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.