“I can’t stand that
drive,” a friend said when I told him I was about to drive back to Cape Town, “It’s
so BORING!” After more than a week in
Johannesburg I was feeling a familiar creeping claustrophobia. A feeling that grows imperceptibly at first
then starts gnawing at the edges of my nerves.
The constant traffic sometimes crawling and frustrating, at other times
racing aggressively to goodness knows what vital destinations. Gradually the avenues of twelve foot security
walls and meals in shopping malls and overlooking car parks pick away at me
until I need space and views in huge dollops.
Like being transported
through a sanity portal of infinite space, the drive through the Karoo to Cape
Town is a slow, easy transition from the frenetic energy and constant movement
of Gauteng to the easier pace and soothing views of the Cape.
I understand how
people enjoy the rush of South Africa’s economic powerhouse. I feel it when I’m there. I enjoy it too, for a short while. It’s a place where all the positive energy of
South Africa focusses, like the dot of
hot light formed by a magnifying glass under the summer sun. But it’s not my place. So I enjoy a slow cruise down the N1. I fill, like a sponge, with the magnificent
Karoo light, the drab green scrub, the huge sky and vast horizon.
I’m seldom bored for
long. A flaming sunset, clouds towering
high into a sky that is almost unbelievably blue, a thunderstorm of immense spectacle, this is a
place where nature reminds us that she rules.
Just before Christmas
I headed home, sitting behind the wheel enjoying the landscape I’ve come to
love so much when I was hit by a series of thundershowers. At times I had to slow to forty kilometres
per hour, so ferocious was the rain storm.
At one point I arrived at a section of road that had just been visited
by a passing hail storm. For two hundred
metres the road looked like it was under ten centimetres of snow.
Is driving through the
Karoo boring? No. Never.
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