

E VEN the smallest Western Cape dorpies have some claim to fame. Montagu has all but packaged Breyten Breytenbach; the people of Lambertsbaai have clawed out a niche for themselves thanks to their crayfish; and Wellington, well, that’s brandy country. A bit of pre-trip research on McGregor, though, revealed its greatest municipal export was an ominous and slightly off-putting motto: “McGregor still sits at the end of the road to nowhere.”

The catchphrase sounds as much like a Johnny Cash lyric as it does a mystic’s soothsaying, and as my partner and I veered off the R62 to make the final 10km journey to the Breede River Valley town, we imagined a man with cataract-clouded eyes and a sunken chest prophesying the tiny outpost’s cursed destiny.

As it turns out, McGregor’s eerie little slogan is just a farmer’s matter-of-fact way of putting things. Back in the 1800s, shortly after labourers had settled the area because of its rich soil and arable land, plans to build a road connecting the enclave with the nearby community of Greyton were announced. Construction began from both sides, but before the two pieces of pavement could wind their way up and over the Boesmanskloof Pass to make two ends meet, the funds ran out.

Today, the village remains hemmed in by the Riviersonderend Mountains, the old, thin strip of asphalt petering out into a smudge of dirt alongside a windpump, leaving the only way out of McGregor to double as the only way in.

While the reality of the unfinished highway is far less mystical than I had imaged, there remains something slightly otherworldly about the dorp.

Perhaps that’s why I didn’t find it too strange when my masseuse asked to “read me”.

I had a knot in my shoulder and, in my research, had found out that healing treatments and meditation were also a

This may sound strange, but he’s with us