UNDER A NON SHELTERING SKY

Just outside Steytlerville in the Karoo, on a narrow concrete road that necessitated a game of chicken with oncoming traffic - someone had to give way and pull over to avoid a head on collision - something in the Uno gave. I actually felt it - the Uno lurched and there was a terrible grinding noise for about fifteen seconds. Then whatever it was was spat out and the terrible grinding subsided slightly, but only slightly.

I made it to Steytlerville and popped the bonnet for a friendly, beefy, bearded Afrikaans mechanic. I'd pulled into his workshop, a delapidated corrugated iron warehouse with the carcasses of tractors and combine harvesters and some very old looking cars scattered around its weedy yard. When I fired the engine up it vibrated so badly its outline blurred.
'No man!' the horrified mechanic said. ' This is very, very serious ... this car is very, very sick ... I think maybe only the dealers ... no ya, this car is very, very beyond us.'

The nearest big town was Port Elizabeth. A good friend of mine, Brian, lived there. We'd roomed together for a year in London, in Elephant And Castle. Now he taught architecture at PE university. By the time I got there the Uno had developed a ratcheting, clattering shriek. This noise hadn't been so bad on the open road, where the Uno could idle along at about ninety; but at lower speeds, pulling away from traffic lights, and almplified by the walls of buildings on either side, the sound was horrendous. Add to this my by now almost pathological avoidance of big cities, and the looks I was getting from pedestrians and drivers all around me, and I was in dire need of a stout by the time I arrived at a camping site situated on the beachfront at the far end of town.

This was one of the worse camping sites I'd seen so far. The toilets and showers were good, there was a nice pool to swim in and the beach was a stone's throw away through some thick scrub; but it was packed full of posh caravans, and there was no shade! In the camping sites I'd visited I'd always managed to find a spot that was relatively private, beneath a tree. Here I was stuck on a tiny patch of sandy grass between two hulking caravans, with no tree in sight.

I quickly erected the tent and took off with Spud and a quart concealed beneath my towel to the beach. A ledge of rock-pools extending for about a hundred metres into the sea extinguished any hopes of catching a wave, but I was able to dunk myself in one of the pools and scour off some of the road grime. By the time Brian arrived in his battered yellow Toyota I was sitting on the balcony of the camp pub, which provided a partial view of the sea over the scrub. Brian is about twenty nine. He has a wild bush of crizzy hair, which if allowed to grow develops into a great rounded afro. That had been back in his student days. He had it pared down now to manageable proportions, but it was still wild by normal standards. As he came up the wooden stairs beside the balcony he shot me a guarded look. If I didn't know him better I might have been offended. He has this way of looking around him warily as he walks, with his head slightly down and his slim shoulders hunched defensively, which can be misinterpreted. He'd been backpacking in Volvograd once when a drunken young Russian detached himself from the group he was with, walked over and punched Brian hard on the shoulder. Brian said it was because some Russians have a thing against foreigners. Personally I think it might have been caused by this look of alert, wary scepticism that he unconsciously gives the world. Then again, I've also seen him sauntering dreamily through dense London crowds, like he was alone on a beach, totally oblivious to the ripples he caused in the frenzied rythms of the pavement.

Brian bought a beer and joined me. By now it was past seven, and the pub-restuarant we were in was buzzing. Two attractive Australian girls were sitting with two Australian men - possibly their boyfriends, but not obviously so - just inside the doors leading from the balcony into the restuarant. Bryan and I were the only two out on the balcony. It was a warm, clear night. We could hear the sea murmuring just beyond the scrub covered dunes. The one Australian girl had bumped into Spud earlier, when I had been walking with him across to the camp's shower-rooms. She had come around a corner and seen him and yelled, 'Holy shit!' I'd quickly reassured her that he was harmless, but she hadn't looked entirely convinced.
She came out onto the balcony now, in woman's baggies that showed off most of her lovely brown thighs, and she was all over Spud. She sat at the wooden table beside ours and before long Spud was up on his hind legs, with his meaty chest on her lap. She was caressing and slapping his solid meat and saying, 'You're a strong boy, aren't you? Yes, you're just a big strong softie.'
Brian gave one of his nervous laughs and said, 'Be careful, that dog eats people!'
She laughed, appreciatively enough, since he was trying a bit of flirty banter, and went back to slapping and caressing Spud: 'You're such a big, strooong boy!' Slap. 'Yes you are! Yes you are!' Whack. It went on for about twenty minutes, while the three other Aussies sat inside and occasionally the curly headed blonde man who looked like he might be with her gave Brian and myself a cool look. Was she out here sitting with us to show him what a boring bastard he was? Was she waiting for Brian and I to invite her over? Who knows? We're not too adept at picking up on these signals. She eventually got up and said, "So long, fellas. Enjoy your night,' in a friendly enough way, and then she bent over and gave Spud a final rough, arousing caress - arousing enough for me, watching this - and a final whack on his chest. 'So long Spud. You're just a great big softie, aren't you?'

After this we drove through to the main PE beach strip, where we found a pub-restuarant that overlooked a peir. The rows of lights on either side of this pier made it look like a landing strip sretching into the sea. Further out, the festive lights of the ships looked like spaceships floating in dark air, waiting to land on this strip. I knew from this mental imagery that I was getting drunk. Spud meanwhile was having a ball. At the balcony pub he'd been sneaking into the resturarant and coming back with spare ribs and T-bones. Now he was doing the same. I don't think dogs were allowed in here, but Spud has a knack of blending in with the scenery. When we'd first walked in he'd stuck right beside my leg. He got a few glances, but after five minutes of sitting quietly at the foot of my barstool people had forgotten him. Then, quietly and unobstrusively, he ventured out amongst the tables. The people eating assumed that he belonged to someone on the staff, so they started feeding him. Before long Brian and I had waitress coming up to us with doggie bags that people had given them 'For the dog.' Every few minutes he came back to touch base at our barstools, and then he drifted off again. I was having a pee and he clicked up behind me, touched his cold nose against my calf for a second, and then clicked out again. There were three of us standing at the urinals and no-one batted an eyelid.

