and props to the man at the car rental lot. i’d made sure it was a no excess policy, and he barely batted an eyelid on seeing the state of the car. “i think we might have to levy a valet charge for the interior”… if you’d had seen it, you’d have been happy to pay it too.
franschhoek is the wine and fine dining epicentre of south africa. and if - after all that - ever taking the tasting menu was deserved, it was, and felt sooo good.
time for a little enumeration:
- up at 5am
- two hours drive to sossusvlei
- due to flat tire episode, schedule squeezed and emergency cash used, now scraping coins together
- all cash machines for these particular 100’s of kilometers have decided they don’t like my cards
- rather than 4x4 taxi tour around dawn, epic endurance desert walk lasting into the afternoon
- walking back out of the desert trying for the last drops of the three bottles of water
- as well as not losing the ring, didn’t lose the car keys to the desert: on goes the aircon, in glugs all those half-drunk bottles of water cars generate
- five hours drive to nearest town. gravel roads. through rain storms. over a mountain pass with boulders scraping the bottom the car.
- atm has closed “fiften minutes ago. but don’t worry, the next town along has banks and restaurants, and the road is tar from here”.
- next town is a 100+km. car can go very fast on straight, tar roads. we are _very hungry.
so its at this point, at 5pm, exploring bold new tests of exhaustion and still before breakfast, that a bridge guarded by a thousand monkeys appears as if straight out of a rudyard kipling story. one of the more surreal emergency stops i’ve ever had to do. took a minute or so to have the where-with-all for the camera to be got out, before we passed through it really was covered with them.
aged 19 i’d promised myself if i ever was to ask that big question of someone, it would have to be here. and so it was.
moreover in a day where circumstance truly played havoc with our lives, such a test of endurance and commitment couldn’t have started something better. and i get to say i almost killed my girlfriend — no: fiancee! — in the process.
the plan had precedence. i’d done it on zero budget, hitchhiked hundreds of kilometers, rode the side plates of a 4x4 in the warmest clothes i had as the freezing pre-dawn desert flowed around my feet… but this was not to be history repeating. so instead of romantic ideas of walking around a serene crescent dune as sun broke across it, we have taken the three steps forward and fallen the two back, climbing up the face of a mountain as the noon sun approaches.
amazing once you’re there though. with nobody else insane enough to still be around at this time of day, at the top of it all you truly are the epic.
…well that is the highest looking dune in the desert known for the highest dunes in the world. guess where we’re going.
this whole trip was pretty much built around getting back to sossusvlei. orange sand, blue sky, trees on one side lush, green and alive and the on other salt-wizened casks with the air of having been petrified eons before. oh, and if it wasn’t surreal enough, oryx walking around - they might as well have been unicorns. the colours are primary, but its the early morning light that carves across the twisting contours of the dunescape and makes every surface a study in texture. such were my memories from a final hitch-hike zen adventure before returning to the uk to start university.
2010, and the reality is a bit more sun-bleached, and its a few hours later into the day that started overcast. but the texture is still there… 700px is just not enough here, but you can start to see.
to come: amazing thunderstorm spectacle over the wide vista leading out from the petrified dune cliffs we’re standing on.
…everybody must have their own, that perfect drink at the perfect place at the perfect time.
i will never tire of driving through endless, epic landscapes on a single dirt track surrounded by oryx. pure magic, pushing the landscape beyond the sublime. cameras don’t quite cut it here.
