44. Taking the Edge Off. Part 1: Rules, Commandments, Guidelines and Laws.

25.08.24 – 29.08.24 : Louis Trichardt – Amsterdam

Gail and Alistair were an antidote; the remedy for a day spent suspended somewhere between rider and roadkill. Zvakanaka farm, their serene square of South African soil, was heaven for a stricken cyclist. The evening I arrived, they were out christening a friend’s new home with a sacrificial bottle of something-or-other. But generosity, in the case of Gail and Al, is not bounded by geography—nor, for that matter, by familiarity. Still at this point unacquainted, my request for their cheapest patch of grass had been transfigured into an offer of a luxury suite—a place complete with rainfall shower head, heated towel rail, and a bed wrapped in marzipan sheets, a coating that concealed the mother of all comforts: an electric blanket. Streaked in grease and grime, the mask of the day’s trials, I stood on the threshold, marvelling at how fortune could be quite so exquisitely fickle.

Later that evening, I ventured out for dinner, emboldened by the security that the key to a home provides. Though, as the lights of Zvakanaka had faded behind me, my courage too had dimmed and the key, now thrust between my middle and ring fingers, began to offer some far simpler reassurance. Thankfully, they appeared to be taking a night off from dismembering and I was granted safe passage to a restaurant where my strong British pounds permitted me the modest indulgence of a hot meal.

The next morning, over coffee with Gail and Al, I learned that last night’s little escapade—reported by Gracious the groundsman, who had very kindly offered to accompany me—had caused Gail a good deal of worry. Had the christening bottle not, in the end, been entirely sacrificial, I’d have no doubt been intercepted by Al's high-beams cutting through the dusk to scoop me up and away from any potential peril.

As coffee slipped seamlessly into breakfast, I excused myself from the day’s obligations of forward progress. Breakfast soon morphed into lunch and, before long, I was sitting under the Tree of Idleness—the Rare Forest Fig that bows over a patch of prized shade in the garden of my hosts—a third gin and tonic soaking into the frayed fibres of my being. Anywhere with such appropriately lazy flora, I reasoned, was surely ripe for a rest day.

Conversation with Gail and Al moved with a blissful ease; a fluidity reminiscent of a bond shared with a favourite aunt, a godparent, or perhaps an old teacher—one that you felt sure held you in special regard, apart from the tidal generations of students that filtered through around you. Funnily enough, both Gail and Al had, at one point, been teachers. That day, I received a predictably rich history of Zvakanaka, the surrounding hills and valleys, the nine provinces of South Africa, and the country as a whole, through the seasons of its turbulent past. It was an education that worked wonders in sanding down the country’s hard edges. The recuperative power of the place must have spread through the bike-touring ether because, just at the moment a fourth gin and tonic appeared, so did my dutch friend, Thijs.

The Analyst and I, reunited for a final time.

While I’d spent the night cocooned by comforts, he’d pitched up in a hostel beside Musina’s retail park, a place which, on the subject of hard edges, held a good deal in common with a dodecahedron. A very disturbed night had been followed by a morning on the Continent’s Worst Road, where Thijs had dodged everything from the passing Gonyethis—which were not, in fact, gone yet; or ever, it seemed—to missiles launched from the windows of petulant motorists. For the Dutchman, the offer of a stiff drink couldn’t have come quickly enough.

As it happened, our hosts provided more than just historical context and swigable anaesthesia to help us integrate with the country they called home. They also provided Casper. Casper was their close friend and local GP; an ambiguous role in the context of a midday tipple. Though, in Casper’s case, this was where any ambiguity ended. He’s a man who calls a spade a spade; and calls a lazy fat fucker who needs to lay off the beers and go out for the occasional jog that too, in a professional context. He was quick to point out that anyone who chose to cycle on the N1 was fucking insane and proceeded to impart nuggets of navigational wisdom from his archive of local knowledge. This was something—unlike spade-related pseudonyms—of which Casper had plenty. When he wasn’t berating his over-indulgent patients down at the surgery, he was out riding, and riding hard. Casper was an ultra-distance racer, who’d proved his mettle in some of South Africa’s toughest two-wheeled contests. He often rode with some of the sport’s strongest competitors and had type-two anecdotes coming out of his ears.

