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In his 82nd year, Dave Holmes feels the wind rushing in his face.
He hears the thump of 71-year-old Murgatroyd, his 500cc London-built Matchless G80 single-piston motorcycle between his feet, reverberating through his body.
All around him is the landscape of SA.
“It enthrals me,” he says.
We speak at his builder son Kerry’s home in Bonza Bay on Sunday.
It is day 26 of his grand ride, doing about 200km a day, with 4,300km on the clock.
This is an imaginary clock — his speedometer fell to pieces on the road.
There is nothing more than the basics on the beat-generation-looking long-distance travelling machine.
Standing next to my 2006 1200 GSA, Murgatroyd is like our City Hall parked up against the municipality’s Trust Centre — one is tiny, detailed with curly vintage edgings, the other large and stark with shiny clean lines — two eras of elegance.
The Matchless, however, is just handlebars, clutch, accelerator, foot pedals all marked and scuffed, covered by a mottled patina of tough rebelliousness.
But this is what Dave, in the late ’70s early ’80s a former East London self-trained chef and manager of popular family steakhouse Dave’s Kitchen, owned by then-Daily Dispatch executives Terry Briceland and Alan Beaumont, has chosen to ride on this big old ride.
He and Kerry recall the lines outside the 220-seater — once they had 48 parties waiting for a table.
A year ago, he felt the “urge for going” — the title of his favourite song from his beloved artist, Joni Mitchell — and having made that decision was racked with apprehension, fear really.
A high-age man on a sketchy motorcycle, two saddle bags, a tank bag and a 60-litre Backpacker Canyon sack hanging off his back.
A pair of black leather pants and a tattered, peeling black — now brown — leather jacket, the shoulders still shredded from where the young Jodie Scheckter grated it along the ground, a “piss-pot” helmet and World War 2 goggles.
He packed a small tent, Bodum coffee plunger, stove, air mattress and sleeping bag.
Sparse.
He has no Garmin, no map book, and is loath to turn off the engine.
The Matchless has no electric starter motor (pfft!) and even his kick-start is packed away, pressed under the saddle bag, so he uses downhill run-starts to swing the motor.
He resolves his separation anxiety with another Mitchell lyric — she is “frightened by the devil, and drawn to those ones that ain’t afraid” and informs his four children from two wives of his solo journey, bids farewell to his Johannesburg businesswoman, life partner of 24 years — and 19 years younger than him — Michelle Knight.
April 10 he rides off — in “absolutely the wrong direction”.
He has made contact with never-yet-met cousin Jo Holmes at Tonteldoos near Dullstrom, and the welcome is “effusive and wonderful”. It settles the soul.
Murgatroyd (the district that leads to the moors), the Matchless, gets some mechanical work done, and onward he goes, down the southeast to get horribly lost in an endless rural KwaZulu-Natal homesteading area.
But people on the road are kind and curious, fascinated, in fact.
He recalibrates and heads across the interior to the West Coast and people start to open their homes for his overnight stays.
He has no love for the digital era, feels “the kids have given up”.
“They sit in front of screens all day. They are too conformist. There is not enough free thinking. They do not live in the physical moment. It is tragic.”
Pop music is “fatuous mush” compared with deep rock, folk and classical.
So says the child who, as a 10-year-old hungrily read 100 encyclopedias.
In the 1950s these were the internet, all information about anything compressed in large sets of books.
He sees the comparison with Google, but says the digital information systems spits out short, shallow bites.
He had wonderful parents, but has always been a loner.
He remembers as an 11-year-old the 10km beach walk from then-Port Elizabeth to Cape Recife.
When he got to the lighthouse, a tea towel was fluttering and he walked into a tea with doughnuts laid out on a stone table by the lighthouse keeper and his wife.
David was mesmerised by all the brass, gleaming dark woods and shiny red artefacts and went on to live an exciting life of sailing, diving, skydiving and sea rescue.
As a 20-year-old constable in the British South Africa Police driving more than 200km an hour in a 3.8-litre Jaguar Mach II on fine then-Rhodesia roads, he discovered speed.
But as it all winds down, the lifelong nonconformist — “I will never live in an old age home, I rail against the norm, maturity is just beyond me” — finds himself pootling along at 80km/h on the road to nowhere — at 100km/h the bike would be “caning it” .
He feels the fight against the “emasculation” of ageing, for his right to remain independent, dependent only on his own resourcefulness, critical of others his age who have “given up too soon” and “take no chances”.
He has a “zest for life”, and feels a need for risk.
On a corner, he presses down on the throttle accelerating into the lean, wanting to feel the bike approach its engineered limit.
In this zone, on this edge, he feels exhilarated and alive.
“There is life before death.”
On the road, he is flabbergasted by the deterioration of tar roads which have become a “potholed lace”, and saddened by the remarkable loss of insect life to pesticides.
He notices the return of insects smashing into his goggles as he crosses the Krom River at Humansdorp heading back to hometown East London.
There have been hardships.
His first night camping on his air mattress saw him awake, his back locked in spasm.
“I crawled like a spider to a tree and raised myself up slowly.”
He immediately jettisoned it all — tent, sleeping, bag, air mat, liner.
No need to dispense with the Bodum, it broke early, but he kept his stove, enjoying coffee, sometimes made from the “relaxing” mesquite bean roasted and sold in the Northern Cape, simply allowing the grinds to sink to the bottom of the cup and enjoying the remaining brew.
There is an irony to his minimalism — much of his accommodation in towns and on farms is a result of a WhatsApp group, “80 going on 70" (his age and the bike’s age) set up by his children, and when he gets in at night he whips out his laptop from his sack and journals on Facebook.
In his latest post, he writes: “While many things have broken or fallen off, the engine has been steady and dependable.
“During the trip I have lost seven mirrors, the speedo shook itself into its recipe parts, the decompression cable broke, the lights have vibrated the terminals loose, the rear brake has lost efficiency and the hooter disappeared in the Karoo.”
But he says in the interview: “She is running beautifully and has used no oil.”
This is big picture stuff for motorcyclists.
He describes coming out of the blazing dry heat of the Northern Cape desert to the coast at Lamberts Bay as “riding out the oven into a white wall of ice”, with temperatures dropping instantly from the high 30s to as low as 4°C — caused by the cold Atlantic Ocean.
His left eye is also cause for concern — it is fitted with a scleral contact lens and the glare and grit have left a redness.
Other than that, he says his good health is his greatest asset — possibly even more reliable than his motorcycle.
His son, Kerry, photographer Luis Wullf and I help Dave roll Murgatroyd from her parking under the tree for a photo shoot and she is not that light, about 190kg.
David does the shoot and then heads off for a rest.
His next stop on Tuesday is Hogsback.
He posts: "... next stint Northwards and again into The Karoo.
“The open road has an almost magnetic appeal. Alone with my thoughts, I can exalt in the fleeting presence of family and friends, a privilege and a pleasure!”
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