It was after twelve when we drove back along the dark, narrow road to my campsite at the far end of town. The Toyota's headlights on the beach scrub flickering past on either side made it seem like we were rushing down a tunnel. But when I looked over at the speedometer we were doing about forty. Brian was hunched over the wheel like an old lady, his nose almost touching it.
We'd made fervent, impassioned plans to spend the next few days together. He had to work in the morning, but in the afternoon he was attending the opening of a school he'd helped design and build in a local township. The plan was for me to hang around the camp in the morning, and then go with him to the opening. He also knew a mechanic I could take the ailing Uno to sometime.
But my God, when I woke up in the tent I felt terrible. The Castel draughts and tequila shots I'd drunk with Brian were enough to make me feel tender; but when you factored in the three quarts I'd drunk earlier in the day I was in dire straights. This would have been bearable though, if it wasn't for the fact that I had no shade. And when I stuck my grisly head out of the tent opening into blinding sunshine there, a few feet away, was a nice old couple in deckchairs. They looked up and smiled nervously from beneath a cool green awning that flared from the side of their giant caravan. I stumbled out and tried to organise myself while their sizzling skottel wafted queasy bacon smells at me. There was a radar dish planted beside their bronze Camry 4x4, and a tv droned dismally from somehwere in all their camping paraphernalia. On the other side of me, also a few feet away, another huge caravan rose to blot out the sky. The elderly couple tried not to look at me as I stumbled around in the white glare, putting water down for Spud, hanging clothes and towels from the Uno's open doors, but mostly just holding my head and groaning. Spud, who is normally very discreet about these things, chose this moment to deposit on the grass nearbye the terrible load of last night's bones. They came out slowly and painfully, in full view of this poor old couple, and of mostly everyone else in the camp. Everwhere I looked there were these great big immaculate caravans, and wondrously glossy LUV's, and awnings and tv's and skottels spluttering with eggs and bacon fat. Three well behaved, golden haired little girls trouped past my scarred beast of a shitting dog with their eyes averted. Then the grown up kids of the elderly couple arrived - two daughters, it seemed, with their husbands, and kids of their own. Within seconds I had this huge knot of happy, sociable people milling beside me. One of the husbands had been diving and had brought a bag of crayfish. It went into a boiling pot, the crayfish keening with what is apparently the sound of escaping air; to me it sounds like the agonised death throes of a living creature being boiled alive. Soon I had this smell to add to my nausea.

I tried lying in the tent, but it was an unbearable pink oven, much like the Uno, so I took Spud down to the sea for a swim. A glassy wind rippled the flat green water, and small scraps of cirrus flitted through a high, cold blue sky. The beach was empty, and paradoxically enough, now that I had my privacy, it felt lonely and depressing listening to the wind.

But back at the camp the crowd and the heat were worse than ever. The tall scrubby dune which denied us a view of the sea also blocked off the wind and seemed to trap a different sky above us to the one over the sea - a milky oppressive haze that pressed down on my crawling, sweating skin. I packed the tent into the Uno and sat groaning in the front seat. Spud lay on the passenger seat beside me and his eyes flicked at me unhappily, sensing my distress. The family cooking the crayfish were trying to do their thing, but I could see them looking across at me every now and then - a rather shady character, perhaps on a mad spin after a horrible divorce, but definately caravanless, 4x4less, skottelless; and very possibly alchoholic too, judging by the way I was holding my head, and by the amount of empty quart bottles I'd just noisily dumped in the yellow oil drum that we all shared.

THE HARD KERELS OF THE KNERSVLAKTE

After Bedford I headed North, to Uppington, and then West all the way to Springbok. I stopped to look at Augrabies Falls, situated in the middle of a livid, angry landscape of barren rock. Then I headed South, roughly parralell to the Atlantic coastline. It was a strange stage in the journey, really hot and unforgiving. I flew down this incredibly jagged white mountain range early one morning and arrived at Kamieskroon. It nestled - an overused but appropriate word here - amongst weird dolerite domes like massive black-grey turtles. The town was absolutely dead, but a plump Boermeisie at a tiny bottle-store assured me it became lively in the evenings, when people ventured from their homes. I found this to be a feature of the hot, dusty towns I'd passed through here and further back in towns like Poffadder: everyone hid from the heat, except the coloured men, who sat around looking like they were dying; or the coloured girls, who giggled at Spud hanging out the window and openly flirted with me, flashing their yellow thighs.

After Kamieskroon came Karkams and then Bitterfontein, where I stocked up on my supply of Stouts. I took a photo of three local coloured men beneath a Bols Brandy sign. The sign was on the wall of a bottle store, which was closed - at 11.30 on a Wednesday morning. The men had been lounging around when I'd arrived, and had approached me for money. This unemployment and begging was a feature of all the towns in this area - coloured people listlessly roaming the empty streets, constantly looking to catch your eye so they could score a buck. In Poffadder even the petrol attendant had hit on me for five rand. Of the three men posing, one had recently been beaten up and stitches bristled from his face. They stared sourly at the camera, showing their disdain for this touristy activity. As I was about to leave a white man drove up in a Toyota Hilux and opened the store for me. As soon as I'd bought my Stout he locked up and left.

Beside the dirt road leading into the next town, Nuwerus, there was a small dam. I opened the gate, carefull not to let the goats out, and parked the Uno at the waters edge. I undressed to my skants and left my clothes and towel hanging from the open doors. My Stout and tinny sounding transistor radio went on the roof. This was a well rehearsed drill - Spud and I had swum in every river and open patch of water we'd come across. While I was scouring my crevices out in the middle, and Spud was cooling his belly in the shallows, a bakkie veered off the road and skidded up to the gate. The window rolled down and a beefy red face beneath a floppy sun-hat stared at us in amazement. 'Niemand,' he yelled, 'het ooit in die geskiedenis van hierdie dorp in daai dam geswem! Niemand!'

Ya well. Once he'd gotten over his amazement, and I'd reassured him that Spud wasn't about to kill the goats, and that I would be sure to close the gate after me, I asked him where the local bottle store was. I was buying a cold quart at a time, to prevent spare ones heating up in the car. There is no bottle store in Nuwerus, he informed me. But I could try my luck at the local tea-room. The owner was a friend of his.

The tea-room was a large, low stone house with a stoep encircling it. The front half of the house was the shop section. This consisted of a counter facing a large room containing plastic tables and chairs. Leaning against the counter was the same farmer er who had driven up to the dam. On the other side of the counter was the tall, pot bellied owner and his surly, brow-beaten looking wife. It turned out I was the topic of conversation.

'Dis die Engelsman! Die een wat geswem het! Nog nooit in die geskiedenis - '

Once the story of my swim had been retold the farmer, shaking his head in disbelief, drove off. The owner, barefoot in shorts, with a red drinkers nose and raw gnarled hands and clublike feet, seemed to take a wierd shining to me. When I asked for a beer he dug around in one of the large freezers behind the counter and hauled out a can of Lion Lager. He wouldn't hear of me paying for it. As I sat by the counter and drank it two coloured kids, a boy and a girl, came in to ogle the large, sticky looking sweets in glass jars on the counter.
'Pasop!' He yelled at them. 'Hierdie hond speel nie! Kyk na sy kakebene! Hy weet jy wil steel. Hy gaan jou vreet!'
When they ran out shrieking nervously he turned to me, his jowls quivering with earnest conviction , and said, 'The problem with these people is, they don't want to work! They're worse than the baboons!'

