“This is the place!” my friend says. “Right here!” We are driving along the N1 between Laingsburg and Beaufort West, and I just know, here comes that story again…
Years ago, he was hitch-hiking and a Cadbury sales rep dropped him off here at the turn-off to the abandoned Koup Railway Station with a box of Freddo frog-shaped chocolates (a new product at the time, similar to Caramello Bears).
It was 11 o’clock on a December morning, and it was hot. My friend ate a few Freddos. The cars whizzed past him; no one stopped. Eventually he sat down under the road sign and moved with the shade to stay out of the sun. He ate more Freddos and it made him very thirsty, but he didn’t have water with him. When the sun started to go down he walked to the railway buildings to look for a tap, but he didn’t find one.
The end of the story? It wasn’t until 23:00 that someone finally stopped to give him a lift and he could get water at a garage in Beaufort West. He never ate a Freddo chocolate frog again… and it all started here at this road sign.
THIS IS ONE OF the great joys of driving through the platteland – bumping into your past self. The landscape stretches to distant horizons, but everywhere you come across places that remind you of who you once were. When I was about six years old, my dad’s Peugeot 404 overheated on thishere, on a weekend pass from the army, Pierre Bredell and I shook a one-litre Coke to douse the flames after the brake drums on his Austin Apache caught fire.
