The Great North Road

When things go wrong and you lose your dream you have a choice, you can give up, or you can try again. Trying again might give a different result. Seeing the " going wrong " as a change of course rather than a final event changes your reaction to it. It is all in the timing, that's the magic.

After our house on the hill burnt down it seemed that the Universe had spoken. The message was clear - this ain't happening! That was three years ago - perhaps the Universe has changed its mind?

Could we go back to the future? Was there a way? We decide a recce might be the way to find out. So at the start of the school holidays we set off from our sea side home in Hermanus, just up the coast from Cape Town, on the Great Trek North. As a child I had done this journey many times. Then it was the return journey back to Rhodesia, after a long summer holiday in my grandparents’ home in the beautiful fishing village of Kalk Bay, on the Cape peninsula. This time we first diverted east to drop off Duke, a new canine member of the family, with Granny and Oupa in Swellendam.

Swellendam is the oldest town in South Africa, after Cape Town, a farming town that is the centre of the Overberg farming community. From here many " trek boers" set off to the North to escape the British colony, their taxes and being told what to do. In other words, to get away from the government. This came to be known as The Great Trek.

The word trek means pull in Afrikaans and the trek boers were farmers who loaded their wagons with everything they needed for a new life. The pulling was done by oxen, many of them. The wagon wheels were made of wood with a steel rim and spare wheels were made along the way. They went in small groups, families and neighbours, leaving their farms and taking their Bibles and their God with them.

As we proceeded North from Swellendam, through the mountain passes of the Overberg, we contemplated how challenging it must have been for the trek boers. It must have taken them months to cover the distances that your modern traveller would drive in a few days. We, however, seemed to be an exception. We were definitely ahead of the trek boers but as modern travellers, we were at the back of the pack, if we were part of it at all. The school holidays were only so long and our destination, Harare, was three thousand odd kilometres to the North, which didn't deter us from smelling the roses along the way.

The first distraction came in the form of the Cango Caves, a huge network of underground caverns with awe-inspiring stalagmites and stalactites. These incredible examples of nature taking its time, put the trek boer’s journey in a different perspective. It has taken an estimated 100 000 years for the limestone deposits to become majestic pillars and surrealistic expressions of Nature herself. Their formation entirely dependent upon the rainfall above ground. For all those thousands of years they have been shaped, drop by drop, in utter darkness until one man discovered a narrow passage from the world above.

It is truly awe-inspiring, an ancient sub terranean cathedral, built by nature herself. Complete with organ pipes and heavenly ceilings. This secret space that has taken four million years to reach its current splendour was an inspiring start to our journey. The trek boers passed by unaware with their sights on crossing the Karoo desert, the barrier between them and the proverbial promised land.

We, on the other hand, had our sights on a tiny town in the middle of the Karoo, as our next port of call. With three children on board, it seemed a good idea to have shorter term goals.