"Not all those who wander are lost..."

When I was five years old, I would periodically vanish. It made my mother very anxious when, without telling her, I would take my wide-brimmed felt hat and the dogs, and simply follow the wind into the long grass. I remember coming home hot and thirsty, and having to face my mother's disapproving correction, but even so, I somehow knew that I would do it again. More than three and half decades later and I still do that upon occasion.

When given the option, you will always find me along the roads less-traveled. When I have traveled a road before, I will take another, longer one, just so that I would not have to travel the same road twice. If there is a paved road and a dirt road, chances are I'll choose the dirt road. I left the emerald landscape of Glentana, the sapphire ocean and the velvet green mountains this year, hungry for the Karoo. That unbelievably ancient land where you still feel a connection to the times when prehistoric beasts lived in shallow lakes which have since turned to stone and become raised hills and features of the landscape. You will still find them there, those ancient old beasts. Crumbling fossils with sunken eyes. A hint of skin and scales perhaps. And sometimes their vanishing footsteps in the sun-blackened rock where they hold small puddles of water from a rare passing shower.

Crossing Outeniqua Pass.

Across the Outeniqua pass, 700 metres above sea level and down into the Waboomskloof valley with its hops plantations and flowering rambling roses. Take a right at the Oudtshoorn junction and run along the very long line of tar that separates two sets of mountains like an asphalt zipper. The Langkloof. Hot and dry and semi-desert, yet watered by the dew that runs from the beard of the Outeniqua peaks, feeding apple orchards and peach plantations of which the late bloomers are still shedding blossoms. These are ancient settler farms, dating back to the time of the Trekboere who lived here in search of freedom and to get away from the corrupt Dutch administration in the Cape. Early traveler's accounts such as that of Christian Latrobe speak fondly about the families who used to live there. Simple country folk who nevertheless lead dignified and prosperous lives. They were famous for their unbelievable generosity and hospitality to strangers, for their devout faith, and - according to one traveler's journal - for the unusual beauty of their women.

Heading down the Langkloof.

I smiled inwardly as I passed the old farm of Ezeljacht where the renegade pioneer, Coenraad de Buys had been born. Times were wild back then. The settlers never saw black tribes at all, but they lived in a state of silent war with the Bushmen and Hottentots. And besides that, there was the never-ending struggle against lion, leopard, rhino and elephant which lurked around every corner. I was born three centuries too late, so I'll just have to make do with that I have now. Memories and imagination. The torches by which the curious peer into the shadows of the past.

The further you travel the more free life feels. The accelerator pedal or the "spoon," as we say in Afrikaans, slowly becomes heavier while your chariot becomes lighter. The sky is blue and welcoming and the clouds are smiling like tufts of cotton wool draped across an invisible cathedral roof. Good-bye civilization. You've always been overrated.

An old farm near Potjiesberg.

At Potjiesberg the road swings left and makes a set of crazy curly-windings as it propels you northward. Across the crest and down again towards the apron-folds of the Kamanassie mountain. You're heading towards Uniondale now, where the famous ghost-girl is said to stand and hitch a ride on dark and stormy nights. I've traveled this road around midnight before, with howling wind and sleet. I looked for her, but if she was there, she clearly did not look for me. We missed each other. But still. I think about her every time I pass there, and the words of Anton Goosen's song: "And Kamanassie mountain is haunted strongly, while she's rolling stones down the mountain." Kamanassie. A beautiful, onomatopoeic word. I don't know now what it means, except that the very word tastes like honey upon my grateful tongue. You pass her, and the shepherd's trees upon the plains, then roar past Uniondale without a stop. Breakfast at Willowmore, that is what the traveller keeps thinking of.

Willowmore, the gateway to the famous Baviaans valley. Here you will always find motorcyclists in their Darth Vader gear on BMW and KTM dirt bikes. They look like time travelers from the future in this ancient land. I ignore them as the foreign objects that they are. What I'm looking for are authentic people. Men with sun-blistered eye banks and sweet-faced old women who water flowers from a leaking hosepipe as you dry past homes in which they had probably been born. Welcome to Willowmore. My Australian friend Dr. Don Diespecker's father used to be the British commander there during the Anglo-Boer War. And the old fort is still standing on the hill above the town, it's hollow windows staring like eyes in a stony scull.

The last haul - in Willowmore.

My car finds a resting place along the main street beside Sophie's Choice. I step into the coolness of her old-fashioned coffee shop and slowly look at all the romantic old antiques inside. Some for sale, some for show. Sophia notices me and smiles, her long grey hair still tied loosely behind her head as always.
"It's been a long time," she says as she invites me to a table.
"Over a year now," I smile back.
I know she does not remember my name, but I'm flattered that she still remembers my face. I pass there roughly once a year, and over time she has come to remember me.
"How's the book coming along?" she wants to know.
Again, I am surprised.
"Long done," I answer hesitatingly, before adding, "I'm on my way back along the footsteps of my forefathers to collect a few more photographs. It should have been published long ago."
I feel guilty and she has the grace to act as if this is good news.

