11 April 1986: Typing in a Land Rover while Crossing the High Veld

Friday, April 11, 1986, Along the Roads between Johannesburg and Memel

This is a new experiment –typing in a Land Rover traveling at 100 km/hour.  It’s 4:00 PM and I’m heading southeast from Johannesburg with six members of the Mountain Club of South Africa for a weekend of climbing/hiking at the edge of the Drakensburg, the escarpment that stretches east from the western Cape Provence north of Cape Town, parallels the Indian Ocean coast to Natal Provence, then swings north into eastern Transvaal Provence.

These chaps from the mountain club picked me up around 2:00 PM in Lombardy East where I’ve been staying since my arrival here six days ago.  We then headed over to Germiston to pick up Benno (the owner of this Land Rover) where he works at a factory.  From there, Benno’s son, Thomas, drove us south on Route 23 for about 25 km until we hit National Route 3 just northwest of Heidelberg.  The highway was initially a four-lane motorway but narrowed to two lanes with occasional passing lanes once we left the Johannesburg metro area.     

Route of our drive from the Johannesburg area to Memel in the eastern Orange Free State.  Our hiking destination, the Transkop, is a few kilometers southeast of Memel.  

We’re passing through rolling farmland punctuated with scattered ranges of low hills here and there.  Most of this area is planted in “mealies” (corn) with some pastureland.  Scattered groves of deciduous and evergreen trees dot the semi-arid landscape.  The elevation is around 1800 meters (nearly 6000 feet).  This is the High Veld (high plains), originally settled by the Voortrekkers in the mid-1800s.  We pass a herd of cattle that are being attended by white, long-necked birds, who are probably interested in picking insects off the big guys’ hides.  Oops, the Land Rover slipped out of gear again but Benno assures us it’s only a minor problem.

It feels like spring out here – well, it was back in Colorado.  But the tall, dead mealie stalks in the fields remind me that everything is backwards here.  Not only is it autumn, but the traffic is on the “wrong” side of the road and the sun is in the northern sky.  And the road signs are bilingual – English and Afrikaans. 

We cross the Vaal River, leaving Transvaal and entering the Orange Free State, two of South Africa’s four provinces.  Ingrid, one of my hiking companions, says the name Transvaal comes from the Voortrekkers and means “across the Vaal”.  Now, the landscape has flattened considerably.  A light rain is falling and ominous thunderheads loom to the south.  We could be in Kansas, Toto.  Well, maybe the topography and farms resemble Kansas, but the “cultural landscape” on and along the highway has a big difference – black people everywhere.  Blacks riding in the back of big lorries (trucks with open cargo beds), blacks in the back of small Nissan bakkies (pick-up trucks), black women walking with big bundles on their heads, groups of purposeful black men walking along the roadside, blacks in busses, young black boys wearing shorts, tired-looking old black men in ragged shirts and trousers, young black men who are smartly-dressed.  Once in a while I see blacks in nice motorcars but these are mostly occupied by whites. 

As we left Germiston, Benno point out some old mine dumps, flat-topped hills with steep, eroded side slopes and little vegetation on the gullied sides.  Now, off in the distance, I notice a few similar-looking hills, but I suspect these are not man-made.  Could they be koppies (kopjes in Afrikaans), the dolerite-capped hills which dot the vast, arid Karoo region to the southwest of here?  I haven’t seen a town for miles (I mean kilometers).  A road sign says it’s 125 km to Harrismith (near the Natal border).  From there, the highway crosses the Drakensberg and continues on to Ladysmith.  Then it drops down through the coastal hills to Pietermaritzburg and on to the Indian Ocean port city of Durban, center of South Africa’s Indian population. 

Our destination is a campground southeast of Memal, a small Orange Free State dorp (town) near where the OFS, Natal, and Transvaal meet.  Continuing on into the fading afternoon light, I see a herd of freshly-shorn sheep to our left.  A black fellow in olive green work clothes with matching brimmed hat is watching over them.  Along the roadside are white and lavender wildflowers which Roland says are cosmos.  Ingrid says the cosmos were brought here by Australians during the Boer War and are used to stabilize disturbed areas like roadsides.  They bloom every year around Easter – no wonder my hay fever is acting up. 

To our left, a large farmstead with a spacious, well-maintained home and several white barn-like buildings with curved red roofs.  To the right, a group of native huts.  And now, to the right, three bontebok, cute deer-like critters.  Rolls of hay (not haystacks) in the fields.  More native huts painted with interesting geometric patterns and boulders on their metal roofs (to keep the roofs from blowing off, I suppose). 

We turn off Route 3, and head east on a paved secondary road.  A bypass takes us around Vrede.  Roland notices that a herd of black cattle are all facing in the same direction.  “Probably facing away from the rain which was coming from the other direction,” he notes.  “The zebras [pronounced ZEB-ra, not ZEE-bra, in South Africa, by the way] stand with their asses facing the sun to avoid the heat,” he adds.  Large mesas are to our left and ahead of us – the landscape is becoming more rugged.  Groups of native huts (mostly rectangular) are scattered across the open fields at a density of perhaps one group per five square kilometers.

We suddenly make a detour onto a rough gravel road paralleling new road construction on the bypass – it’s a sonofabitch trying to type under these conditions!  Yellow-orange and white, cotton-candy cumulous clouds face us now.  Benno has been scanning the horizon with his binoculars.  It’s still too light to see Halley’s Comet but the clouds and mesas are very interesting indeed.  PADWERKE VOOR (roadwork ahead) says the sign – no shit – too rough for typing.

EINDE OMPAD (end detour) reads another sign several minutes later, thank god.  It’s getting dark but I’ll try to crank out a few more sentences.  We climb through mesas and past more farms.  Willow trees in the stream bottoms; mealie stalks in bundles covering a field.  More herds of black cows (Angus, maybe?  No one in the Land Rover seems to know.)  Up over a pass through a mesa and down across a basin with mesas on all sides in the distance.  The noisy ol’ yellow Land Rover barrels on through the dusk.  The speedometer hits 80 kph when we’re travelling downhill but it feels more like 100.  And now ahead, maybe another 5 km, lies Memel.  No tall buildings but lights and more trees than I’ve seen in many a kilometer.  Damn, looks like we’re going to by-pass Memel too.  I want to see some Afrikaner towns. 

It’s too dark to see my keyboard now.  This will be a test to see if I can use this little 5-pound sweetie in the dark.  Riding in this yellow beast is giving me a sore zorch.  I banged my tailbone on a hidden rock last May while glissading down a snowfield high in the Indian Peaks Wilderness west of Boulder, and it’s been slow to totally heal.  Side road – heading for the campground.  Too rough to write anymore!