I'd seen a baboon as I approached the town, sitting like a sentinel on top of a jagged rock strewn hillside. This area is called the Knersvlakte - after the gnashing noise the wagons made in the old days when they trekked over all the rock and quartz on their way to the Cape and back. As the overhead fans droned and flies buzzed around crusts of food on the plastic tables ou Hendrik reeled out his creaking racial philosophy for me: the Kaffers and Hotnots are lazy and shiftless, without ambition or drive or the need for hygiene - 'unlike a baboon, which cleans itself!' They rape and steal and have no value for life. Left to their own devices, without whites to guide them, they will revert to a sort of animal existence. The only way to guide them is with a good beating.
'It's the only thing they understand! Vragitg, you can't talk sense to these people. They're animals! If you catch them stealing you beat them so they know never to come and rob you again. It's the only way. Otherwise they will steal you blind.'

No ya. I used wonder at how people can go on retelling these stories of hate day after day. Then I figured out that tirelessly repeating how useless the kaffer is serves the function of constantly affirming how valuable and worthy the white man is. The one is a mirror image of the other. I found myself thinking of the Hexagon I'd seen in Queenstown - the central defensive position around which the rest of the town was built in the Settler days. It's still there, in the middle of the town. I sat with Spud in the park beside it and tried to imagine the Settler terror as hordes of crazed Xhosa warriors closed in on them. Then I swopped positions and tried, in the simplest of empathetic shifts, to imagine the feelings of the Xhosa as they stormed in: fear and rage at this strange white tribe, with their powerful weapons and clever, deceitful ways, robbing them of more and more land.

No ya. Saying these things seems to solve them in some way, make them less weighty; but when I go back to them after a while there they are, as solid and impenetrable as ever. And yet I can't stop going back to them. It's like trying to force my thoughts through a kink in a pipe - they won't go, and I keep coming back to where I got stuck, as clueless as ever. Is it guilt? I dunno. But as I followed Hendrik into the gloomy, stuffy interior of his house I could feel this imaginery kink in me. I wanted to say something, but really, what would be the point? It wouldn't make the slightest dent in his beliefs. It would only serve to validate my own beliefs. Did I need to do this, to believe in myself as a decent person? Was keeping quiet merely a form of weakness? If I didn't verbalise my views, make them known, could I even lay claim to them? Maybe, just maybe, my silence was a tacit form of agreement with the likes of Hendrik. Could I be deceiving myself to this extent?

'Now here,' Hendrik was saying, in a darkly curtained room fusty with age and mothballs and dreary old wooden furniture, 'are the kerels.' On the wall two horizontal rows of photographs, four in each row, showed the Nuwerus rugby teams. The first few photographs were in black and white. The men in them wore baggy pants and sported short hair and large moustaches. The rest were in colour. The men in these wore tight pants and had some truly memorable mullets. But there was one thing they all had in common. They all looked tough and confident, and there was an impenetrable air of afikaanerdom about them - of belonging to a rugged frontier tribe and sharing a history that was uniquely their own.

Ou Hendrik layed a big, bony hand on my shoulder and told me proudly how these kerels never trained; they were good enough to just turn up at the matches and thump the Bitterfontein team - who did train - ever time. We stood for a while and gazed at these images. In the quiet room his breathing sounded heavy and laboured. He pointed to himself in one of the black and white photos; then he pointed out his son in the most recent photograph: a chunky redhead seated in the front row. I turned to look at him and a distant, dreamy look had softened his face. On the way back down the narrow creaking corridor to the daylight at the shop counter I found myself wondering why he'd shown me, a stranger and an Engelsman to boot, these photographs and this side of his life.

I was still asking myself this when an eighteen wheeler bellowed and wheezed to a stop outside the shop. From the dust storm he'd created emerged the same chunky redhead from the photograph. He wore veldskoens without socks and his large freckled thighs were dented by the seams of his way too tight black boxer shorts. This was Johannes, son of Hendrik. He bounded into the shop and gave me a crushing handshake. When he heard about my swim in the dam he smiled at me wonderingly, as if I was a simpleton. There was a dot of rot right between his two front teeth. He had recently been to Australia, where he'd apparently shagged a lot of Sheilas, because this is what he kept on alluding to: 'Ya, I was shagged out, aye!' Whenever he said something like this he and his father shared deep, masculine chuckles; the surly mom grimly swabbed the counter and ignored us all.

My failure to join in these chuckles quickly led Johannes to conclude that I was not much of a kerel - even by an Engelsmans diluted standards. He started to pull my leg about how soft city people were, and about how we wouldn't last a day out here on the Knersvlakte. He kept chuckling and sharing these secret sly looks with his father - as if to say, jurrie, but we're showing this sorry Englishman how real manne behave. For my part I kept quiet and sipped my second horrible tasting Lion - which Hendrik had once again insisted on handing me for free. And although he chuckled and joined his son in playing the role of hard frontier kerel to my soft ineffectual city boy, he looked slightly ill at ease doing so. It occurred to me then why he'd taken me into his house to show me those pictures. It was because I was English.


The English had won the war, but they had taken a tremendous spanking in doing so. They had never belonged on the veld, in their red uniforms, beating their silly drums.

And in a way, out here in the harsh environs of the Knersvlakte, it felt like we were re-enacting this historical scene. I was the slightly daft Englishman, swimming in dams and driving aimlessly, going nowhere slowly; Hendrik and his son were the hard, practical manne of the veld. Johannes was right. I wouldn't last out here. He looked at me now and leered, 'Ya, I really loiked those Sheilas!'
His Dad chuckled. He leant across the counter and clapped me on the shoulder and said. 'No Ya!' Remember when you go back to the city to tell your friends about Boer hospitality!'

BASTARD OF A RED FACED FERRET

I woke to a clear day outside the windows and had a good, drumming shower in a locker-room redolent with the oddly pleasant and comforting odours of old socks, sweat, soap, damp towels, fungus, talcum powder and the leather of golf bags. Open tog bags lay carelessly on long slatted wooden benches which ran along the walls. An assortment of towels hung like flags from the corners of open locker doors.
It felt good to have the entire club to myself. I made myself coffee from one of those giant stainless steel urns which had been left to simmer in the kitchen and wandered around looking at signed caricatures on the walls of club characters - the heads huge on small bodies; grinning teeth the size of tombstones. Outside on the golf course gossamer threads of mist lay over the grass and the thorn trees, as if a massive spider had been spinning its web out there.

By the time Dianne arrived to let us out a sort of vague, hung-over anxiety had settled on me. I was nervous about my attempted pick up lines from last night. But apart from one or two appraising glances in the beginning she seemed fine, and we soon settled into the kind of banter we'd developed at the bar. I got my stuff and we left in her battered little Bantum to look at the Uno - Spud all but falling off the back in his attempt to see everything. On the way I asked her to drop me at the Doc's surgery. From here I could easily walk to Richards repair shop.
As she drove off I said something to make her laugh and she yelled, 'Let me know if you're coming through here on your way back. I might be able to let you and Spud use the spare room at my place. If you behave yourself.'