The famous Sophie's Choice in Willowmore.

I ordered home baked pies.
"Let me just see if they are ready yet," Sophia said.
She vanishes into the kitchen briefly and then returns with a triumphant smile that whispers to my beaming face: "They've just come out the oven!"
It was the same thing last year. Almost the same thing every year. I'm such a sticker for routine, once I've found something that I like.
I'm seated at a polished table. None of the tacky trappings of modernity taints my touch at all. The cutlery is ancient silver, the kind that is polished by frequent handling, with heavy square handles full of dents and scratch marks. My table overflows with a vase full of fragrant sweat pea flowers - fresh from Sophia's garden. Beside it, a set of crystal bottles containing olive oil and vinegar in a diadem of plated silver. And a heavy EPN silver candelabra to round it off. I'm back in the Victorian era and I relish the discovery. This is where I feel at home. In a time that has gone extinct long before I was born. Only another old soul would understand. And for those who don't - I do not judge. I just smile sadly, knowing that they miss a thing that cannot be explained.

Home baked pies and Victorian splendour at Sophie's Choice.

Suddenly a crash reverberates outside. Everybody rushes to the cool veranda, but I remain quietly at my table. The Queen did not jump from her horse or canter when that silly boy shot at her in 1981, and neither will I be moved by impulsive action. A little waitress comes to stand next to my chair with her hands held to her mouth.
"Someone's run into Sophia's car!" she gasps.
Then the sound of screeching tires. A screaming engine. More screeching tires as the vehicle runs around, and then the desperate whine of pistons that are beating against the block. I slowly rise to join the spectators on the patio.
"That's the off-duty detective who's chasing after him," the waitress says.
I shrug and assure here that in that case the feeling culprit will soon be caught. After all, this is Sunday afternoon and there can hardly be three streets out of Willowmore. Upon the open plains there is only so many places where a man can hide. And sergeant Whatsisname sounded quite determined.

Elegance upon my table at Sophie's Choice.

Ten minutes later, while I was finishing my vegetables and tasting a cup of splendid coffee, the detective burst through the door triumphantly. He sported beads of sweat upon his brown forehead, but looked every inch a gladiator returning from the arena with a severed head held by the hear.
"I got him," he announced. "Booked him for drunken driving too."
I nodded and slowly rose as I offered him my hand. You're a hero sir. Well done. Vaaljapie on a Sunday afternoon. What is the world coming to these days? He presses my hand shyly, but my grin is genuine. I don't know what his name is, but the word needs knights like him. Even in a dusty place like Willowmore.

Poor Sophia's car looks bad. Ironically, the only reason I didn't park on this same spot which is my usual place, was because she had been there first. Such are the fortunes and misfortunes of our existence. Sophia was still standing on the veranda, staring at the scattered fragments of her husband's father's car which they inherited. I hesitate for just a moment and then step across to her.
"When one has had a big skrik," I ventured, "one could do with a hug."
She accepts it gratefully. I finished my coffee and the paid my bill. As I stepped out into the blinding sunlight, Sophia followed me into the street and said, "look forward to seeing you again some time. And thanks for the hug."

Thanks for the hug. That's one of the things that's wrong with the world. People don't hug each other enough anymore. Imagine how difficult it would be to rob or murder if it was mandatory to start every encounter with a hug. But then again, look at Judas. He set the world on fire with just a kiss. I'm wrong about many things in life, but still. I can't believe that I would be wrong about my philosophy about hugging.

Sophia's car.

From Willowmore the road continues northwards. I program my GPS with my destination for what should be a 15 hour journey if you travel without stopping, but it picks up Margate in England and announces that the expected time is 15 and a half days. I shake my head and turn my eyes towards the great horizons. Distance means nothing anymore now. We have shackled continents together by strings of digital ones and zeros. Our knowledge pool is greater than at any other time in history, yet our world has smaller than men have ever known. And yet, the great plains still make you feel like you can breathe.

My picnic spot on the endless plains.

Beervlei dam is bone dry, as it nearly always is. Grass is growing in its bed. Beyond it lies the Black Karoo. Miles of flat plains, which as a child, I used to believe to be the ugliest land I have ever seen. And yet, as I grew older, I fell in love with it, the way a man can sometimes fall in love with an ugly woman when he gets to know the beauty of her soul. My car slowly loses speed and then leaves the tar before it shudders into a lake of silence. The air is dry here, and the temperature just perfect. The Karoo seems lifeless when you are at speed, but when you stop you see that you were wrong. The droning of insects fill the air.