The N1—that had reduced me to a sobbing, quivering mess a day earlier—stirred no more joy in prospect than it did in retrospect, so I was only too happy to heed Casper’s advice verbatim. Together with Thijs, we pored over a paper map, fusing together stretches of service road, country lane and low-traffic A-road into a single rideable filament.

Spot the Tree of Idleness minding its Rare-Forrest-Figgy business in the background.

The following morning, now laden with my own bulk of local knowledge, and a care package of homemade rusks—a sort of hard biscuit with the shelf-life of a can of spam—I prepared to make tracks. Much to my delight, Al insisted on dropping me 10 kilometres down the road to skip the final, unavoidable stretch of treacherous highway. After an indulgent night of boerewors, chakalaka, and a goblet or two of a rather full-bodied red, I didn’t need too much persuading. I said one last, final farewell to the wonderfully ubiquitous Dutchman—who had, unsurprisingly, succumbed to the temptation of Zvakanaka’s tranquility—and bundled Madonna into the bed of Al’s bakkie.

15 kilometres later, I sat beside a gravel service track attending to my fourth puncture of the morning and quietly cursing the burden of local knowledge. Of course, Casper couldn’t have known that the powers that be had chosen to strim the fringes of the acacia-lined path that morning. Nor could he have known that, thanks to the mindless anachronism of running tubes in my tires—rather than the prevailing fashion of some self-sealing gunk—each deflating spike spelled out an irritatingly predictable future. A string of expletives would pave the way for a good deal of huffing and puffing which, 15 minutes later, left Madonna in much the same condition as she had been 16 minutes before, and me in much the same position. Progress was slow.

Acacias, and the town council of Louis Trichardt, can fuck off.

During my time in South Africa so far, I’d developed a set of new rules to cope with the country’s hard edges. They went like this. Rule 1: never ride at night. Rule 2: never camp wild. Rule 3: keep valuables in a backpack. And, most recently, Rule 4: avoid highways at all costs. For any constitution not etched on stone tablets, however, three rules seems adequate, so I demoted Rule 4 to the rank of Guideline, and diverted back onto the N1.

It wasn’t my slickest day’s ride. Pedalling a bike while scared stiff produces rather a stilted cadence. Still, since Zvakanaka, the N1 had at least sprouted a shoulder, and the vast majority of drivers even managed to refrain from launching their freshly drained beer bottles my way.

In honour of Rules 1 and 2, I reached my night’s stop in Tzaneen just as the last hint of day drained from the horizon, and pitched my tent in the gated garden of a kind local. With the tent up and the sun down, an antelope arrived, accompanied by two large dogs. The dogs, I’d been assured, were friendly—part of the family . With the antelope, however, I remained unacquainted. The trio seemed familiar with one another and had even come up with a game to pass the evening hours, which they iterated with endless enjoyment. First, the antelope would charge—head down, horns brandished—at my tent. Second, the dogs would leap into action and intercept the attacker, who they proceeded to chase merrily round the paddock. Third, the antelope, suddenly remembering that it was far bigger than the dogs, and, what’s more, had horns, would suddenly turn, and the chase would transpose. Finally, having scared off the guards, the antelope would turn its attention back to my tent and the cycle would repeat. I placed my fate in the hands of this delicate equilibrium and drifted off to sleep, hoping to make it through the night unimpaled.