True to form I had no desire now to play a round of golf. I wanted to climb into the Uno with Spud and soothe my Stout jangled nerves with mountain scenery. Inside the Doc's surgery the woman with the page-bob looked up from behind her desk and grinned. It was the sort of knowing, affectionate grin unmarried women give men who insist on drinking like idiots.

'Krisstoffel! And Spud! Hi!' The Doc's busy but I'll tell him you're here.'

She bustled off and I sat in the rather spare waiting room. A black man in tattered rural clothes sat facing me. Red dust caked his bare shins and his face had been painted a perfect oval with bright orange clay. The room reeked with the acrid smell of his sweat. How far had he walked to be here? Resting against his knee was a gnarled knobkerrie with a head not much smaller that a soccer ball. He stared impassively straight ahead and never once in the few minutes I was there did he glance to the side - not even when the room suddenly filled with three mothers in tribal dress accompanied by clinging gape-eyed kids and a tremendous rustling of Checkers packets.

The Doc when he came out was transformed into a busy, harried professional. His craggy features displayed a certain bleary haggardness, but he carried himself and spoke with a firmness and a sureness that were reassuring. I had little doubt he was a good doctor. As far as last night went though, we were both pale imitations of the fervent, passionate plan makers we'd been. When I told him I was keen to hit the road he looked relieved.

'Look, try to drop in on your way back. We'll make proper plans then. I'll get the wife to prepare us a good dish.

We shared a hurried handshake, and he hustled back to his rooms with a mom and her terrified kids in tow.

Richard was waiting for me behind his desk in the showroom.

'Krisstoffel! Howzit my friend! The parts have arrived. Sarel's just trying them out now. How's the head? Good night, hey? The Doc's a character, isn't he? He took a real shining to you. I'm glad I could organise you that room. That's me, hey. If someone's in trouble, I try to help. That's my nature. Sometime's I get taken for a ride, but what the fuck. It's worth it in the end. Hey hey! There she goes!'

From the back of the workshop the Uno roared tinnily into life. I was relieved. I was less relieved when Richard hit me with the bill. I remembered him saying - I wrote them down - the prices of the parts coming from Beaufort West: R319 and R497. The bill came to R757.32. This he magnanimoulsy rounded offf to R750. I'd been told by Sarel that the courier service from Beaufort West came free. It had taken them a few minutes to find the problem; how long had it taken them to stick this part in? I doubted more than a few minutes.

My face must have registered my distress and budding disgust because his took on a wounded, defensive and slightly aggressive cast. His red forehead furrowed like a dog's pallette and his eyes narrowed. Buddy, what the hell? I bought you beers, showed you a good time, organised you a free place to stay for the night. Is this how you repay me? I suppose he had a point. I paid him in a somewhat surly and aggrieved silence - this coming from both of us - and went into the back to collect the Uno. There a thought ocurred to me. I went over to Sarel.
'Which part did you put in, the one for R319 or the one for R497?'
He laughed and looked embaressed. 'Hell! You'll have to ask Richard that. I just sommer stick them in.'

I left it at that. When I told this story to a friend of mine recently he asked, 'Did you check the battery water?'

'No. I didn't know batteries took water.'

'No kidding? When it runs out the car just dies. Sort of like yours did. All you have to do is top it up with distilled water. Boiled water does the job just fine.'

Fucking red faced bastard of a ferret cunt.

THE BEDFORD GOLF CLUB PUB - PT II

After this the night was a pleasant, dimly remembered blur. An inner expansiveness had dissolved the edges of my awkwardness. After a few drinks my tongue can sometimes feel too thick to fit my thoughts around. Tonight it was working fine. I'd been making Dianne laugh. She'd brought her stool to sit across the beer slickened bar counter from me. The Doc had gone home. I'd walked him out to his old Rover and we'd made heartfelt promises to meet the following day. Richard was still here, looking grisly. His nose had taken on that peculiar alchoholic hue of something dipped in gentian violet. The beers had made him belligerently dogmatic. Worse, they had brought his belief in his own slyness to the surface. If any on the locals contradicted him his lips curled in a snarl and you could see him thinking, I'm far cleverer than this cunt. They just sighed and said, "Yaa, Richard,' and changed the subject.

The rest of the club was thinning out. A group of smoking, flirting teenagers held court now amongst the sofas. They'd turned the music up and some sort of demonic heavy metal blared out. Spud sat at their feet. At a floral Chesterfield sofa the Doc's assistant sat with a few of her friends. He had introduced me to her earlier. In fact I'd been introduced to virtually everyone in the club. They'd wandered over at different stages of the night and the Doc had told them my story. The Doc's assistant had smiled shyly, and after this, whenever our eyes met, she'd smiled. She smiled now, when I looked over. She was pretty, in a plain, wholesome sort of way. Rosy cheeks, page-boy haircut, low heeled, square toed shoes. I find it difficult to look at myself from the outside, but I suppose I cut a slightly romantic figure here - back from a few years in a glamourous, major city, travelling the country on a sightseeing tour, spending my nights in the back rooms of pubs. This wasn't my reality at all - London had been cold and grim and this trip was in many respects a flight from some aspects of my life - but it was pleasant to bask in this fiction.

And then it was just me and Dianne. I walked with her while she locked the kitchen and side doors. Unseen for most of the night beneath the bar, she wore a grey suede skirt with frontal ties of rawhide. Tan leather espadrilles wrapped around her brown calves, scissoring in front of me. They showed an unexpected shapliness and muscularity.
At the front door she stopped and we faced each other - me slightly inside the door, she slightly outside. Spud went out and began peeing against a bush beside us.

'This is it old boy. I'll be back to open up at eight.' She grinned her twisted, wry grin and looked at me, her head slightly to one side.

It was now or never. 'I'm going to miss you. How will I find my way to the toilet in the dark?'

'Oh, I think you'll find a way.'

'What if Spud needs to go out? What if all those chop bones he's been given tonight suddenly need to exit?'

'I think we'll have to take our chances.'

'Damn. I guess it's goodbye then.'

'I guess so. I have an eleven year old daughter to go home to.'

And that was that. She smiled and let me to go to bed alone, wondering if I'd been too forward. I wasn't even all that interested in sex. It was more the idea of wrapping an arm around her and having her head on my chest, the warmth of her body pressing against my side. Instead I had Spud, curled in the crook of my arm, sighing with the full load in his belly. Oh well. Just before I fell asleep a fart fluttered against my thigh.

THE BEDFORD GOLF CLUB PUB - PT1

Richard introduced me the locals, who sat around a horseshoe shaped bar which occupied one side of a large open room. The wide doors to this room opened onto the lawn, where the kids were playing a game of cricket. There were excited hysterical cries from them whenever Spud chased the ball. Beyond them a gentle dusk was descending like a blue mist over the thorn trees on the golf course. Beyond this, in the distance, the slate grey of the Winterberg range was merging slowly with the deep violet of the darkening sky.

