The Swartberg Pass, Meiringspoort and the pregnant lady
From Prince Albert we got onto the R407 and after that the N12. It was on this road, just past Meiringspoort, that a man jumped out and maniacally waved at us to stop. We stopped a little hesitantly; these days it might just be the next hijacker to jump from behind a bush…
A childhood friend of mine, MC, phoned me up the other day to say that he had just bought a little red 1995 Suzuki Jeep, and after a little tinkering and a lot of bashing it was finally ready for its (maybe not so) maiden off road expedition.
From Port Elizabeth we planned to drive through the Langkloof towards Oudshoorn, over the Swartberg Pass and through Prince Albert, De Rust and Avontuur and back towards Port Elizabeth. Unbeknownst to us, we would get much more than the scenic route…
Exactly 327km into our intrepid journey we faced our first challenge. At the foot of the Swartberg Pass we looked up the mountain. The winding gravel road becomes narrower the steeper it gets, eventually disappearing near the top. The problem was, we knew, that the Swarberg Pass is a favourite of posh BMW-owning, four-letter-word slinging men who like to be seen driving into the city with a little dust on their X5s after a weekend and that although the little Jeep will valiantly, and painfully slowly, fight its way up the mountain, a head on confrontation with said BMW was out of the question.
Our fears were of course soon realised as a big 4×4 sped towards us with headlights flashing and a cloud of dust behind it. We went off the road and into the bush.
About halfway up the pass we called halt for MC to calm his nerves with a cigarette and for me to enjoy the views without any racing BMWs. The ploughed and planted lands that stretch up to the purple and blue Outeniqua Mountains in the distance, look like pieces of a puzzle seamlessly put together, painting a picture more beautiful than even the best landscape artist is capable of.
After another twenty minutes of driving with baited breath and successfully negotiating the sheer cliffs and drops, we arrived at a grammatically incorrect Afrikaans board which informed us that we had reached the top of Thomas Bain’s Pass that was opened for the first time in 1888. Behind us lay picturesque farmlands ensconced by mountains, and in front of us lay an alien landscape filled with rocks, boulders and stones.
Our next stop on this Saturday morning was Prince Albert. Saturday also means market day and the small town centre was a beehive of activity. For breakfast we each bought a piece of baklava – a messy business without a plate or fork. Getting back into the Jeep I was met with disgruntled looks from MC until I conceded and got out to wash my hands in one of the irrigation furrows that still runs past every house in this town and which they use to water their gardens.
From Prince Albert we got onto the R407 and after that the N12. It was on this road, just past Meiringspoort, that a man jumped from behind a bush and maniacally waved at us to stop. We stopped a little hesitantly; these days it might just be the next hijacker to jump from behind a bush…
The man pleaded with us to go and help him pull out his 4×4 that had got stuck in a ditch a short distance from where we stopped. He also told us, while I was getting into the back and he into the front, that he and his friend had decided to take his bakkie for a spin in the bush and that they had dragged his wife with them. She was now a little angry with him, he said.
Arriving at the ditch it wasn’t the hopelessly stuck Nissan 4×4 that immediately got my attention, but the man’s wife. The one he said was a little angry. She was heavily pregnant and about as red as MC’s Jeep…
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
After repeated attempts we realised that the Nissan would need a little more goading than the 1300cc of MC’s Jeep, and that another plan had to be made. We decided to drive the couple back to their farm where he would get his Land Rover to help with the recovery operation. The lady would thus sit next to me in the back. MC’s car, however, serves more or less the same purpose as most women’s handbags – a storage facility for everything useful and even more things useless.
I bundled together the three cans of tuna, a few items of clothing, a hardhat, a wrench for opening the Jeep’s windows and a blow up doll (not what you might think, but a whole other story altogether!) that I found strewn around the back and used it for a seat because MC, for reasons unbeknownst to me, decided before our trip to take out the other back seat.
“What idiotic man takes his pregnant wife to go bundu-bashing?” started the lady the moment we hit the tarmac again. And worse insults followed. MC gave a couple of grunts and chortles as he tried his utmost to suppress a bout of hysterical laughter at the verbal abuse the man had to endure.
And then she saw my copy of Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf lying on the floor half hidden under an old fishing licence. She become friendliness incarnate and asked me, “Do you read a lot?” and after a stunned “Yes” from me she said, “The characters in that book can say such nasty things to each other.”
With the arrival at their farm, MC and I were quite taken a back by the grandeur of the house and the extent of their vineyards. And for our Samaritan deed the lady thanked us with a couple of bottles of their finest and the words, “For men more conscientious than my own.”
Later that evening MC and I had a glass or two on Treppie and Mol and Lambert from Triomf. It was after all their insults that made the lady calm down.
by Wessel Stoltz
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