A road-trip to end all road-trips

IHADN’T been to Cape Town since my divorce, seven years before. That time, my then husband and I drove from Port Elizabeth along the Garden Route, stopping off for a walk along Plettenberg Bay’s Main Beach.

Then there was the obligatory stop at The Boatshed on Thesen Island, Knysna, home to the Île de Païn bakery. Their artisanal bread is legendary, a crispy, nutty wheat-and-ryesourdough baguette for me; a heavenly coconut dacquoise for him, light and airy and lacily pretty, like a culinary mantilla.

Then we were off to Prince Albert, over the dizzyingly steep Swartberg Pass, where I had to close my eyes and imagine myself on the safe sands of a beach — far, far away from this death-defyingly high and windy road.

My husband hummed as he changed gears and moved closer to the edge in the face of oncoming cars, which caused me to hold my breath till I turned blue.

And then we were in the quaint little Western Cape town, on the southern edge of the Great Karoo.

My mother used to say that before you married a man, you should take a trip through the Karoo with him, in the blistering heat of summer, in a car without air conditioning.

I’d already married him but I found that Francois and I travelled brilliantly together. There was a lot that we didn’t do well together, but travelling was not one of them.

Held captive in an airless car for hours and hours, we opened the windows and covered up our arms with kikois to stop them from being burnt to a crisp by the punishing sun. We sang along to the radio and told stories and laughed at each other’s silly jokes and were companionably silent, taking in the breathtaking beauty that is the Karoo in the shimmering midday light.

We didn’t mind that driving to Cape Town took us two days; we agreed on where to stop to eat, or stretch our legs. He didn’t mind that I wanted to stop to pick wild flowers on the road’s edge, though he did say they’d be dead before long, and they were.

In Prince Albert, we stopped at Gay’s Guernsey Dairy for frothy, creamy, real milk from real Guernsey cows, and a taste of the natural, pasteurised, antibiotic- and hormone-free produce.

The cheese-tasting room is straight out of TV’s Food Network: rounds of fresh and ageing cheeses of every imaginable combination, stacked high. The stink of old cheese, like a sweaty sock — only, somehow, appetising — hung in the air.

I wanted salty feta, in a sandwich with tomato and bland mozzarella. Francois declared the cheese, infused with cumin and paired with black-olive paste, delicious.

Replete, we began the final leg of the journey to Cape Town, stopping at Laingsburg to remember the 100 people who’d drowned there on January 25 1981, when the largest part of the town was swept away within minutes after one of the worst floods ever in the Great Karoo.

We sailed past Touws River, the small railway town home to just under 7 000 people and whizzed past Worcester, situated as it is on the Breede River Valley…

We didn’t stop at Paarl, the third-oldest town in South Africa, though friends had spoken of their fine dining experience there: delicious food served in exquisite natural surrounds (some overlooking the lush vineyards). But everything was paired with the wine of the region, and we thought it might be a bad idea to drive the last 60-odd kilometres having partaken of the fruit of the vine.

And then we were there, Cape Town in all its glorious splendour on this magnificent day: not a breath of air, the sea an iridescent blue, competing with an azure sky. The fairest, fairest Cape.

This time, I flew. —

I had to close my eyes and imagine myself on the safe sands of a beach