I could see all this from my position at the bar. The rest of the room was occupied by second hand sofas and chairs, clustered loosely around a set of matching low wooden coffee tables. There were about twenty people seated around these tables. On the orange slasto just outside the doors a braai hissed as fat dripped onto it from strings of boerewors. Beside it, at a red formica table, a woman buttered bread rolls. The smell had been getting to me but without my saying a word she had walked over with a Boerie roll on a white paper plate and deposited it on the bar counter before me.

'Welcome to Bedford!' Richard had crowed. Now he was embroiled in a lengthy discussion about the relative merits of one car over another. He had insisted on buying me my first draught. When I'd tried to buy him one instead he'd said, 'Hell no! You're my guest! You don't buy anything tonight!'

Coming from him I found this slightly ominous. With his crafty eyes he didn't strike me as the overly magnanimous type. Halfway through his first draught his scalp, showing clearly through the black cirrus of his hair, glowed a bright shiny pink, as if it had been scalded and was weeping. I felt good and was holding my own with the locals, putting in my comments now and then; but whenever I spoke Richard cocked a paternal eye at me, proud at having been the one to set me up with a place to sleep for the night. In case any of us forgot this, he slipped it into the conversation at regular intervals.

'Wait until the Doc arrives. I think you'll like him,' Diane said to me in her husky voice, as I finished my roll. She was wearing a loose buttoned blouse with an airy summer weave that revealed the shape of her beige bra. Her arms were lean and brown and the chords showed in her neck. She smiled wryly, with a slight self-conscious twist of her lips to show the wryness was directed at herself too. "He's quite a fundi on Bedford.'


When the Doc arrived, to cries of 'Doc!' from the locals at the bar, darkness had sealed off the view beyond the doors. The light from the pub and a few lights outside illuminated the lawn, on which the kids were still playing. Moths flitted meteorically around a light by the door. Spud was wandering around the tables, his claws clicking on the parque floor, being fed scraps.

Each of the barstools had a small brass plate screwed to the rim of the seat, inscribed with a local's name. The Doc's chair was beside mine. He sat down and Richard quickly introduced us, explaining how he'd organised me the back room for the night. When I explained that I was travelling the country for the sake of, merely to see the sights, his eyes lit up.

'What do you know about local Settler history,' he asked in a soft Scottish burr. He was in his mid-fifties, with a beard and a full head of slightly wild grey hair. I explained how earlier I'd driven up a dirt road on the outskirts of town and found an old stone building. It had consisted of one barren room, in which two women and an old man had been sitting on the floor, watching a pot bubble on a fire between them. One of the women was breastfeeding a baby. Numerous tiny kids sat against the wall, staring at me in awe. Two of the older ones, five or six year old girls, held babies. It was a creche. I made up the excuse that I was lost and the breastfeeding woman smilingly gave me directions, while the other two nodded sympathetically.

"Ah, that's the old X building,' the Doc said. 'It dates back to the settler period. It's a pity, but a lot of these old treasures go neglected.'
'I told you you two would get on,' Diane said, the dark parting in her straw coloured hair showing as she leant over to refill our draughts.

In the next few hours I learnt a lot about the Doc. His name was Andrew Lamont. After
graduating from Edinburgh University in the early seventies he'd come to South Africa. He was immediately dispatched to Bedford to establish a practise and he liked it so much here he never left. When he first walked in I'd noticed the bright ethnic belt he wore along with his nondescript working clothes. It was frayed and worn, inlaid with a zigzagging pattern of tiny african beads. It bespoke a certain appealing eccentricity - an impression which grew with every beer. He was passionate about flowers and butterflies and birds. There was nothing he didn't seem to know about the local people, the local geography, the local Settler history. When he got going on a topic - he was deeply concerned about the Aids epidemic decimating the local blacks - Richard and the boys nudged each other and winked. They got a twinkle in their eye when he began telling me the story of his search for a particular species of local butterfly. It took him seven years to find it. And for some reason they found the word lepidoptera hilarious. So did I though, at this stage of the night. But their ribbing was edged with respect. For all his eccentricity - if you could call it this - the Doc was a formidable character who was good company around the bar.

He invited me to play golf with himself and the boys the following morning, once he'd put in a few hours at the office. He told me that the Bedford golf course was one of the oldest in the country. After golf the two of us could investigate the local settler architecture. I accepted immediately, although I've never played a hole of golf in my life. Then he staggered off to the toilets.
"Jeez,' Diane said to me. 'The Doc never has more than his regular two. Tonight he's had four.'
'Ya, that's right! 'Richard's said, his wizened face floating above the counter across from me. In the bar's light I noticed his strong orbital bones. The shadows and hollows they created in his wasted face gave him the mad, staring look of a skeleton. 'And he's working tomorrow morning!'

BEDFORD: A GOOD TOWN

Bedford, in the Eastern Cape, had the feel of a good town. I arrived there at about two on a balmy afternoon and decided to stick around. The houses were old and ramshackle, many made from corrugated iron, but they looked cared for. If they were painted the colours chosen were tasteful: soft yellows, light greens. Anyone who wants to see the other end of the scale might try Secunda: ultraviolet purple roofs with hot pink guttering comes to mind. The gardens were slightly wild, but they showed creativity and imagination. I saw arched trellises covered in vines, clusters of purple grapes, leafy arbours. There wasn't a garden gnome or a planted, brightly painted wagon wheel in sight. At the local tennis club vines climbed the fences surrounding the courts. Attractive moms in white tennis oufits floated balls back and forth. I heard happy shouts and laughter. A sign on a wrought iron gate said, 'Small Children! Please Close The Gate To The Tennis Courts.'

I parked outside a Pep store with 1899 in bold relief on its dirty Dutch Gable facade. I get confused by the categorisation of all our race groups but I think the small brown people lolling on the steps were Koi? Or San? Isn't there a Koi-san, from a mixing of the two groups? They all greeted me and looked warily at Spud. I drove around and looked at the churches. I found a modern NG Kerk, with its rather brutal inverted V of a roof hunched close to the ground, like a shell protecting it from the sky. Then I found a lovely old Anglican church. I was so taken with it I parked in the grassy grounds, beside a row of tall whispering Yellowwoods, and tramped around for a while taking photos.

Then, out of the blue, the Uno refused to start. I checked my records and found I'd done exactly 6013 km from the time I'd set out from Durban until the time I'd last filled up in Fort Beaufort. In all this time the Uno had rattled along without a hiccup, and now - dead.