I woke the next morning a year older. 25 felt a significant landmark, and not only because I’d managed to arrive neither flattened nor perforated. For as long as I can remember, when asked about the why of my trip, I’ve responded with a vague commitment to an adventure before I’m 25. This pledge began life as a placeholder while I set about finding a more elaborate excuse for buggering off for a year on my bike. But something in its simplicity stuck. The why didn’t seem to require such refining. Sometimes, because the time is right is as good a reason as any. That morning marked the completion of this simple goal: an adventure taken at the right time.

Happy Irthday.

To celebrate, I took a leisurely start, decorated Madonna in balloons, and ate a blank-cheque breakfast at the local supermarket. By lunchtime, I’d made good progress, with 90 of the day’s 180 kilometres under my belt. I was feeling good. However, imbued with the cosy confidence of a goal complete, not to mention a birthday, I’d naively neglected to delve into the day’s data. I may have wolfed down half the distance, but I’d taken a mere nibble at the elevation. Lunch soon took a new form as dining surrendered to fuelling—two petrol-station sandwiches and four hard-boiled eggs were chased by a tub of ice-cream and washed down with a litre of coke. From here, the road inclined.

The climb was a mischievous one. The gradient remained steep enough that standing on the pedals was preferable to sitting. It wound tantalising round blind corners, each tempting the final crest. The sun beat down and the salt I’d gone to great lengths to onboard—stowed aboard the eggs, swirled in the ice-cream, stirred in the coke and, well, sandwiched in the sandwich—made a break for the surface. I was soon drenched and the straps of my black backpack—which Rule 3 decreed should now be worn at all times—were blanched with sweat.

You should have seen the rest of me.

Over the course of the afternoon, I climbed two thirds the height of Kilimanjaro. The following morning, from my rather swish stopover in Graskop, a birthday treat from me to me, I was pleased to see that the state of Madonna’s balloons reflected my own—the phrase pathetic buoyancy springs to mind.

We both aged a century.

But they’d played their part. On the busier sections of road the morning before, I’d been pleasantly surprised to receive a far wider berth from passing vehicles than I’d become used to. There must have been some magic in the Birthday Balloons—such a joyous expression of life—that took all the fun out of a nearly-flattened cyclist. It was an effect I fully intended to exploit, and I toyed with buying some more to see me down to Cape Town. (This batch had come squirrelled away in a birthday card, written by my parents in March, and ferried across to me by Ellie a month later. I’d been carrying them since The Gambia. Still, I was sure the next set needn’t be imported.)

In full regalia.

Thanks to my diversion up and into the Drakensberg—the thousand-kilometre-long mountain range that runs from the Eastern Cape right up to Limpopo—I’d risen above the intimate peril of high-speed traffic. But other worries lay in wait. Illegal gold miners, known locally as Zama zamas, had dug themselves into the surrounding hills. A short newscast I’d watched in Graskop showed them descending on the nearby tourist town of Pilgrim’s Rest and sending a battalion of armed police, who’d arrived to evict them, into forced retreat. Gunfire reportedly rang through the night. I quickly promoted Rule 1 to the rank of Commandment, and set about in search of some stone tablets.

And the Zama zamas weren’t my only worry. As the mountainous days continued and the climbs compounded, I began to notice a distinctive sound emanating from Madonna. It began as a ghostly creak, emitted on only the steepest gradients as I hauled her from side to side, the pendulous weight of her baggage torquing and twisting her frame. I took an aural audit: cleats, pedals, bottom bracket, headset—none seemed to provide the source. As the days wore on and the air wore thin, the creak intensified, sounding frequent and visceral protests. But of what?

Climb after climb after climb.

I stopped at a bike shop—the sort of place that had, not long ago, been the stuff of fantasy, but that now reappeared as a routine fixture of a high street. But the mechanic’s cursory check struck out. The creak remained obscure. I began to worry. Once before, on my first steel bike, I’d been plagued by a mystery creak. After some overzealous laps of a well-ridden London loop, I’d discovered a hairline crack on the down tube—a Major Mechanical by any account. And a Major Mechanical in the twilight of this trip was something I was all too keen to avoid.

