2001 Biking South Africa

Day 18, Tuesday, July 3
Colesberg to Middelburg
106.3km @ 20kph

What a fantastic day! First we visited the Sikhuleseni Educare Centre – following a hooting traffic cop through the ‘township’ streets, with staff and children in a combi taxi bringing up the rear. Then cycled through Colesberg, up the hill past the church and onto the N9 south. And voomah-ed all the way here – arriving well before five despite THREE punctures. All occurring within a short 7km! Today I believed for the first time that it might actually be downhill to the coast. And enjoyed particularly the Karoo at its best – green-tinged with a lovely variety of veld flowers. Feelin’ good!   

We spent the night in accommodation at the Colesberg jail and in the morning Noliswe collected us in a taxi, cop car in attendance, and drove us to the outskirts of the township where we mounted our bikes and were led by the hooting cop car and followed by a taxi-load of kids through the streets to Sikhuleseni, one of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund projects (although it transpired they had only received one tranche from the NMCF and that the school had been constructed using RDP money). We were impressed by the initiative and thought and creativity we encountered, for example, the window blinds were designed and painted by the kids (64 kids aged 3-6 years, several teachers, and a cook).

Done with our visit, we cycled through Colesberg, up the hill and past the church, taking a loo break at the garage there, before heading on south. We had a nice shoulder for 15km or so, then travelled a narrow road, with not too much traffic. We did get off the road for trucks, but found the drivers well-behaved on the whole. When the wind is strong, trucks coming in the opposite direction nearly knock us off our bikes, bringing us now and then to a standstill.

We left Colesberg at around 10h00 and averaged a super 18kph for the first 60km. A strong wind blew into our right ears or mainly behind our right shoulders as we passed through typical Karoo scenery of flat-topped hills, the road a real pleasure on the whole with some climbing but essentially making for an easy day, which we needed. On the new section of the N9, there were signs marking off every 200m of road.

I was still doctoring a painful bum with prep shaving cream!

We passed tiny Nouwpoort just off the road, with its dingy township and graveyard on the roadside. The Colesberg township was quite nice by comparison – pity we did not get to take any photos of the nicer homes and clean gardens, a mixture of rich and poor as usual, even a guest house.

We saw a small buck trapped on the road-side of a fence that ran through a culvert under the road as we approached, a real bambi. Charl teased me, saying “let’s catch it and put it over the fence”. And set a male and female ostrich running like mad, having ignored considerably noisier vehicular traffic. And admired rather pretty veld flowers in lavender and red, and daisies, their yellow faces bright and brave against the brown of the earth. We saw a passenger train in a long flat valley, tooting mournful.

Charl had a puncture in his front tyre in the ‘Paul Simon amphitheatre’ outside Nouwpoort. He fixed it and we hit the road, me cycling ahead. Within 100m he got another puncture, in a new tube. I waited and waited up ahead, reluctant to cycle back to him until I saw two men approaching him. Then I had to go back, just in case…

We had a climb thereafter to 1600m, followed by a helluva drop on which we reached  70kph. Just near the bottom my tube punctured and I had to contend with a frightening speed wobble. Three punctures within 7km! Charl was far ahead of me, of course, having careened down the hill, and had to come back.

We had been averaging 18kph and still had 27km to go. We managed to increase our overall average to 20kph for the day on this last stretch, so really voohmaed!

It was absolutely beautiful cycling into Middelburg (Eastern Cape) town, with fantastic cloud formations sweeping across the blue of the sky, and light pouring through holes in the cloud, a lovely light, and mountains in the distance. We could see the town from a long way off, and it was downhill all the way in.

We camped at the Carot Chalets where we shared a bathroom with a policeman who rents a bungalow there. The owner made a point of letting us know beforehand that he was a coloured man.

When we arrived in town we found that dad had tracked down and gone to visit a friend he hadn’t seen in 50 years!