I waited beneath the gently swaying Yellowwoods until two young coloured boys came strolling through the grass. I offered them five Rand each and they pushed me onto the level main road. We made slow progress past the 'Coffee Corner', with its cracked concrete porch festooned with dangling cats and zodiac signs and pixies fashioned from burnished metal. The cats had semi-precious stones for eyes. A dissipated gay looking character in a sordid white string vest lolled in the doorway. He had his arms raised, grasping the doorjamb above him. As I crept past he eyed me speculatively. I found his presence reassuring though. If the town put up with him it meant the people here were surely tolerant and open minded. Pretty Koi girls passing on the pavement covered their mouths and giggled delightedly at Spud. He was thrust halfway out of his window, paws planted on the outside of the door, enjoying the novelty of this slow moving scenery.

We made it to the garage. A small, red faced man in the front office asked me to swing the Uno into the dim workshop at the back. A beefy oke wandered over and buried himself in the bonnet. He had blonde locks curling down to his shoulders, and massive forearms. Within minutes he had identified the problem.
'What you have got here,' he said - or at least this is what I understood him to say, in his peculiarly high pitched voice - 'is a non-firing thing, which normally causes the spark plug to fire, but not any more. Or the other thing that transmits the signal - one of these two things is befokked.'

Fok. It was impossible for him to tell which of the two things it was. Two other mechanics who wandered over were equally stumped. The small red faced man was called from the front office. He had a whippet stoop and crafty alchoholic eyes in a wizened face. A gold chain glinting in the V of his collar. He introduced himself as Richard and made a theatrical call on his cellphone to Fort Beaufort. 'Hell! Can't you make a price for me? Ya, that sounds better. Is that the lowest you can go? R319 and R497? That's cost, hey? Ya, send them both. We'll send back the one we don't need. Excellent! Excellent!'

The part could only be sent in the morning. I allowed this to sink in as Spud trotted to a corner of the workshop and raised his leg against the tyre of a red Nissan truck. Three coloured guys who stood smoking beside the truck, wearing oil blackened overalls, hooted and yelled 'Nay! Nay! Nay!' and ran from him, laughing nervously.
'Ya manne! Hy gaan jou vreet!' the beefy mechanic called good naturedly. Spud followed the commotion with ears cocked. I saw Richard in the meantime surreptitiously checking out the contents of the Uno. There was my Cannon on the dashboard, alongside my thick hardback Readers Digest Guide To South Africa (1981 edition). On the backseat was my laptop and in the hatchback section all of my camping gear. He'd watched me with a shrewd appraising eye as I'd put a bowl of water down for Spud. I think he had me pegged: daft twit of leisure; should be able to foot bill.


I followed him to the showroom in the front of the shop. Here I met his kugel-tannie wife, who managed the books. She was all gold chains and lekker laquered hair and cheaply perfumed folds in a floral dress. She had a bossy bright manner, and I could imagine her managing church cake bakes with a rather totalitarian hand. Richard sucked on his Camel and peered through twirling smoke with slitted eyes. There was no camping ground in the town, and the guest houses wouldn't take me with Spud. He couldn't take me, because of his fierce Boerbulls. Sarel, the beefy mechanic, had Rottweillers.
'Hell man, everyone has dogs in Bedford,' Richard mused.
The last thing I wanted was to spend the night in someone's house. I told them anywhere with a patch of ground to put my tent up was ok with me.'
'What about the church grounds?' Richard's wife asked. 'If we can find Father Andrew we can ask him. He's got the key to that outside toilet he can use.'
'But I don't really need a toilet,' I said.
'You don't need a toilet? But then where ... ' Her features hardened, leaving me feeling like I'd just farted in church.

It was now around four, on a Friday afternoon. While we were standing in the showroom, with its wide glass doors open to the street, two men in their fifties drifted in from the Spar across the road. They looked like farmers, with knee length socks on stringy brown legs. They became involved in the debate. Then the son of one of the farmers drifted in with his wife. Sarel wandered in from the back, and Sarel's beefy thighed son arrived in his rugby togs. I was introduced to everyone, and after a few minutes of chuckling and mutual ribbing - Richard's wife dominating proceedings with a brassy cackle - they all clustered around in a pensive knot to discuss the problem of Krisstoffel and Spud. This is what we had become: Krisstoffel and Spud.

'You know what? I reckon Diane can take them,' Richard said through his Camel smoke. Everyone instantly agreed. 'Let's go find her,' Richard said to me.

Spud trotted behind us as we crossed the street to the Spar. Lo and behold, there was Diane, loading her Spar packets into the back of a pockmarked blue Bantam backie. Diane was the barmaid at the local golf club pub. She was tall and slim and attractive in a slightly haggard sort of way. When she spoke her voice was deep and husky. 'No problem.' She smiled wryly at Spud and then at me. 'As long as the two of you don't mind being locked in when I leave.'
I was smitten.

The golf club had a small room at the back with a bed in it - very basic, but then after twelve days of camping I had very basic needs. It was quickly agreed upon. Richard would give me a ride to the club in an hour's time, when he finished work. In the meantime Spud and I were free to wander around the town. We had become quite an attraction on Main Street. The young Koi girls covered their mouths and giggled openly at me, overcome by the sight of a grown white man in shorts trailing a leashless dog behind him. The tennis moms bustled in and out of the Spar, their thighs glowing pink beneath their swishing skirts following their earlier exertions. I saw a few of them looking over at me and then turning to discuss this anomoly amongst themselves. I'd had two Stouts during the day's drive, but I needed further fortifying. I found a small drankwinkel and bought a Stout from a coloured woman who gave me a knowing wink when she served me. Then I strolled down a back street lined with houses and tried to surreptitiously down it. A middle aged woman came towards me walking a brown and white terrier. It became so enraged at the sight of Spud she had to bend down to restrain it. She was so friendly and apologetic though, while I stood there clutching my quart like a lout, that I became entirely convinced: Bedford was a good town.

Back at the workshop I was feeling garrulous. Sarel told me, 'Hell man, you'll like the golf club. It's where the decent people in this town go. There's only two places to go: the club, and X on the other side of town. The larnies - or the ones who think they're larny! - go to X. You're gonna have a lekker piss-up, Im telling you!'

On the drive through with Richard and his wife my garrulousness dried up, but it revived when I saw the clubhouse. It was a flat, wide building with doors that opened onto a wide lawn like a putting green. Beyond the lawn the tree studded course swept down and away and merged with a plain that ended in the distant Winterberge range. Directly behind the clubhouse the steep slopes of Kagga mountain rose - deep green with dense bushveld, ribbed with canyons and gullies. Add to this the balmy, clear evening sky, the pack of kids converging on Spud (who had run to join them on the lawn), the relaxed hubbub coming from the crowd of twenty or so people evident through the open doors as I approached ... it was going to be a good night.