The desert awakes after only a few drops of passing rain.

I watch a strange insect with a long sharp proboscis gathering pollen from a flower. It had rained a little a day or two before. The desert is awakening. To the west is nothing. A rippling ocean of mild heat waves that hover upon the uncertain line of the horizon. Not a hill or a single ridge as far as the eye can see. At any moment I expect to see the figure of a lonely bushman walking towards me through the rippling air, bearing bow and quiver, and an ostrich egg of water. But no one comes. To the east three horses slowly walk past me. I whistle to try and make them look at me for a photograph, but they have no interest in strangers. Scraggly and haggard, they are on a mission to get to some place which may or may not matter. All I can do is stand beside the fence and admire them. They have something that I want, although I still can't explain even to myself what it is.

Twisted mountains of the Karoo that speak of a time when the earth was moulded by force.

At the concrete picnic table, I sit and scratch my thoughts onto the yellow paper of my travel journal. A crow is sitting on her untidy nest at the top of a silver telephone pole. She eyes me wearily and then turns away so that only her tail feathers point at me. This place makes you feel both old and young at the same time. The gold of my fountain pen's nib scratch upon the paper, and gradually comes to rest upon a hesitating bead from which the ink slowly spreads into the fibres. Suddenly I'm out of words. I twist the cap back on and allow my eyes to feast upon the distances. I'm wealthy in this moment. Wealthy because even though I cannot take it home with me, at this very instant I own all that is around me. And it owns me. And God owns all of us together. I should have written it down in the pages of my journal, but I don't. I slip the elastic around the pages and just sit there for a while. Where tar runs out of road the surface looks like glass. And it is calling me. It is time to wrap my picnic up for there is a long way more to go.

The great road to the north between Willowmore and Aberdeen.

Where nowhere dips its finger into the lake of loneliness, a farm stall suddenly appears. I turn in and park beside a gleaming new Mercedes limousine. It makes me think of George Lucas' beautiful name for Luke Skywalker's spacecraft: the Millennium Falcon. I'm looking for biltong, but I'm driven by curiosity as I step onto the patio. I'm greeted by a black woman with a monkey on her shoulder. The lattice roof casts zebra stripes upon her ethnic dress as she struggles to convince her pet to climb into his travel basket. I notice that it contains airline stickers, so I assume that this must be a well-travelled monkey. A little boy stares fascinated at the screeching little figure, holding his head askew.
"What's his name?" I ask.
"Knapie," she replies - or "little fellow."
The pun is now lost on me. Knapie sounds like apie, and apie is the diminutive name for a monkey.

The little monkey named Knapie.

She didn't seem eager to strike up conversation so I went inside. The things for sale seemed to be an odd assortment of things not entirely typical of the Karoo. Or maybe it is just I who was expecting roll tobacco and sacks of milled flour against the walls. My imagination has been watered by the parched landscape of the surrounding desert, and I'm asking for too much. But I still wanted biltong. When I found some on the counter, I noticed the price first of all. Suddenly the Karoo began melting around me, and I stepped away in silent protest. It is OK to make a buck, I think to myself. Even to make a good buck if you can. But there ought to be a law against overpricing biltong. Let the gold price go skywards. Let fuel cost what it will. But let the price of biltong and good whiskey remain reasonable is my wordless prayer. And if it not a prayer, then at least a wish. Or a hope. Or a whimper as I fell back into the white-hot sun outside. I'll make the next station without biltong. At least I'm still good for fuel, many thanks to the wells of far-off Saudi-Arabia.

And so I draw a bead into the distance, and burn my way up north. Aberdeen with all its memories flash past after many miles of nothingness. I think about my old friend, Mrs. Anneliese Ihnken who lie beneath the hungry soil of its windswept cemetery and for a while her voice still fills my mind. I hear again her stories from her times during World War II. I hear the bombs falling around her in the city of Dresden as a girl of 15. I smell the smoke and see before me the intensity of her blue eyes as she holds up and old woman's finger and turns to me in the car and tell me after her fourth miraculous escape, how she knew that God had a purpose for her life. And then her memory falls silent, and I'm left with only my own thoughts. And I'm left wondering what purpose God has for my life one day. I'm driving slowly as if I'm afraid of running out of desert now. I don't mind the long road. Each horizon frames an animated painting and I'm trying to take it home with me.

The Dutch Reformed church at Graaff-Reinet.

