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On into South Africa
It's hard to believe but here we are travelling into the 12th and last country on this trip. Four months is nearly up and the end point, Cape Town, seems just down the road.
Border formalities were quick and painless, both leaving Namibia and entering South Africa, though we did have to have a small strip of nondescript paper stamped and signed by four individuals to be shown to a fifth before we could actually drive off.
The Northern Cape region was just the same as the Namibia we had just left - dry, rocky and hilly with little animal life to be seen except for some rock hyrax, called Dassies here, who darted across the road and hid in crevices when we approached.
The delightfully named Springbok (though there was not a single one to be seen) was our destination for the night. Springbok is the "capital" of Namaqaland, this northernmost section of the Cape. It is a typical isolated mining town: a main street with mostly down-at-heel shops, quite a few liquor stores with dodgy characters hanging around outside and a couple of big supermarkets. We looked for an internet cafe, but this particular advance in civilised living has not yet reached here. Instead, a single computer fed by a single line was set up in the corner of a sports store. The connection was mercifully adequately fast - perhaps because it was the only computer connection in town!
The campground offered us a few delights we had not encountered before. The first was yellow mongoose wandering around the place, digging in the hard ground looking for dinner and carrying off large millipedes when they struck it lucky. Golden, sleek creatures with a lovely bushy tail ending in a white tip. And there were tiny mice with short stumpy tails who darted in and out of low, scrubby bushes, keeping us amused while we had dinner. (If we have identified them correctly, then the guide book tells us they are Brant's Whistling Rats!)
The second delight was to be found in the ablutions block. Not only were we treated to good, hot showers and loos without broken seats and that flushed ... we had "decor". In the corner on a bench was a plastic vase with a huge bunch of plastic flowers, the mirrors had stencils of fleur-de-lis around them, there were two enormous indoor potplants reaching for the sky, and ... each and every loo seat had a lovely mauve, frilled toilet seat cover and matching cistern mat. Never in all the trip had we been so blessed with home comforts.
Leaving Springbok behind in its desolate surroundings, we drove on through treeless plains with only occasional evidence of marginal farming and human existence. We passed small outposts of towns off to the side of the excellent tarred road. Baboons and bands of small grey mongoose occasionally wandered across the road. Eventually the spectacular Cedarburg Range with its vertical cliffs and flat topped mountains rose up on our left and we followed it for a hundred kilometres.
Suddenly farms with white farmhouses started to appear - our first glimpse of Cape Dutch architecture - and as we crossed into valleys, green, irrigated land stretched endlessly. Here in the Olifants River Valley, grape vines, both established and newly pushing into virgin ground, were accomapnied by wine cellars and new houses, a green checkerboard of paddocks contrasting strongly with the yellow-white earth and the adjacent grey desert vegetation. The farms became huge - no subsistence farming operations here - and populated with large machinery and lots of cars and trucks, a contrast to all the countries we had been travelling through.
As we continued south, the traffic became heavier (and faster - South Africans don't think 100kph is fast ... 150kph is more like it), the road became wider and we hit our first real motorway. Table Mountain, that instantly recognisable icon of Cape Town, was on the horizon but we turned away towards Stellenbosch for the night.
And then it had to happen ... for some time we had been losing power, but we did not want to pull over on the freeway with Friday afternoon peak traffic zooming all around us. We managed to limp the car the last several kilometres to the off ramp and pulled over. And there the car wanted to stay! Thiemo tried to diagnose the problem, but we ended up being towed the last 6 or 7 kilometres to our campsite! And so we mused that we had been towed right at the beginning of the trip and here we were being towed right at the end! Nice bit of balance that, we thought.
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