Tired of sharing the thrill of the open road with thousands of trucks, taxis and speeding holidaymakers on SA's freeways?

Duane Heath takes a 5 000km detour along the country's R road network and discovers a parallel universe in the shadow of the toll plazas.

It's an odd feeling, having a highway all to yourself.

What made it even stranger was that it was a Friday, in early December, and the radio DJ was already singing a very familiar tune: bus plunges down Transkei ravine (goats the scapegoats); bakkie and taxi collide near Bloem; politician clocks 214km/h outside Durban (and gets bail of R500).

And yet here I was, having chosen to spend the next fortnight on these roads, criss-crossing the country at the height of the holidays instead of taking my brother’s well-meaning advice: “Why don’t you just fly to Durban for Christmas? It’s safer, not to mention quicker.”

There were many reasons: after a long year of deadlines and Cape Town city limits, I suddenly found myself with as much time as I needed to get to where I was headed. Click here to view the gallery.

Explore SA's r-rated roads. Book now with these package deals.

But, most of all, I wanted to see the South African landscape as it might have looked when life was perhaps a little slower, before the claustrophobic freeways changed the way we see this old and empty country, before our holidays became a mad-dash 140km/h blur between the costly pauses of toll plazas – thin slices of annual leave flying by in fast forward, down functional but essentially soulless stretches of painted tar.

And so the plan was hatched: could I completely avoid these national roads, and the trucks, taxis and speeding holidaymakers that ruled them, as I wound my way from the Mother City to Durban and back again?

Could I cover 5000km without coming across a single tollbooth? And would my journeys along our under-utilised R road network, the same roads my grandfather helped build, and my dad always preferred on our childhood holidays, be worth the considerable detour, the extra petrol, and the extra hours behind the wheel?

The answer to question number one, of course, was ‘no’.

It took less than an hour to find that out, as the R310 from my home near Muizenberg, to the R44 turnoff to Gordon’s Bay and Hermanus, intersected the N2 at Somerset West like the proverbial crossroads.

It was here that I relaxed my rigid game plan and hit the N2. Thankfully it was 4.30am, and with the sky turning red over the Helderberg Mountains and the world was still asleep, at least the road was totally free of traffic.

I had more luck with question two (grand total paid to the toll trolls: zero), while question three’s answer echoed back at me everywhere I went: from the widescreen views across False Bay on the R44, to those from the Tradouws Pass up the R324 to Barrydale; from the thirsty tourist strip that is the R62 to Oudtshoorn, to the fertile yet forlorn stretch it becomes between Joubertina and Kareedouw further east. And that was only the first 48 hours.

And the more I explored, the more important it became to retrace old steps as well.

On the R72 to East London, I suddenly headed north to Bloemfontein, and found the city of my childhood just as I remember it.

Then east towards Lesotho on the R26, through the farming towns of Ladybrand, Clocolan and Ficksburg – a seabound route my parents followed many a time during December holidays of decades past.

It felt good to go over ground I last covered 25 years ago: the same mealie fields, sunflowers in full bloom and long-abandoned farm stalls, now replaced by local women sitting on the side of the road, selling peaches stacked in neat pyramids.

And, wherever I went, I also saw reflected in my wide eyes vivid slices of other people’s lives, entire parallel universes which I inhabited only briefly: at a roadside café in Fouriesburg, on the R711 to Clarens and the Golden Gate National Park, a girl sat under an oak tree while her farmer father, shouting into the latest cellphone, tried to find a part for his broken windmill.

And a thousand kilometres away at Coffee Bay, down an unlabelled, potholed road forking off from the N2 highway outside Mthatha, a purple mini-van offloaded another troop of bug-eyed backpackers intent on finding the ‘real’ Africa, out here in the crumbling hinterland of the old Transkei. Every day on the road told its own tale.

Looking back on my trip, I realise the most satisfying thing of all was not avoiding highways or paying for the privilege of driving on them.

Rather, it was having the chance to once again slowly fall in love with this wide-open land, to reacquaint myself with its different moods, its changing vegetation and climate.

I’m not sure I could have done the same thing had I chosen the quickest route to my destination.

From the semi-desert dryness of the Karoo, to the subtropical showers of the South Coast, the long way round was never disappointing.

• Add new comment

Bookmark/Search this post with:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•