After all these years, I still can't find the the old rusting settler's double bed which marks a grave along the highway. According to the legend an old Trekboer's wife died at this spot. He left her bed above her grave, and it stands there too this day. I have seen pictures of it, and Sophia had told me where to look but still my eyes are blind. But then Spandau kop towers on the left, and slowly I come rolling into Graaff-Reinet. This old town used to be the last station before the wild unknown. A sleepy post where civilization stubbornly used to hang upon the precipice of the wilderness by its very fingernails. Here the Trekboere used to come once a month or once every fear years to christen their latest children and hold communion. Or to buy powder and lead, or sell their stock of hides and horns, elephant ivory and ostrich feathers. This is settler's country. This is one of the places where the gold in the heart of our nation was first refined.

Camdeboo mountains.

I pour a little more of Saudi-Arabia into my tank and then swing eastward. The land you see before you must have been one of the finest in Africa once upon a time. It still is, in many ways. But it must have been best when the great herds still roamed its fertile plains. The old traveller, naturalist and explorer, Captain Gordon Cumming wrote about the plains where thousands of plains game used to roam. And the changing seasons when millions of springbuck passed across the burning landscape, leaving the entire country trampled into powdered dust behind them. Woe to any livestock which should be swept into this endless tide, he said, for such a beast would never be seen again.

Ancient hills that abound with prehistoric fossils.

The are is called the Camdeboo. It is not a settler's name. It is older than that. It might be Hottentot. A name from a people who have long ago become extinct. Here my family trekked in the latter 1700's. She was a young widow with small children from the Paarl, who had married a Trekboer from the north. And he was taking her to his wild home across these plains. I think of Gezina Labuschagne and her little ones. She, who had grown up in the soft valleys of the Boland, now cast upon the barrenness of this savage land. I wish I could have talked to her. I'm sure her tears still lie in the ochre earth. And yet, I sense that she must have been happy here. In a land as beautiful as this one, it would have been hard not to be happy.

Upon the plains of the Camdeboo.

I flash through Pearceton, and then hit Bruintjieshoogte. Nowadays the name means nothing, but once upon a time this outrunner of the Sneewberge marked the furthest extreme of European civilization. My family was among the very first Trekboere who went and settle on the other side. When the Dutch authorities heard about it, they found themselves in trouble. They had to write a very humble letter, humbly begging to be allowed to remain where they were settled. The corrupt officers of the Dutch East India Company grudgingly acceded. And then the Trekboere promptly went one step further and moved across the Great Fish River. That's what makes us Afrikaners, I suppose. Our heads are so hard, probably because they have been knocked so many times. And baked by a thousand frontier suns. And because we've had everything against us for so many generations - and had to learn to do our own thinking in order to survive.

The road from Bruintjieshoogte towards Somerset-East. It is here my family lived in the late 1700's and got into trouble for venturing beyond the borders of the Dutch colony.

I was running out of day now, and Somerset East looked sad and wasted on a Sunday afternoon. I couldn't find a single restaurant open in the entire town. There was a tavern or African "eating house" that seemed open, but the crowd who hung out there was not my sort of company. On a street corner another entrepreneur was barbecuing sausages on a braai made from a cut open fuel drum. It looked like dysentery and maggots would be bundled with the offer, so I decided to pass the town without a stop. I'd seen it in better years. South Africa's rivets are popping, but you mostly see it in the country towns. It is a shame. But at least there are good memories from times gone by.

In the wild parts of Africa, the end of each day brings genuine peace.

Before the road hits Cookhouse and the Great Fish River, I turn off towards the mountains. A farmhouse nestles one third up the slope, overlooking orange groves and canals and miles of olive-blue plains that roll in the direction of Grahamstown. Brett Wienand's family has been here for generations, and he received me graciously. He said his wife is in New York right now, and that all he knew about cooking was how to boil and egg. I told him not to worry, as I'd brought my own snacks, just in case. And so we sat upon the deck of his old farmhouse and drank coffee and talked about farming and the future, about his son that has to continue after him one day, and about how nothing has really changed at all when you think about it in a certain way.

The homestead at Olivewoods.

Olivewoods is the name of his very fine B&B. When we ran out of conversation later, the world sank into dignified silence. Two days before full moon and the valley shone silver, while the air was heavy with the scent of belated spring. Wild jasmin and acacia flowers. Sometimes you don't need much to feel just like an emperor. You sit sit there and run your fingers through a sky bejeweled with stars, as if it was an upturned vessel full of diamonds.

End of the haul at Olivewoods.

I knew I was taking the long way round to the Natal South Coast this year, but I chose it by design. I wonder what Brett told Wendy about me when he must have reported that he'd put up a traveler in a B&B which was strictly-speaking, temporarily closed. Probably something about an eccentric traveler who seemed lost when the day was running out of sun. I wasn't lost, however. As Tolkien wrote in All That is Gold Does Not Glitter, "not all those who wander are lost." I was one of them. I still am.

(Next installment... journey into the forgotten valleys of the Winterberg. )