After another day of vocal protest, Madonna and I rolled into Waterval Boven, a small town in the province of Mpumalanga. In South Africa, I’d become used to calling ahead to book my night’s accommodation. A booking, unlike a cold call, often repaid with interest. First, it ensured that, unlike Bethlehem at Christmas, there remained some room at the inn, which helped to avoid a needless infraction of Rule 2. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it primed the host to expect a rather ragged youth of questionable liquidity but unquestionable vivacity on whom they might decide to take pity—a strategy which eased the budgetary strain of forced accommodation along the South-African leg considerably.

In Waterval Boven, I’d booked into a climbers’ lodge. Climbers are a breed that tend to empathise with the frugality of their fellow adventurer and I felt quietly confident that, as a member of their tight-fisted tribe, I might be granted some concession. Sadly, that evening, all the climbers were out. The owners were off in the Alps in vertical pursuit, leaving their decidedly horizontal dad behind to hold the fort. Checking in was a long and complex affair that made me wonder if this was its procedural debut, under current management.

Once united with the code to my dorm, a twelve-berth hall of which I was the sole occupant, I asked my host whether he recommended anywhere for dinner. No, came a curt response. This was puzzling. A cursory Google on my way into town had seemed to reveal a healthy crop of possibilities. How about The Steam Inn, I asked, remembering one, could I eat there? Nope, he replied, obtusely. I prodded deeper. You mean they don’t serve food? I asked, picturing the recent images of toasted sandwiches I’d seen pinned to their profile. He exhaled, no doubt quietly cursing his children for burdening him with such arduous hospitality. They claim to, came the eventual response. I rattled off a few more names, each met with a derisive snort and a reductive dismissal. And I guess you’re not making your own food, my host sighed. Well I could…I began, glancing around the basic kitchen. Nope, you couldn’t, he cut me off, shop closed at six.

After a perfectly pleasant toasted sandwich at the Steam Inn, I walked back through the unlit streets, wishing my room had come with a key rather than a code. I quickened my pace a little and held the crown of the road, scanning the shadows for ghouls. Once safely back inside, I slipped shivering into bed, gathering several of my would-be neighbours’ blankets around me in an itchy nest to shield me from the chill. The heat of the week had vanished and a cold snap had arrived.

The next morning, I set off to a cacophony of creaks. My next attempt at echolocation drew my attention to the front fork: two blades of layered carbon. Carbon is a newfangled material and I don’t trust it. It seems brittle, delicate; high-performance, yes, but undoubtedly a bit of a diva. In the state of utter conviction that befalls the mechanical hypochondriac, wallowing in the worry of a worst-case scenario, I suddenly decided that my fork had cracked. If this were the case, and the integrity of the carbon had been compromised, the connection between my handlebars and my front wheel was in jeopardy and my steering could, at any moment, fail. The only way to confirm this hypothesis was to remove the fork entirely, but now the nearest bike shop was 100 kilometres away.

I rode gingerly on, trying to flag down drivers to no avail. Rain had arrived overnight and blew in moody gusts across the hillsides. It was my first drenching in months. Minibuses, once my mortal enemy thanks to their proclivity for narrow overtakes and erratic driving, suddenly became a beacon. Surely one must have room for this sorry duo. Only once did one stop and I offered up all the cash I had in the hope of a lift. I was 20 rand short—about 90p—and the window was promptly wound up, muting my pleas, as the driver sped off in a cloud of mist.

No smiles under there.

Drivers in South Africa seem to abide by a few rules of their own. These rules go a little like this. Rule 1: Overtake if convenient; if inconvenient, overtake anyway. Rule 2: if the lane beside you is clear, don’t use it; instead, push the poor two-wheeled sod to your left off the road. Rule 3: never, under any circumstances, pick up a hitchhiker.