DAY 8 - HAVING A MR KURTZ MOMENT

The moment I drove into Bedford it had the feel of a good town. This makes me think though: what exactly makes a good town? Ficksburg and Ladybrand are attractive towns. They fill you with a sense of the old Vrystaat order of things. But there is something menacing and oppressive in this strictly regulated conformity. It feels like everyone in these towns is locked into a role. The Dutchmen are kind and stern - very stern - and the black populace behaves itself like disciplined school shildren. If they are naughty they they are put in clean green overalls and made to tend the splendid vegetable patches in the correctional institutions. I think the Dutchmen find the idea of the kaffers looking after themselves shocking and irresponsible. If you take order and discipline away from a school what will happen? The kids become lazy and shiftless and get up to all sorts of mischief. The kaffer needs to be directed, sternly but kindly; the kaffer, in turn, appreciates this guidance.

The alternative to this scenario presents itself in towns where the townships have sprawled out of control. I wouldn't call these 'good' towns either. Burgersdorp, in a valley surrounded by the Stormberg mountains, is a good example of a proper Dutchman town where the Dutchmen seem to have lost the fight. In the centre of town sits a striking old Dutch Reformed church. It has a domed, corrugated iron roof which blazes molten in the noonday sun. Right beside it is the delapidated old Royal Hotel. When I drove through town its balcony was crowded with apparently drunken blacks. They spilled out of the hotel doors onto the street, and I had to thread the Uno through them while they gave me rotten insolent looks and intentionally got in my way. The white people that I saw drove around with tight inward looking faces, and the yellow cop vans were dusty and defeated looking. The township when I drove out was huge and sprawling and mean looking.

Then there are the almost completely black towns, which have a sense of harmony free from the grinding pressure of racial tension. I found this in Thabanchu, situated in the old Bhoputatswana, where Spud and I spent a night in the tent on the lawn of the local police station. I spent half of the next day roaming around the town, and I found it bustling with a black energy and sense of purpose that I'd only briefly seen while passing through the Transkei. (I was to see more of the Transkei later in the trip, when Spud and I hitched through it following the demise of the Uno).

I had a weird experience in the town of Seymour, which I found up in the Andriesberg mountains an hour or two outside of Queenstown. Seymour has the look of a white town, yet it is solely occupied by blacks. They lolled on the steps of the of the post office and police station, and they loitered and chatted in the entrance to Fred's Bakery. I saw them sprawled on the porches of derelict looking houses. Absolutely no-one seemed to be doing anything. How were they supporting themselves? How was the town functioning? As I drove down the main street and they stared at me and Spud hanging out his window I had the eerie feeling that the town had only recently been occupied; that only last week the white folk had moved out in a hurry, and now this crowd were waiting in a limbo, yet to settle down and establish themselves properly. It had to be a recent occupation. How else were they supporting themselves? Where was the food coming from? I felt like I was experiencing a Kurtz moment - that I was glimpsing something fundamental in the difference between our respective cultures. It wasn't that blacks are lazy and whites industrious. It was more a sense of them being comfortable as a community which does nothing much all day except hang out and shoot the breeze. If this leads to them starving then obviously it's not a good thing. But if they have enough food to get by on then what's the point of stressing? Just park off and be part of the community. Whites on the other hand are thrown into an existential void after a few days of this existence. We vibrate at too feverish a city pitch to ever understand the slower rythms of country life. Can it be this simple? And ... where was the food coming from?
As I drove out of town I saw what looked like a township laid out in neat, barren rows on an adjacent hillside. The grey cinder block building were new, with brightly silver corrugated iron roofs coruscating in the late afternoon sunshine. Apart from one piccanin, running behind a goat and whipping its arse with a thin stick, the houses and streets were deserted.

DAY 7 - THINGS THAT GO CLOP IN THE NIGHT

From the Freestate I headed down into the Eastern Cape. I arrived in Queenstown on a warm evening, with a few Stouts under my belt. I'd just sailed down from the Stormberg mountains, where I'd threaded my way through a howling lunar landscape of rounded, wind seared hills and mountains. Between Molteno and Dordrecht I had literally not seen another living thing. A biting wind had whipped in through my window, and I had begun to feel pleasantly numb and disengaged from the world.

But Queenstown was a warm and friendly place. I drove through the neat suburbs and emerged onto a plain dense with thorn trees. I found an unlocked gate and hid amongst the trees, tucked partly into the fold of a bank running beside a dry river bed. Apart from the odd car rumbling past on the dirt road some twenty metres away, Spud and I had the bush to ourselves. A mountain range rose out of the plain in the near distance; nearer still, a lone flat-topped Sandstone mountain glowed red in the sunset.
Before long I had the tent up in the warm, pleasant twilight. By the time it was dark we were snuggled inside. My kerosene lamp flickered brightly in the tent entrance, where the sooty smoke was free to swirl up into the night. My transistor radio blared tinnily, giving me the rundown of events here in Settler Land. I recommend tuning into the local stations to anyone travelling through South Africa. It gives you a feeling for the people who live in that area. I fed Spud a tin of Hoender flavoured dog food, and I drank my final quart of the day as I ate chunks of brown bread dipped in achar. By nine my lamp and torch were out and I fell into a contented, frotted sleep.

Spud's quivering body woke me. Something was out there. I looked at my watch and saw by the faint green luminescence that it was five to one. I listened to the dense darkness, taut with anxiety, and heard a shuffling sound and then a series of clops. Lions don't clop. It couldn't be lions. There was only a token wire fence seperating the bush from the road. If there were lions here they would be rampaging through the neat suburbs a few kilometres away. Still ... there was some sort of large hoofed animal out there - a herd of them. Without turning my torch on I quietly unzipped the tent opening and stuck my head out. There, glowing whitely in the moonlight, were six donkeys. They dipped their heads and looked at me with sad, gentle eyes. Spud jostled his head through the hard opening beneath my arm and had a quiveringly excited look for himself. This startled them and they clopped away and vanished amongst the thorn trees.

The clopping continued throughout the night. Each time Spud heard it he began to quiver, which in turn woke me up. God knows what kind of carnivourous creatures he was conjuring up in his imagination. I tried wrapping an arm around his taught body and pulling his head down. He pretended to sleep; but I sensed his ears and eyes twitching in the dark, and at the faintest sound his head shot up and he began to quiver.

In the morning the donkeys returned. I got a good photo of Spud lying flat on his belly, with his ears flattened and his head between his paws, while one of them approached him. This donkey's schlong was awesome. It was black, as thick as my wrist, and it drooped rubber like halfway to the ground. Once Spud got over his awe they all made friends and trotted off amongst the trees. As I was packing the tent I looked up and saw them nearbye. Spud was frozen with one paw raised while a donkey sniffed his arse. Then when I looked again Spud was sniffing a donkey's arse, the donkey peering back at him with sad patience. It wasn't the big five, but it was touching all the same.

