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When you are sitting on an ellipse-shaped varnished bench in a kitchen wearing only your Oddballs underwear and your olive-green Thailand cotton shirt which you vaguely observe is inside-out, then you know the holiday season has started.
It’s Ben's birthday dinner here in our essential Karoo house, and he is dishing up sun-dried tomato and mushroom pasta and salad.
Day three of the heatwave on big adventure bikes and we are high on the Karoo.
This morning began with a lazy start — I strolled “the Thez” and after discovering the authentic far-from-the-insane-crowd village 30 years ago, I am pleased to see that little has changed.
There are more lifestyle seekers who have renovated or built, but it’s all in that lush Karoo cottage, pondokkie style.
And even that stuff gathers a coat of dust and roof paint fades.
There’s so much subtle post-iron-age rusted metal art lurking.
We have stubby lucerne paddocks either side of us.
Donkeys graze. One lets out such an enormous bray of ardour at a passing lust piece that I am sure it will wake the slumbering Bike Prof.
Young boys tripple along the white dirt roads bareback, with foals following.
The sky comes alive as a pair of blue cranes unleash their shattering cry as they fly like arrows towards the crowning sun which lights up the mauve koppies, with that huge snaggled tooth of Compassberg rising, like my Karoo grandfather’s gnarled forefinger raised to the world.
Nieu-Bethesda is my Hofmeyr of childhood. Placid and bucolic at dawn, but as the day wears on there will be trade, tourists and slaughter.
My friend, a truly hardworking single-mom farmer, says she can’t stop for tea with us leisure seekers as she has 12 sheep to send to “market”.
This is sheep-farming country, and it is how it has always been since my Karoo consciousness awoke in me as a four-year-old in this very same Stormberg district.
I have strange roots here.
The dry heat, the pungency of sheep drol, the scent of petrichor as the leiwater enters the red soil or lights up the green glowing of grass of the oasis.
I bounce into Belinda du Toit. It’s just after 5.30am and she is dressed and made up.
She shows me a row of cardboard boxes on the stoep of The Rest, in the heart of what she calls the “CBD”, and says that on Saturday morning children from the poor areas will be arriving to pick up food and care items.
Her retired dominee husband is practising his violin somewhere inside their rambling coffee shop, gift shop, outdoor shaded garden.
She takes walking tours, runs the Karoo Camino — a walk in the hills with comfortable, splendid overnight stays.
She has a secret room onto the street for those who will bring something special to the town, such as writers!
There are two kinds of visitors to the Thez: tourists and travellers.
I raise my hand for the latter. A journey into the Karoo is an adventure into the vast interior of the soul.
You leave here saying “I need to stay longer”. Not to farm, or endeavour, just to stay. And be.
It’s a tricky act, for people here must earn to live.
I hear the story as we quaff Karoo ale, cider and ginger beer with Andre Cilliers at his Brewery and Two Goats Deli.
A delightful emporium of cheese, bread, olives and a hanging bed under the enormous willow.
We have known each other for more than two decades — all of it in the village.
He was going to build me a flat-roofed desert home back then when our dreams and lives were fecund.
I called it Be Unbelievable, but now I am shopping around for a little huisie for me and my thirtysomething daughters in early autumn!
I found somewhere I think. Compass View is the very same little, then Pink House coffee shop where owner Debbie heard a mom telling her excited little girls not to touch anything on the shelves.
Those poppets wore flowery dresses and ran and rode around the village in the late 1990s.
We danced in the main Helen Martins Street as the clock struck midnight heralding the end of the 20th century and the start of this century.
Here in the shade at the brewery, the four men entering high age at this table look at each other and realise that we have all raised children, had wives and partners, and here we are still in Bethesda.
It’s the women who have moved on. I chuckle.
I can’t wait to make the pilgrimage with my daughters who, at 30 and 31, will hopefully also feel their roots reaching down through the red river sand and shale to find that cool, tasty aquifer water.
This morning, we left late but happily so and wound our way up and over the Compassberg.
It’s an amazing little road, so determined and full of grit and glorious views.
It’s the road of two Keiths — the legendary climber Keith James and I coming round a corner and there is the other Keith — McCabe — herding sheep.
He famously disappeared without trace.
That was the early 90s. In the mid-90s my friend Alf James ordered me and my little family to spend a night in Huisie Nommer 1 — even paid for us.
He landed up in love and on the Alfie, son of an SA champion boxer, found peace and tranquillity here far from where we ran, played touch rugby in Yeoville, Johannesburg.
Well he is gone, but Brenda and their three children live on.
He brought us all here for the good stuff, the slow existential reawakening.
That feels like real legacy to me. He went from being ethereal, a bit of a spiritual searcher on the hill to a loving Christian.
Out on the bikes, I doff my hat to them all, fighters, survivors and lovers.
But we must move on now for the digital needle on the dash is spiking over 30°C.
We are a bit lost and decide to belt it to Middelburg for coffee and sustenance.
Just like last year — “Same procedure as last year Miss Sophie?”
“The same procedure as every year James..” I mutter under my breath.
It’s hot. I peek into the coffee shop’s kitchen — it is fired by the Devil’s bellows! How do people live let alone cook in there!
We glug and chomp what is put before us, scurry back to the bikes, fill up and hit the tar back towards Graaff-Reinet.
The needles hits freakin’ 37, 38, 39, 39.5! Hit 40! I screech into my pot.
And it feels good. The baked Karoo panorama sweeping and swirling on this random Wednesday afternoon God forgot.
Dom crowns the moment with the regal unfurling of the arm — look at this for magnificence!
The last stretch, the dirt road from.the north is incredible.
White dust drifting into midafternoon. We ride hard, with purpose. Compassberg peers over us.
We drop into town, and grab those beers at Andre’s Brewery.
I clump past the early-season tourist tables to the “pool”, more of a duck pond.
It’s a lovely cement structure, and I sweep aside the feathers on the green surface and fall in pants, shirt, the lot. What’s good for the geese is good for the gander!
After a long lakka yack we ride off.
I stop in at the local single mom’s functions and potions house to ask why her delicious tub of man cream I treated myself to for R395, was, as Ben chirped, acting like “paint stripper” on my face.
Her mouth goes O-shaped. That’s for your joints not your face! Oops.
But a swap-out is not happening, so I buy a cheaper tub of magical man face goop and leave in good spirits. My man product cupboard overflows.
A little barefooted guy with a serious look on his Trompie face steps out in front of me, arm raised like a cop, bringing Hetty the 1200 beast to a halt.
What now? Why is his demeanour so serious?
He balls his hand and reaches out for a fist pump and scampers back to Starry Nights guest house, naughty little sh*t!
Or just a chimera of the Karoo boy in me.
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