Just recently I was fortunate to have the opportunity to take a road trip into the interior region of the Western Cape province of my country of South Africa. Leaving my idyllic coastal residence was not easy for me as I was born and raised at the coast and have lived my entire life there. Still, the chance to visit a friend made it worth the effort to explore some of the lesser known parts of the region.
Leaving the town of Plettenberg Bay in the “Garden Route” region, I drove inland over a particularly old and narrow mountain pass. It was a dirt road fit for an ox wagon and I wasn’t at all sure that my little city car would relate to the trek. Nevertheless, I made my way very slowly up the pass and into another world, compared to my familiar region of the coast.
On top of the pass the road was no more than a track made centuries ago by the look of it. This was the road to a town called Uniondale, one the other side of the mountain range that separates the south coast of Africa from the Karoo desert of the interior. They are worlds apart in climate and curiously also quite different in culture, architecture and style, as you will see.
08-121442
While meandering slowly along my mountain pass, thinking my car was not up to such harsh conditions, I encountered the most unusual sight. Here I was worrying about the condition of my car on this road, when along came an even more resolute traveler...on a bicycle. He must be an international visitor. That was my first thought. No local would go to this much trouble. I could be wrong of course, but he had all his kit in saddle bags or whatever the cycling equivalent is. And he was peddling uphill with several kilograms of kit on his bicycle. What a legend. After that I couldn’t complain about my car at all, which was a luxury by comparison.
I remembered just how intrepid some digital nomads and international travelers can be, compared to my homely existence in my comfort zone at the most beautiful holiday tourist beach in the country. Here was a guy voluntarily pcking all his camping gear on a bicycle and tackling the most austere mountain pass I have even driven on...all for the pleasure of seeing the sights, I presume. That take endurance. We passed by each other so I didn’t get to find out where he was from.
Along the dirt road, I was able to appreciate the sights of the valley below and had checked out the map of my route beforehand, so knew my way theoretically. The few road signs made it clearer as I ventured into this previously unknown hinterland that was so remote and devoid of civilization. Some of the really tight bends in the depths of the mountain pass itself had the most iconic names which were relics of a long forgotten past, when Afrikaner trekkers first ventured into this area three hundred years ago or thereabouts.
Some of the tightest parts of the pass allowed for only one vehicle, like the bridges across some streams. And the valleys or gorges were steep on either side, so it must have been quite an effort to carve out the original roadway in the previous centuries, using just manual labor with picks and shovels. Maybe they used some dynamite sometimes, I’m not sure. Still, it made for an awesome experience, like Dorothy leaving Kansas and heading down the yellow brick road.
One signpost said “Convict’s Grave”. Now that really painted a gritty picture in my mind of just how these roads were probably built or carved out of the sheer hard mountain rock face. They probably used convicts to do all the slave labor and some of them died in the effort to pave the way for us future generations.
One of the pioneer road builders in this part of the world, known originally as the Cape colony, was a british engineer called Thomas Bain. He has a pass named after him in the Cape of Good Hope, my town of birth (aka Cape Town). And here on my trek I came across evidence of his work on this very mountain pass too. Before these roads were carved, I presume it was just a horse trail. And during the time that Bain built these roads, the Cape was part of the British Empire as a colony. The earlier Dutch settlers had been pushed out and further north, where they later founded Johannesburg and the northern provinces of today’s South Africa. That’s where all the gold was found, which the British and the Dutch “boers” or farmers then fought over.
Eventually I made it out of the mountain pass and back to a tarred road and the first signs of civilization once more. But the towns were quite different in appearance and architecture compared to the modern popular towns I frequent back along the coast. They were archaic and from a distant past, and I will show you the architecture in my next blog post on my tour, so stay tuned for that in the coming episode. You will find it intriguing.