10 days to do the Bash

[Eisbein]

That road that you said was the highlight - it really really looks awesome !

I would love to retrace your steps at some point.

+100

I feel a ride coming on ;D

Hmmmmmm

 

[Doringboom]

Fantastiese paaie daarlangs! Ek sal al die pad van Gauteng af soontoe ry as die Suid-Kaap willehonde 'n lekker trip daar kan organiseer! Dankie tok-tokkie

 

[tok-tokkie]

Friday  Day 4  Somerset East to Hogsback  313km  7h18m

Plan was for mainly gravel to Hogsback.  Turned out there was quite a sting in the tail.

I decided on the Blue Crane B&B.  Went in and asked for a room.  Bit of a bat in the office with something similar for company.  No, we are fully booked.  Can you recommend some other place please?  Will 4 star do? Yea that sounds cool.  I will phone â??mumbleâ??.  Off she goes around the corner to phone â??mumbleâ?? but why that is necessary with a cell phone I canâ??t explain.  Anyway it all turned out good as by the time she came back she had had 2 cancellations so there was room for me. I plumped for the second room.  This was a nice Victorian dorpshuis stuffed full of old brass trinkets (a cupboard full of brass bells for example) and pictures everywhere and china plates etc â?? stuffed full of this stuff.  I had a shower (decent bathroom en suite).  Had asked about where was best for a beer & supper.  Came out now without my dusty riding gear but instead clean jeans, t-shirt & crocs.  Along comes Rika (proprietor) with a nice cold beer â??on meâ??.  Fortunate about the sudden cancellations was I not.  After I finish the beer along comes Rika again & says I should move into the room over the way (not on offer originally) as it has air-conditioning which can be a decided advantage in Somerset East.  Things got even better by the time I left as the price dropped from R350 to R300.  Strange place!

Had some beers at Noahâ??s Art â?? a restaurant/bar place.  I had noticed a Walter Batiss art gallery when driving around town scouting for a B&B.  I have a Water Batiss screenprint & have always associated him with Jozi.  This gallery was in a very nice (& extensive) Victorian building in one of the side streets.  Since this bar had Art in itâ??s name I asked the poppie serving me about the Walter Batiss place.  Seems she has never been down that street as she did not seem to know what or who I was talking about.  Strange place Somerset East.

Had supper at the Blue Crane restaurant (no relation to the B&B).  Chicken stir fry.  Now I have recently been in Thailand & have a pretty good idea what a chicken stir fry is going to be like; particularly as it is part of my staple diet at home.  This was unlike the one at home or in Thailand but it was very filling and quite fine â?? just unusual.  In the corner they had a Christmas tree with flashing lights and stacks of presents stacked around it â?? on 11th October!  Christmas comes early in Somerset East.  Strange place.

The one other guest was interesting.  He is a retired civil engineer from near Port Alfred who has been roped in by central government to help out struggling municipalities such as Somerset East (plus another one nearby).  He has made a dramatic difference he says â?? because it was so easy to make improvements from such a low base.  He recounted the saga of a broken main sewer that periodically gave problems but the technicalities of what was wrong & how to rectify it was a complete mystery to the incumbents.  He was no racist and got on well with the local council and was regarded as something of a magician by them since he had been able to make all sorts of problems just disappear.  He had just the day before concluded a contract with a company in Nelspruit to install a mini hydro-electric turbine on the main water supply to the town.  Behind Somerset East is a flat topped mountain which has perennial springs which supply the water.  This water drops down from the plateau on top & ends up in the Little Fish river.  They should be able to generate about 1/3 of the townâ??s electricity from this water stream.  Smart contract as the plant belongs to the Nelspruit company & Somerset East just buys the electricity at about 30% less than Eskom prices from the company.  Sounds like a real smart deal.  Good engineer.  Nice guy.  The peak electricity demand from Eskom will thus be lowered & Eskom has a sliding scale of charges based on the peak demand.  So the bill will be reduced in 2 ways; 1. They buy 30% at a lower price from the company & 2.the Eskom electricity also becomes cheaper per kWhr because their peak demand will be lower.