From the point of view of the poor two-wheeled sod to the left, the first two seem mindless. The sense of the third, however, can’t be denied. Hijackings in South Africa are a credible threat. Stop, and you risk losing your vehicle, if you’re lucky, and something far more important if you’re not. Waving frantically from beside the road, I was, however, at this point unaware of Rule 3, and had begun to wonder whether the drivers might be blind, or I might be invisible. In a moment of desperation, I flexed my highway Guideline once more and ended up on another of the continent’s worst roads, hoping that the sheer volume of traffic might nudge the law of large numbers into play.

Just as I began to draft a damning denunciation of the credibility of statistics, a 4x4, breaking away from the faceless traffic around it, pulled tentatively into a lay-by ahead. I approached waving and smiling, perhaps a little maniacally on reflection, in an attempted display of ragged, youthful, illiquid vivacity—my winning formula. It worked. The couple in the cab welcomed me and Madonna aboard and helped us balance ourselves between crates of glitter, sequins and assorted shiny knickknacks. I started to wonder whether we’d somehow been swept up in a travelling pantomime.

The couple who—whose names, I’m afraid to say, now escape me—soon clarified. They were the owners of a business supplying independent craft shops with all the necessary essentials. It was, according to them, a dying trade, but one that brought a lot of joy. They seemed to relish the camaraderie of a joint venture and they treated the travelling sales days like mini-breaks. We shared koeksisters—a sort of braided doughnut—and naartjies—the afrikaans for easy-peelers—the spoils of this particular excursion. We spoke about my impression of South Africa so far, and they reminisced fondly about the days when, in their youth, they could happily hitch across the country. Rule 3 had come into play in their lifetime, and it was one they abided by—this recent infraction having come only after much deliberation. But humanity had prevailed. They dropped me at the bike shop, showered me yet more with edible delights, and set off again on their quest to make the country sparkle.

Lawrence Scott owned the bike shop—his name I remember, as it was stamped on the top tube of some very smart bikes indeed. He was another racer, and was happily tinkering with one of his rigs for an upcoming event. Stepping into the workshop, I was instantly plied with coffee, as Lawrence set out in search of the creak. Madonna was duly deconstructed, with each of her components examined, serviced and then absolved. As he worked, he quizzed me on my inventory. How are you for inner tubes? he’d ask—hardly waiting for an answer before a pair were produced and bestowed. Parts were replaced, bearings regreased, and, with a flourish, an electronic gismo appeared. Cast your mind back and you may remember The Analyst, festooned with gadgets, had as part of his arsenal a radar rear light: a nifty little device that alerts the rider of approaching vehicles, and flashes them accordingly. These cost hundreds of pounds. Yet Lawrence, in a display of stunning generosity, waived any notion of payment and brushed off my protests with the simple assertion that you can’t put a price on safety.

After a full rebuild, Madonna was eventually back on two-wheels, but the creak remained. Lawrence, unperturbed, ducked down to chase a final lead. Following a quizzical fiddle, he tightened the front axle a quarter turn. Problem solved, he beamed. I flushed with embarrassment. It seemed that, following the last of the string of punctures I’d picked up on my local detour back at Zvakanaka, I’d simply forgotten to retighten the wheel as I’d replaced it. Perhaps the simplest of all mechanical solutions had evaded me for days and I’d been left needlessly to catastrophize. Far from frustrated by my mechanical incompetence, Lawrence had just winked and told me I’d done him a favour. He was only too happy, he’d assured me, to give Madonna a once over. He didn’t know when he’d next get the chance.

I’d left the shop transfused, with Madonna transformed, and, that night, as I lay sprawled across an electric blanket eating pasta bake from a tray of hot food—the result of yet another act of selfless hospitality—a final truth became apparent. Not a Rule, nor a Guideline, nor a Commandment but a Law. Fortunes may be fickle, and fate might play cruel tricks, but kindness can always be found just a little further down the road.