Traveling the Free State, Great Karoo and Little Karoo in South Africa. Make sure you get the August 2007 copy of the “South African Country Life” magazine August 2007″ where this article was taken from.
SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD
by Robert Fysh
Checking up on spectres of the open road…
Where Free State, Great Karoo and Little Karoo
Contacts
Klaarstroom Guest House 023 541 1474
Mossievale B&B 049 891 0296
Japie se Huis 051 7730050
“A quest to find ghostly hitch-hikers” That was Cronje’s description of our trip to Meiringspoort via Willowrnore and Uniondale to “check up”on the hitch-hiker ghost stories that haunt this “isolated and beautiful corner of the Klein Karoo.”
Cronje, of course, snared by tangled interpretations of these unexplained legends, recalled Basil Conradie and his “missing” girlfriend. Basil once lived somewhere between Molshoop and Arniston on the coast, or “some such place.”
Basil, Cronj’e told me, skidded off a hairpin on the Bloukrans Pass near Nature’s Valley. Crashing through the barrier at the apex of a bend, he ploughed through the monkey rope-draped yellowwood trees and landed, widely separated from his bike, in a ravine below. As Basil recalled the incident, “I was leaning into this hairpin. The next thing, the bike, Julia and I flew over the edge. That was it. I thought we were gone.”
The trouble, said Cronj’e, was Basil’s prolonged concussion. He only realised two weeks later that Julia was missing. Although he’d found his motorcycle submerged in the stream below, she, who had been clinging to his waist as they tumbled into the abyss, was “gone”
Stories like this cause me to roll my eyes and change the subject. But Cronje was adamant. Basil Conradie’s loss of the “great love of his life” so closely replicated the Uniondale hitch-hiker legend that he decided to”check”the Uniondale story himself. So we left Pretoria on our ghost-busting mission, heading as usual – when we travel to the Karoo – for Edenburg, Trompsburg, Phillippolis, Colesberg and, finally, Graaff-Reinet.
Graaff-Reinet, said Cronje, was a good launching point for locating phantom motorcycle hitch-hikers. But in Graaff-Reinet Cronje found himself diverted by another
legend – that of Lucas Borman, the “gifted” cabinetmaker. Lucas chiselled “fine” furniture – now worth “thousands and thousands”of rands – in the late 19th Century from old Cleghorne and Harris packing cases.
“Most of Cleghorne’s merchandise was shipped from overseas, “explained Cronje. “Lucas dismantled the large packing cases they came in and used the wood to construct ornately carved sideboards and wardrobes.”
What appealed to Cronje most was Lucas’s tendency to fit mismatched doorhandles to his creations, one pointing this way, the other that. South Africa’s fourth-oldest newspaper, the Graaff-Reinet Advertiser, once carried an article on the mismatched door handles.In the Felix Lategan Museum in the Old Residensie in Graaff-Reinet, a wardrobe door opens the wrong way because it was the only handle he had,”said the report.
After booking into Mossievale, Cronje’s favourite Graaff-Reinet B&B, we found Chippy Joseph sweeping the pavement outside it; two short sweeps followed by the usual longer sweep. Sweep, sweep, sweeeeep… sweep, sweep, sweeeeep.
Cronje found the rhythm soothing and, after watching Chippy for a while, felt inclined to retire “once and for all” to Graaff-Reinet so that he could sweep the pavement in front of his own house too. It was over a monstrous Karoo breakfast the following morning that Chippy elaborated on Lucas’s packing case furniture.
“He only made five of these sideboards,” he said, pointing at the stained sideboard that dominated the dining room of his Park Street guest cottage. “Her grandfather,” he says, pointing at a black-framed sepia portrait of his wife, Elsie, “paid £10 for it. Lucas” he explains, fondling the ornate flower motif on the door, “used only one pattern on his furniture, so wherever you see this flower pattern, you know it’s Graaff-Reinet furniture.”
