The Great Vintage Adventure: Day one

In a year where all plans were scrapped, the stars aligned to make this one happen. Matt first mentioned it to me sometime in the middle of 2019: “When my parents move from Kenton to Cape Town,” he said, “I’m hoping to help my dad move his cars.” A 1934 Austin 10 and a 1964 Triumph Spitfire. Over a year later, despite a global pandemic and limitations on every movement, he did. We did.

Over the course of three days in early October, Matt, his parents, Ron and Pam, his sister, Rosemary, Rose’s six-year-old daughter, Emily, and I travelled 1,028km (639 miles according to the Triumph’s odometer) from Kenton on Sea in the Eastern Cape to Cape Town. We took remote inland roads to avoid highway traffic – roads that run through endless, soul-stretching landscapes and remind you that isolation can be a wonderful and desirable thing.

This is the first of three blogs that will attempt to describe the road trip of a lifetime. This is day one.

We leave in dense fog that clears to mist and eventually burns off. Matt’s parents are in the Austin up ahead, he and I are in the Triumph, and Rose and Emily are behind us in the Isuzu, our support vehicle. Ron, who has lovingly restored and maintained both vintage cars in the years since he retired, is more concerned about the Triumph than the Austin. The Triumph has given some trouble in the past, but the Austin, just 14 years shy of its centenary, he’s sure will go like a bomb. A slow bomb, though: its maximum speed is somewhere in the region of 60km/h.

Our first stop is Addo Elephant Park, where we have breakfast and where the Austin goes on without the Triumph and Isuzu. It’s got a slower journey ahead; we have time for a game drive. The park lives up to its name and at one watering hole in particular, we watch dozens of elephants frolic as the mercury rises. One calf is so small it seems to be having trouble staying vertical, and the adolescents dunk each other in a way that is almost uncanny in its familiarity.

We sit there for ages. From the back seat, Emily pipes up: “Can someone please spot me a leopard? I’m dying over here!”

Within half an hour of leaving Addo, we are deep in citrus country. We notice the scent before we’re aware of the orchards. It’s so sweet that it sits in your mouth as much as your nose – it’s everywhere, we’re in it. “Amazing the things you miss when you’re in a modern car with the air con on,” Matt says. “This is so much more immediate.” We would never have smelled the blossoms had we not been driving with the windows open – a vain attempt at combatting the heat.

The heat. How it rises and rises and rises. It rises until it’s so hot you could fry an egg on my knees. When we stop to fill up with petrol in Kleinpoort – on the R75 between Kirkwood and Steytlerville (I know, I’d never heard of them either) – I realise how the sweat has been pooling beneath my breasts. A steady river runs from the nape of my neck. It is, to use Matt’s words, vrekwarm. My phone, when I have signal, says 32 degrees. In a car that sits barely a foot off the roasting road, it feels closer to 40.

But the heat is a small price to pay for the world we’re travelling trough. The emptiness stretches out in every direction. There is only stark, brittle, sun-scorched, water-bereft, resilient, beautiful land as far as the eye can see. Occasionally: a farmhouse. A few times: a dirt road forking into nowhere. Mostly: endless aridity. We barely pass another car. It baffles the bounds of the heart.

At some point between Steytlerville and Willowmore (another unknown town), the road starts to narrow. It pinches space from both lanes, reducing an ordinary, rural, two-lane road (surprisingly light in potholes) to a one-lane cement road. For almost 40km, passing other cars is essentially a game of chicken: at a bit of a distance, each car peels from the road slightly, one set of tyres on the road and the other on the gravel beside it.

The whole experience is surreal. Driving on this strange pseudo runway, built out of cement in the early 1950s because it was cheaper than bitumen and now the country’s last remaining provincial strip road.

Our destination is Willowmore’s old jail, now a guesthouse. Dinner is lamb shank for some, ostrich for others, and malva pudding for dessert. Karoo fare. We walk home in the dark, a deep contentment in my veins. The Milky Way – all those stars that aligned to make this trip a possibility – clearly visible above.