Mad Bike Trips - Waking up in the Karoo.

I heard baboons barking on the other side of the hill where I set up my camp that night. The comfort of the Midgley hotel and my hosts in Somerset West a thing of the past. I had known that this lengthy cut of dried up gravel would take me to Steytlerville eventually. Another nowhere town. But night time is night time and I was tired after day upon day of riding. Especially this last patch upon entering the Karoo. A different world altogether. South Africa is like that. So many different terrains. I feel, after all the years of travelling this country, as a youth with my dog on my thumb, as a delivery man, as a cyclist. As a drifter. I feel I have a picture of the land inside me. My training as a painter will not be wasted. I have hope that there is yet something great that can come out of me, and my art and my wandering.

I had to spend quite a while selecting the right spot to camp in the Karoo. I was probably about thirty kilometres North of Steytlerville, in some fairly wild terrain by the end of that day. The first few spots I settled down in had too many ants the size of dune buggies crawling about. I did eventually manage to pass a very comfortable night though. Technically trespassing I suppose, I scaled a fence bridge where technicians go to inspect pump heads. Walked a mile or so into the land to the side of the dirt road I had been following since I do not enjoy being disturbed in the middle of the night should there happen to be someone else on the road.
I found a little spot where the antelope had worn themselves a hollow under a shrub, cooked a little on my trusty litle primus and lay gazing at the moon until fatigue overwhelmed me.
The thirty odd kilometres to Steytlerville and breakfast at the royal hotel was easy in the cool dawn air. The Karoo mornings are very enjoyable. I even got off the bike to explore a little ravine called 'draaikrans' or 'twisted hill' but here I came across someone else's footprint and it made me feel a little odd, alone out there where there may be someone else but I can't tell.
Draaikrans, 'Twisted Hill' is a good translation I think.

Breakfast at the Royal Hotel in Steytlerville.

After breakfast I took on the roughly fifty kilometres of narrow concrete strip that beelines between Steytlerville and Willowmore, a slightly larger Karoo town.
I wanted a good night's rest, because I knew that it was possible, if only just, to ride the remainder of the distance to see my friend outside Knysna, in a single day. It was about 165 km to Knysna from Willowmore.
Typically, having spent the previous night getting comfortable in a buck's cover. A hollow bush essentially, I now managed to find, since I was paying top dollar for it, the very worst bed and breakfast place in the country. I'm not naming names, but anywhere other than the Merino inn (where I should have gone) is probably dicey. I remember the Merino from being a young man hitchiking with my even younger girlfriend and needing to take a proper break.
This place, in December 2013 was godawful. I mean, the owner's soap, with hair, was in the bathroom allocated to me. The bed was unsleepable and the only other people in the place were the permanent residents who were presumably there to run the place.
So not much sleep but glad to get the hell out of there at five am and skipping the breakfast, who knows? That might have saved my life!

The first part of the ride was tarred and less than exciting although the light was quite interesting and I did take a couple of shots of the landscape.

Toward the middle of the day I found myself in Uniondale, a town familiar to me from my days hitchiking as a youth. This time I was riding a different road though from the route a hitchiker might have favoured. One I had once previously ridden, with my old original touring bike: Dorothy. That night was quite unforgettable too, travelling up the Ghost Road under moonlight and sleeping at the top of the pass in the Fijnbos. I loved it and this time promised to be even better. Tom Sawyer, my current bicycle, was really quite a much better bike that Dorothy had been, and I had long since learned the art of having an effective and comfortable campsite with a minimum of gear.
The road up towards Prince Alfred from Uniondale is known as the Ghost Road because there is a ghost story associated with it. Though I felt neither ghostly nor afraid on either occasion that I rode up this rode, the earlier one being, as I said, in moonlight and really quite beautiful.

They say that a young woman will appear to you and ask you for a lift in your car (maybe that's why...) and after you have given her a lift, you find, shock horror, that she has disappeared from the passenger seat of your car.

As I say, that didn't happen to me. When I got to the top of the pass and started on the dirt into the Knysna forests I was really quite excited. Did a little cross coujntry from the fort at Uniondale before the pass and then the ultra challenging Prince Alfred's pass. A classic dirt road through hills and forests. Often misty and beautiful

Thr Ghost road itself was pretty but not particularly mysterious.

I found myself still in the forest as darkness fell, but before long, as my legs which felt like machines continued to cycle, the fireflies came out and there I was, Christmas eve, headed for the outskirts of Knysna, approacking via the dirt roads nowhere near the highway most are familiar with surrounded by the pale will 'o the wisp lightng in the dark forest. Racing silently by hidden streams gurgling in the magically lit ferns. As I neared the settlements around Knysna, the fireflies lights gave way to the Christmas lights of people's houses. Whirling and whistling through the dark forest, I came out at last on the downhill from Gouna and cruised into my friend Patsy's driveway. Tea with Pats! Nothing better.