Discovering mismatched handles on furniture worth thousands and thousands of rand became an exciting diversion, but not as exciting as an experience we’d had the preceding day. Cronje swore that as we were entering Bloernfontein at dusk, he saw a snowflake drift through the main beam of his bike.
I, of course, ridiculed this observation. “It was just sleet.” “No,”he said,”it was snow. Really.” We’d travelled a long and hard road. Rain, as fine as desert sand, had spattered our visors, exploding and fragmenting the oncoming headlights into starry fragments. So I didn’t argue. Anyway, by the time we arrived in Bloernfontein in the freezing Free State winter, Cronje had started hallucinating. “We’re being followed,”he muttered, removing his soaked scarf, “by our own personal rain cloud. Wherever we go, it rains”
CronjeV’personarrain cloud followed us devotedly the next day. We continued into a frost-encrusted morning lashed by a south-easterly blizzard that whipped the N1 like a demented spirit (and shoved our machines left and right as we deviated onto the familiar old main road to Cape Town through the Groot Karoo).
Cottage waiting for an overhaul in the village of Klaarstroom.
Karoo cenery north of Graaff-Reinet and not a hitch-hiker in sight.
Sharp turn in the road near new Bethesda.
C.J. Langenhoven’s “Herrie” replicated outside a restaurant in De Rust
Chippy Joseph doing the morning chore outside his guest cottage in Graaff-Reinet.
Example of Lucas Borman’s fine packing case furniture.
Cronje’s”personal”cloud attacked usagain in Edenburg as we chugged passed the Eish Drankwinkel, an institution neatly situated on the main street across the road – and a pavement that needed weeding – from a pristine church. Then, enjoying a minor respite from the drizzle, we set off along Cronje’s favourite Karoo road, identifiable by its extensive network of cracks, to Trompsberg. Cronje said the cracks reminded him of “varicose veins that laced the old tar road together into a corset. They serve a definite purpose,” he explained.
We paused in our fight against the elements in Trompsberg, visiting Emmie van der Berg the town librarian. Emmie served us cups of hot tea and showed us the hole in the library ceiling caused by a “huge storm one night” the previous summer. The water destroyed shelves and shelves of books, “And,”says Emmie with a sigh,”things take so long to fix in a small town.”
As we arrived in Philippolis our personal cloud lost all its shame and restraint and drove us for cover into Oom Japie se Huis, a restaurant located on the left past the historic white church, just beyond the kink in the main road.
Cronje mollified himself over a bowl of creamy rich tomato soup. “It’s obviously made from farm-grown organic tomatoes,” he said, crunching on the first of four thick slices of home-baked brown toast.
After overnighting in Graaff-Reinet, we departed for Aberdeen, Willowmore and Uniondale. Cronje felt no ghostly arms clutching his waist, saw no apparitions, no extended thumbs or buxom brunettes; just clouds, rain, more clouds, and then De Rust, snug in the armpit of the Swartberg Mountains, a writhing convulsion of stone cloaked in roiling clouds and purple turmoil.
In Meiringspoort we survived Spook Drif and Wit Perd Drif, where a rabbi disappeared in a flood, the “hanging” incident at Finger Rock and the pool where a smous drowned, but saw no hitch-hiker.
After threading the stone alleys and corridors of this rock-patterned pass, we discovered Klaarstroom at the other end.
What impressed Cronje about Klaarstroom was the “old village,”which was small enough for Jeremy and Sharon WitTS-Hewinson, co-owners of the Klaarstroom Guest House, to name all its residents. “Let me see,”Sharon said, “there’s Jeremy and Edwina and I, and Derek, the shopkeeper, and his wife, Estelle, and Graham and Liz… and Lesley. That’s eight.’
But the enduring attraction for Cronje of our overnight stay in the village was Sharon’s kitchen supper. He warmed himself over an ancient Aga stove and, warmed and food-filled, proclaimed his quest for ghostly hitch-hikers on the Uniondale road unfufilled.”No hitch-hiker would travel in this weather,” he declared.
Article and pictures from : South African Country Life August 2007 page 62,63,64