29 Nov – 12 Dec 2016
The first adjustment to be made as we arrived in South Africa, was being able to flush toilet paper. We’d had months, since Greece, of having to throw the paper in a separate little bin, but now, finally, in Johannesburg, it was okay to throw it down the loo. We were in Johannesburg to shoot a film, which took 2 weeks. We were staying near a suburb called Alexandra, in the offices of a charity with whom we were filming.
We were advised by the charity, on day 1, that we could wonder around outside, but, 8 years ago an employee of the charity was shot dead in Alex… so, the choice was ours. Her picture was pinned up in the canteen area, next to a heart-wrenching poem written by her mother. And so, we went from 7 months of constantly being outdoors, to going from dorm, to car, to house, to car, to dorm, to car, to restaurant, to car, to dorm. I missed the bike, I missed exercise. But, besides this, Johannesburg was beautiful. The biggest “urban forest” in the world, when looked at from one of it’s many high hills, what you mostly see is green. And Jacarandas, the beautiful purple flowering trees planted by the British who brought them over from Asia (and which take a lot of water and are therefore exacerbating the current water shortage), cover the city in colour. We were really welcomed by all the people we met. It got to the point where we were out every night at different people’s houses.
After our filming finished we flew down to Cape Town to meet Will’s parents and aunt Caroline who had come out to meet us. The city really was as lovely as everyone kept saying. Table mountain stood tall, overlooking the city, sometimes with a slither of cloud on top, the “table cloth”. My favourite part of Cape Town was Company Gardens, a jungle-like park with exotic flowers and birds- a reminder that we’re not in Europe, as some of the architecture might lead you to believe.
During our week with Will’s parents we packed a lot in- we saw the penguins at Bolders, took a boat to Robben Island and saw where Nelson Mandela and others were imprisoned for so many years, we went to the District 6 museum which tells the story of a close-knit interracial Cape Town community who were forced out in the apartheid era. It was also a chance to meet Will’s mum’s cousin (second cousin?) Simon who lives here with his South African wife Maria and two fabulous kids, Thapelo and Neo. Simon himself cycled from South Africa to the UK in the early 90s and told us stories of hyenas sniffing about his tent… great…!
After Sarah, Howard and Caroline’s departure, Will and I rented a room in a house near Company Gardens and worked on our film. Through our friend Lion, we were introduced to a whole set of lovely people with whom we climbed table mountain (swimming in the reservoir at the top- the water dyed blood red from plants, apparently), had a braai (South African bbq) overlooking the city, celebrated Thanksgiving and built a trailer. Lion’s flatmate had a welder and him and Will spent a day and a half constructing a bike trailer that would solve all our water problems as we headed north into Namibia.
A few days before leaving, Olivia, a friend from London got in touch asking if we were still in Cape Town and if so did Will want a sound recording job. It turned out to be an interview with Denis Goldberg, a man who was sentenced along with Mandela at the Rivonia trial. So Will had the chance to visit this now elderly man at his house in Hout Bay, a suburb of Cape Town, and listen to his story, the shock they all had when they were given jail time rather than execution and the moment when Mandela gave his now famous ‘I am prepared to die’ address to the court (available here). He described how, after sentecing, the accused were told taken to cells and told that they would meet the next morning to prepare an appeal. They said their good nights and Mandela and the other black accused were immediately flown off to Robben Island. Goldberg, being white, was incarcerated in a different facility. They had no contact until they met again in 1990 and Mandela greeted the younger Goldberg, ‘Hello my boy’. Goldberg was 31 when he was given four life sentences – the same age as Will is now.
On our intended day of departure, Will and Phil applied the finishing touches to the trailer. We did a little circuit around the car park- all seemed okay. Phil fashioned a flag holder and we were ready to go!
However, as soon as we were on the open road and travelling with a bit of speed, the trailer just wobbled all over the place, totally out of control. “There’s something fundamental, that we’ve got very wrong” Will said, scratching his head, and trying to ignore the stares from passers-by as we stood on the pavement, not sure what to do. It was getting late, and we were due to stay with a WarmShowers host that night in Table View, 20km outside of town. Realising that there was nothing that could be done without having to stay in Cape Town another day, with heavy hearts, we ditched the beautiful custom-built trailer. We just really wanted to get moving by now.
And we were off, pushing worries about water in Namibia to the backs of our mind, the sun setting over the Southern Atlantic as we whizzed down the bike path that went all the way from Table View to Cape Town. As we left the city, we saw bright pink flamingos wading in the lagoons on either side of the road. Soon, we had arrived and were being warmly welcomed by a cycle-riding, Afrikaans-speaking family who had a beautiful little hut in their garden where they let cyclists rest. The house and it’s garden were so lovely that we decided to stay one extra day so I could do some more work on the film.
The morning arrived when we were to leave, properly, this time. Juliet filled us with a delicious breakfast and we took to the road, heading for Yzerfontain. It felt so great riding again. One of the lovely things is the way being on a bike somehow gives people licence to talk to you and you have all sorts of conversations. 2-minutes on the bike we’d chatted to a group of petrol-station workers, an Italian-South African in a dressing gown and slippers, a man walking his dog.
