I have just returned from a 1750 km long road trip to Cape Town. I tried every excuse I could think of to get out of it but, eventually, I had to concede defeat and resign myself to a very long drive in a very small car. Actually, it wasn’t that small - the Toyota Yaris is surprisingly roomy with a huge amount of packing space once the rear seats have been folded flat. And we needed that space because my son, Mike, was returning to university, laden with a year’s supply of kit and my beloved Sue had packed what looked like a year’s supply of “padkos” to fortify us on the journey.
We planned to do the trip over two days, breaking the journey in Port Elizabeth, a thousand kilometres or ten hours down the road. This would leave us with a relatively short 750 km hop to Cape Town the following day, from where I would catch a plane back to Durban and collapse in a heap! Oh, don’t be such a wimp, David – look at Pieter Verster… he regularly drives his son, to Stellenbosch…and they do it in a single day! Yes, my darling, but he also does the annual Two Oceans Marathon and other near superhuman feats of endurance for fun. I, by comparison, am more of a pleasure cruiser. Still, the countdown continued and when D Day arrived, we loaded a small mountain of luggage into the plucky little Yaris and hit the road at 04h30 – destination…Kokstad…our first planned fuel stop before entering the dreaded Transkei. Mike had done a great deal of preparation for the journey, much of it on his ipod. Now, while I have always considered myself a music lover, nothing I heard on the first twenty minutes of Mike’s road trip playlist was familiar to me and I secretly began to despair …only seventeen hours and forty minutes to go… But then we shared an energy drink and a freshly home baked Cornish Pasty which had the effect of considerably raising my flagging spirits and the journey began to brighten with the sunrise.
After a very pleasant hour and a half on that excellent highway to the South Coast, the dulcet voice on our GPS told me to leave the highway and join the road less travelled on a cross country adventure to a flyspot on the map that is Kokstad. A curtain of mist closed in and heavy drizzle began to fall, obscuring all but the dirty wall of metal and tail lights that marked the rear of an agonisingly slow convoy of heavy articulated trucks in front of us. And so we crawled…all the way to Kokstad. Thankfully, the journey from there began to improve and, after we had left the questionable delights of Umtata and most of the big trucks behind us, I actually started to enjoy the trip. The Transkei leg of the journey was surprisingly rather pleasant. The road is in good nick and, apart from the occasional carcass spread across the tarmac, it passed without incident. From the Kei River, you’re into settler country and the rugged beauty of the Eastern Cape.
This is hard, battle scarred territory where old stone buildings stand silent and watchful as you pass. Port Elizabeth, our scheduled overnight stop, is an unlovely city marked by factories and industrial plant on the waterfront and that enormously expensive white elephant - the Coega Industrial Development Zone - standing empty and silent on the edge of the salt flats.
It was good to be on the road again at 5am the following day and our journey through the Garden Route to Plett, Knysna and George was an absolute joy. The Proteas are in bloom and the Fynbos is a riot of colour prompting indigenous entrepreneurs to set up informal roadside florists to capitalise on nature’s bounty. The final leg of the trip past Swellendam to the foot of Sir Lowry’s Pass is a pastiche of dry landscapes peppered with farmland where olive groves, vineyards and orchards play counterpoint to vast tracts of sheep and cattle country as the Karoo reluctantly surrenders its grip. Then you sweep up and over that magnificent pass to a dramatic reveal of False Bay and our journey’s end in the blue haze far below. As we drove into Cape Town I looked at the young man sitting where my little boy had been and felt a surge of emotion. He’s grown up while I wasn’t looking and the time has passed so quickly. But we have had these two days on the road to reconnect and that’s a gift that I will treasure.
