So I'm bowling along the dirt road and it's 2 o'clock - I left Kommetjie at 9.45, so who knows what I've been doing to take so long to travel 250km. The sky is low with black thunderclouds and bolts of lightning becoming ever more frequent. Edith has gone quiet - apparently she has delivered me safely to my destination. But all I can see is an assortment of farm buildings and labourers cottages and a small dam. I spy a somewhat elaborate, white-painted entrance to a farm which has the farmer's wife's name on it (rather like boat owners who name their boats after their wives or daughters to make up for lengthy absences at sea), so I knew that wasn't the place I was supposed to be.
I followed the dirt track past the farmhouse, noting that it wasn't quite as substantial as the previous section I had ridden along, but as I was so intent on actually getting to the lodge, bordering on anxiety, I looked neither right nor left, but focused on the fact that there were fresh tyre tracks. Obviously someone lived along that track, so I would continue a little further. In hindsight, that was hardly a good reason.
Soon the track became a single lane and started to wind its way deeper into the kloof, the hills becoming steeper and more frequent, and I crossed three drifts with water streaming steadily over them. I remembered how recently they had come down in flood and at that moment the heavens opened and it bucketed down, huge drops beating on the windscreen and roof like the Edinburgh Tattoo. The edges of the track now sloped away quite sharply on either side and two wheels went through a small donga. Anxiety grew, in part due to the fact that my car sometimes has the nasty habit of cutting out and cruising to a halt, and it doesn't always start again very easily. I had brought a battery pack with jumper leads just in case, and had bought a can of puncture repair spray, although having read those instructions, it would be much quicker just to change the wheel!
As suddenly as it started, the rain was over and ahead of me was a pretty little cottage at the side of the road, with a young man standing in the garden. On enquiry he told me that there was only one more farm on that track, about 3km on. Having come that far, I thought I would carry on, and as I reversed back into the roadway, the car cut out. When I turned the key to restart it, it gave its ominous impression of the last gasp of a dying battery. By now the man had wandered off down the road on some mission of his own, so it was an opportune time to ask my guardian angels to sort out my car problems, and at the next turn of the key, it sparked back to life and I was off again.
By now I knew this was definitely the wrong place to be and I began to wonder if I should just turn around and drive straight back to Cape Town, but dismissed that as the thoughts of a wuss (?) as I crested a rise and gazed down a hill that must have been a ratio of 1 in 4, ending at a charming farmhouse surrounded by green fields and definitely not where I should have been.
Despite the narrowness of the road, I did a 4-point turn and was out of there! All my rallying experience (armchair) came to the fore as I sped back along the gravel, barely lifting my foot from the accelerator. Admittedly there were a couple of close corners, but Sebastian Loeb would have been a little impressed, I hope.
Back at the neat farmhouse where things had started to go skew was a large 4x4 being thoroughly valeted by two domestics. I stopped to ask directions, and the farmer detached himself from the shadows of the old gum tree, from where he had been watching me earlier.
"Ja", he said slowly, in that farmer type of way that indicates he has plenty of time on his hands, "I saw you go past and I wondered to myself where you could be going. I know all the cars here, but I didn't know yours. I was just waiting for you to come back." Nice. He almost had a straw sticking out of the side of his mouth, chewing on it while he contemplated the idiocy of city women.
Turns out I should have made a sharp turn left just before his farmhouse, but I was so enthralled by his beautiful white-painted entranceway that I failed to notice the turnoff. I blame the entire stressful incident on him.
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