We headed off the main road on to a small road that passed through farms and eventually into a small town called Atlantis. Here, we stopped briefly as I popped into a shop to get supplies while Will waited with the bike. I took my time, talking to a few sweet little girls, and when I came out, I could see Will had a few lingerers around him. “Can we go?” Will said a bit abruptly and looking at me seriously. And so, with shopping bag on my arm, I jumped on the back. It turned out, while I’d been inside, a man had approached Will: “I’m the kind of guy who would rob you,” he’d said. “But I won’t this time… but I know you’ll give me something”. As Will was telling me about this exchange, we were still riding on the pavement, looking for a slope to enter the road on. We passed a small group and one of the guys came after us and tried to grab our bike light from the bike. We managed to escape his grasp and pedalled off quickly away from Atlantis. I felt quite shaky after this rather insignificant sequence of events, but somehow, after our very protected few weeks in Jo’Berg and Cape Town, I suddenly felt quite vulnerable. Once we’d made some progress up the road and I’d calmed down a bit, Will told me that the guy had also said that, if Will wanted one, he could get him a gun.
We followed the coast heading north, staying next in Langebaan after a day cycling through the West Coast national park, stopping in bird hides to look at flocks of elegant flamingos, avocets, African oyster catchers and many other shore birds. We even saw quite a few ostriches scurry by- our first animal sightings!
The following day was supposed to be a long day, 100km or so, but after 60km a car pulled us over. A women jumped out and ran over to us breathlessly, “Me and my friend Jo saw you earlier” she said, “We’re decorating Jo’s beach house, do you
want to stay the night?” It was still early, only about 12:30pm but we didn’t want to turn down such an inviting offer. Jo’s house was a blindingly white old fisherman lodge right on the sea, the name translated (from Afrikaans) as “Fart Corner”. “We’re busy decorating” Jo told us, “but make yourself at home”. And so, Will and I wondered down to the beach and cooled off in the Atlantic, alongside a brazen seal which came up to rest on the shore. We went to the local beachside bar in the evening with Jo and Berdette who were going through big life changes. Both, in their 50s, had recently divorced and were adjusting to their new lives: “When I was married, I would never have just picked up two travellers and invited them to stay”, Jo told us.
We left Fart Corner the next morning and rejoined the road we’d been pedalling along yesterday. Will and I had been so scorched by the sun the previous days that Will had to completely cover up- including wrapping his face in a scarf so only his eyes (hidden behind sunglasses) were exposed. However, as we were still on the coast, a constant cool wind blew in off the sea keeping things comfortable. But, leaving the coast the next day at Lambert’s bay, and heading inland on a dusty road, the heat began to sink in and the lack of shade became such a problem that we had to construct our own, using our bike and tarps. We later met a man whose ancestor was a British soldier in the Second Anglo-Boer War and had landed at Lambert’s Bay, and the first order was a march to Clanwilliam 50 miles inland across this terrain, in heat, carrying everything.
As we travelled north, I began to get the feeling that we were going back in time, the music, the clothes and the interiors of bars and shops seemed to come straight out of 1982. Similarly, some of the conversations we had with the white people would make it seem as if apartheid was still going strong. Sometimes it was a kind of patronizing, paternal, ‘white man’s burden’ tone, “our blacks”, “he’s actually very intelligent!”. Pretty often they’d also find ways to undermine or belittle members of the other “race groups”, like the knowing roll of the eyes when discussing the local black school standards “of course they just lower the pass mark until everyone passes”. Other groups also seemed to be held to a different set of standards, like the farmer who had turned his land into a campsite, with just a few springbok for tourists to look at or hunt, who angrily criticised his ‘coloured’ (a word you get used to hearing a lot here, meaning mixed-race) neighbours for using their land just for subsistence and not producing enough for market, “who’s gonna feed the nation, that’s what I want to know!?” his wife firmly agreed. They didn’t ask the same of themselves. All of these exchanges (and many more) were with people who were absolutely lovely in every other way but grew up in a society that took racial differences and white supremacy for granted.
One night we arrived in a town called Bitterfontein. We’d read on our navigation app that Bitterfontein was a lovely sweet town, a great “get-away” destination, famous for the world’s best mutton pies. Instead we arrived in a grey miserable looking place, where the tourist information that greeted us on our way in, was long closed, and where, at, every street corner sat a group of sad looking men staring at us apathetically as we passed by. We stopped in the only shop in town, who didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked about mutton pies, but pointed us in the direction of a bright pink house on top of a hill which was the town Guest House. The house had been built by a husband and wife who had moved to town 10 years ago after having owned a fast food restaurant in Cape Town. Their garden was thick with fruit trees and the lovely owners offered to let us stay for only £5.
The landscape was becoming stranger the further we cycled. Huge spherical rocks emerged from the sandy scrub covered ground. It’s like someone took the ‘desert plants’ display from the green house at Kew Gardens and spread it out as far as you can see. Eventually we reached Springbok, only 100km from the Namibian border and the last real town we’d come to in a while. We headed straight for a Springbok Lodge, a restaurant, hotel, and book shop which we’d head had good wifi. Inside, it was like stepping into 1950’s America. The wood panelled walls were lined with red leather benches and plastic tables, in which families sat huddled drinking milkshakes from tall glasses. The waitress wore blue uniforms and small caps and along the wooden walls were framed black and white pictures of Springbok. This wasn’t a carefully manicured ‘vintage’ 50s diner, it was the real thing, unchanged since forever.
We spent the day getting supplies and relaxing before the final stretch before Namibia. We’ve been warned repeatedly how hot it will be there. It’s summer now here and in Namibia so not the best time to be visiting. But we’re undeterred, we’ve heard these types of warnings before.
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