A TALE OF TWO ROUTES

Baviaans-lite. This is how I had imagined the first of the two routes that my fiancée, Annette and I, were to go on: a 270km dirt track that was to take us off the tarred N9 outside Uniondale and eventually deposit us on the R334 to Uitenhage. Although we planned to detour off this route to wrestle with the Gonjah 4x4 trail near Patensie, I was looking forward to this challenging alternative route to PE, particularly as – unlike Baviaanskloof – it’s not on everyone’s bucket list. But, as we were to discover, it certainly should be.

“Okay, so if we were going to do the Baviaanskloof like that line of cars that just passed us, we would turn right to Nuwekloof now,” I commented to Annette.

Although it’s an illusionary notion even on secondary roads, it’s good to feel that you’re pioneering a new way of getting somewhere, and is a hobby I never tire of in our “different worlds within in one country” with its 500 000 km of gravel roads just waiting to be explored.

The other Baviaans

The gravel roads from Uniondale had been relatively silky past the farms of Hartebeest Post, Zaaimansdal and Kouga Game Farm (where we’d had good sightings of white springbok and giraffe) until we turned off the main dirt road to Willowmore at the Winterhoek signboard. But I knew from a past motorbike adventure-ride that the dirt track ahead to Steytlerville was about to get more challenging, especially after the recent rains.

Sure enough, we crossed over a number of sections where the road surface had