Forgotten Road

Appreciate this post, internet here costs R5 per minute (W10 000 per minute).

On Saturday, not long after the rugby (South Africa versus Wales, a game we won but without much style or finesse), I called my girlfriend and said, "We’re going to the Wild Coast tomorrow, so start packing".

We drove a road I have not seen for more than 20 years – eech, am I that old already – and then left that road (the R58) about 53km from a place called Ugie (where Corneli’s family live).
We were using a modern Caltex Map Magazine as our guide, and as luck would have it, the vital border area between the old South Africa and the former country of Mandela’s birth (Transkei – now re-integrated into a whole new South Africa) was lost under a Caltex logo, and you had to turn to three or four pages in the book to find the fraction of the map that was of use.

What we needed was a map that showed Bloemfontein, and our destination, Kob Inn, on the Wild Coast, on one page. No such luck. The result: we left Elliot (on the R58) and took, not a secondary road, but what an Eastern Cape map calls an ‘untarred minor road’ (not the route recommended in the map above, courtesy of www.shellgeostar.co.za). We drove about 100km through untamed Africa – the place most people who have never been to Africa think of when they think of Africa. It’s a place not many white South Africans are aware of, because they only end up there through happenstance or error.

The road from Elliot to Quiba to Cala to the Ncora Dam and beyond is through such a rugged area that the signal of South Africa’s premiere cellular service provider, Vodacom, does not cover vast swathes of this rural hinterland.
Since I had taken almost a hundred photographs earlier in the day, we traveled this road in a gathering gloom. Goats were being herded into their kraals, bulls and others beasts were crossing or walking along dirt roads everywhere on their way home.
More than once we stopped for directions, and you could see on the bright shiny faces of the people, that strangers don’t often travel through here.

In a country where everyone can speak or understand English, here, there are communities who can only speak Xhosa (Mandela is a Xhosa.)
There was a single abandoned petrol station on our road, and a few shops.
My girlfriend was getting nervous as the road crawled on and on, the potholes pushed and crushed at the wheels, and the darkness fell heavier and harder around us.
Truth be told, I was putting on a brave face. After all, if you have a breakdown in darkest Africa, you’re stuck…and if you run out of petrol…which was seeming to be less and less unlikely…but then we found the R61 and suddenly the road felt like butter.
Today is Tuesday, our second day on the Wild Coast.

I had to go to Willowvale today to draw quite a lot of money as the hotel doesn’t accept American Express. Amex is a shitty credit card; I’m going to apply for a different card. The trip this morning meant we had to sacrifice a quad bike ride.

The weather has been sunny, windy and wild, the sea, storm tossed today. Yesterday was better. We’re holding out for good weather tomorrow. If the weather’s good we’ll try to boat up the river, walk to Mazeppa Bay and fit in a Quad Bike ride or riverside hike before sunset. I have taken over 250 stunning pictures, and will provide the thousands of words when I am back in civilization.