DAY 6 - WARM BEER, LOUSY FOOD

Day six found me in Ficksburg as I curved around Lesotho on my trip through the eastern Free State. Ficksburg sits prettily on a plain dotted with weirdly shaped mesas and buttes. Some of them look like crooked fingers pointing skywards, and others like huge ant cones.
Ficksburg is known as the 'Cherry Town' because - logically enough - it lies in the heart of he cherry growing area. The town is immaculate, with well tended gardens and sparkling cop cars and splendid correctional faciltities. Smart little duplexes that served as old age homes perched without fences right on the street. I saw a black female warden sitting on a plastic chair beside a stop sign, outside a prison that looked like a well kept school. She was chatting to her mate while a crew of male prisoners in green overalls weeded the grass on the kerb.

On the other side of the fence, inside the prison, more prisoners were tending a fine looking vegetable patch in the morning sun. Just up the road sharp eyed grannies with blue hair tottered out of their duplexes and chatted in the moring sun. Did the prisoners cut their lawns? I drove past the duplexes again and I was able to look right into their fussy rooms through unparanoid windows.
Gradually, as I cruised around the town, I became aware that cops were everwhere. They glided around in lovingly polished blue and white cars, with batteries of lights on their roofs that a Texan sherrif would be proud of. I saw two of them standing outside Checkers. They exuded rock like dependability behind tear-drop Ray Bans, which accentuated their square chins and immaculately trimmed snors; their khaki uniforms were beautifully pressed, with razor sharp creases ironed into them; and their shoes were a thing of beauty, shimmering in the sun with the sort of lustre that only torching them with a lighter at a vital stage in the polishing process can achieve.
By this time I was starting to look a little road soiled, and I sensed eyes sliding behind the Ray-Bans. So I took my leave, only to have a similar very experience in the next attractive town, Ladybrand. I was given hope though, by a small sign outside a pub as I drove out of Ficksburg. It said, Warm Beer, Lousy Food.

DAY 5 - LOST IN A MAD YELLOW LABYRINTH

From Groot Marico I headed North and skirted the Botswana border on dirt roads. I passed tiny settlements like Beauty and Alldays. Then I headed back down through pretty towns like Duiwellskloof and Tzaneen in the Limpopo area. In Mpumulanga I saw Sabi and Graskop and Hazyview. I stopped to peer down at the lowlveld from God's Window - except that mist prevented me from seeing more than a few hundred metres.

By the fifth day I'd wandered back down south to Clarence, where I spent the night in a camping ground just outside town. Everyone raves about Clarence's umpteen art galleries and elaborately scrolled signs, but the place filled me with a sense of prettified Arts and Crafts gloom - the entire town was on show, like a layout for Home and Garden. Millionaires had rushed in and built massive holiday homes that all seemed to have steeply gabled roofs, with overhanging eaves and stone chimneys and gabled dormer windows sticking out everywhere.
Maybe my sense of doom came from finding the township, out of sight until you went down to the bottom of the hillside Clarence was built on and looked up. It nestled just beneath Clarence - a proper sprawling blister of a shanty town that was totally at odds with the prettified glamour just above it.

To add to my disquiet, I got lost and drove around Golden Gate for hours. I scurried around looping avenues and curving nooks, craning my head up at the smoothly sculpted ice cream scoops of alluvial sandstone, like an ant crossing a river bed. The sun began to set and the sandstone took on a eerie yellow glow as it reared all around and hemmed me in. I remembered reading that the Basutos came here to hide from the Zulus, and the Boers came to hide from the British. The Basutos made a habit of braining the Boers with rocks from above whenever the Boers passed through narrow gulleys. When the Basuto's did manage to skull someone they cut their organs out to use in their witchcraft. As I rattled along in a pissed state I decided witchcraft went with this place. It was easy to imagine someone losing their marbles in this mad yellow labyrinthine.

DAY 3 - THE GROOT MARICO DANCE HALL

One of the books I'd brought along with me was Bosman's Road To Mafeking. Since I was going there, I thought this was quite appropriate. I actually drove along this road, or the modern equivalent of it, on the third day of my trip. After two days of almost continuous rain I arrived in Zeerust in the early morning and sat in the Uno while rain drummed on the roof. As I was leaving the rain stopped, the sky cleared dramatically and Abjaterskop reared up on my left like a huge green breast. It was crisply delineated in the rain washed blue, its sides dense with thorn trees. Oom Schalk Lourens used to stumble over this mountain on moonless nights with too much mampoer inside him, on his way home after courting the local farmers daughters.

I drove for about an hour through a sea of green hills undulating beneath a hot, still sky ... and then there, poking through a hollow in the green sea, were a few roofs: Groot Marico. This was the town where Bosman based most of this stories; all of those crusty Dutchmen he wrote about were Groot Marico locals, and I think it was here where he taught school. The town itself was full of trees - Withaaks possibly, thinking back to one of Bosmans's stories - and all this greenery took the sting out of the heat.

The town had a dreamy somnolent air, sitting quietly in its hollow in the warm green sea. I parked the Uno in the main street and squinted through the glare at a decrepit little concrete block not much bigger than a garden shed. It had a single door in the front and two tiny windows in the side walls. Someone had tried to paint it a festive red, but the result was a deeply gored shade like dried ox blood. Groot Marico Dance Hall was written in yellow across the front - the letters squashed into the space and crudely ornate with curlicued endings and scrolled flourishes. Surely the work of a proud local housewife. But who the fuck was going to fit in there? The local Dutchmen were huge, with melons for calves and brandewyn kegs for legs. They stood around supporting bellies the size of boulders, with perhaps a stubborn pap stain there where a button had popped to show a diamond of straining flesh; and they all had these massive Kruger beards waggling away beneath their chins, no doubt concealing the odd koeksister crumb or two ...

No swaar, surely that little Dance Hall was the towns one concession to the Nuwe Suid Afrika. Santie down there at the phone exchange got this directive from this new government to build the local kaffers a place where they can run their own affairs. But as everyone knows, if you put a group of kaffers together in a room they are going to get drunk and start singing and dancing and fighting. So Swaar, what better place to give the kaffers than a Dance Hall for their meetings? Jacobus' old Pap En Vlies store was just fine. You could fit fifteen kaffers in there if they all stood up. And Stoffels wife Hendrina even went so far as to paint if for them!
Ya. So I parked in Groot Marico for a while. I soaked up the sleepy atmosphere and peered at the heat-drugged winkels and slaghuises and at these genuinely eccentric looking Afrikaaners. Their rugged Hilux bakkies, mud-spattered and thorn-raked - no poncy Luxury Utility Vehicles here - were parked in the bright street while they stood chatting in the shade offered by the winkel awnings. Now and then they interrupted the sage waggling of their beards - Rinderpest, Luiperds, uppity kaffers - to look at me with mild suspicion: an Uitlander, poor Godless soul, taking a break from anxiously scurrying around his city ... and with a varkhondjie, nogal.