As I rode out of town I noticed this dead bridge.  Donâ??t know the story behind it.

My grandparents lived at one time in Golden Valley which is just outside Somerset East so I went there to see it.  Flat farming country with center pivot irrigation schemes.  Station has been abandoned it seems but tracks look as if they are still used occasionally.  I thought Maria Ramos was mad to accept the Transnet job â?? it would be a hopeless case.  Incredibly she seems to be making real progress there.  It is tragic to see years of investment in infrastructure being allowed to deteriorate & be vandalized.  We have dug up the gold and sold it and invested in roads, railways, dams, electricity, phones, hospitals, schools etc.  Years of accumulated saving and capital is being allowed to just disappear.  The prodigal children are now in charge. But, on the other hand a hell of a lot of that capital was also squandered on an absurd & inhuman policy.  As Bono said â??Am I bugging you?  Donâ??t mean to bug ya.â?.

Nearby is a memorial to Slagtersnek.  I couldnâ??t remember what happened there.  Turns out to be one of the catalysts for the Groot Trek.

https://routesandroots.blogspot.com/2005/12/slagtersnek-rebellion-beam-in-museum.html

Leaving Golden valley I followed the Little Fish river downstream to Carlisle Bridge.  On the way I noticed this windpump.  These simple machines have made an incredible difference to our country.  Simple and small as they are it is they that have enabled settlement on the Karoo and all the rest of the country away from the rivers.  I have not noticed an Aeromotor before, I have â??Windpumps in South Africaâ? by James Walton & André Pretorius so looked it up when I got home.  Lloyds made me think it was something to do with Stewarts & Lloyds but it turns out that Lloyds was the name of the company in Chicago that made them.  They started making them in 1888.  They had an agent in Cape Town called Lloyds & Co in Burg street.  This one has East London on the tail & the book reprints an advert from 1913 by Lloyds & Co in East London so they had an office there as well even though it is not mentioned in the text.  Lloyds continued as the agents (Poynton Bros in Pretoria were also agents) until WW2 when the American company switched to armaments production.  After WW2 P. Andrag & Sons became the agent & went on to manufacture the 8ft (2,4m) model locally.  So this windpump pre-dates WW2 making it 70 years old at least.  It has lost a couple of teeth (blades) but still functions.  I wonder how often its oil has been changed.

The Aeromotor was considered the Cadillac of windpumps.  It was made from plain steel and galvanized as the last step so there were no exposed ungalvanised edges (as there would be if it had been made from galvanized angle iron and plate).

Without these things South Africa (& USA, Australia, Argentina ���) would be very different.

Wherever you go, you see them: wherever you see them, they go.

I saw this tree with a cloud of butterflies around it.  For photography 101 â?? I should have got off the bike & taken the shot from low down to isolate the tree against a plain backdrop of blue sky.  Nice tree, poor photo.  Lesson learned I hope.

Straight road

Sheep in road.  I liked the men on horses.  Not cowboys but are they sheepboys?

Fish river at Carlisle Bridge.
Upstream

Downstream.

From Carlisle bridge I turned northwards & got to Fort Beaufort all on pretty good gravel roads but always with the odd pot hole of wash-away to keep you alert.  Went on up to Seymour & tried to get petrol.  None available.  There is a direct road to Hogsback which I took as I was unsure if I had enough for the longer route (since I only did 313km this day I neednâ??t have worried).  Mainly a nice gravel road but there was a small rocky section with a big step in it which was quite a mission to get over with a loaded bike.  The roughest piece of road by far that I encountered on the trip.

It is noticeable that I took less & less photos each day at time went by.  I carried my camera in my Camelbak so it was not readily to hand.  At the bash I bought the SW Motech tank bag for exactly this reason.  The camera will be right to hand & the bag just clips off when you leave the bike.  It is going to make photos much easier.  Trailrider took 1000 photos on his trip & that was made relatively easy because he carries his camera over his shoulder for easy access.  No pictures of this difficult little problem.

 

[Eisbein]

Excellent so far !

I love the fact that you are writing also from an engineer's perspective.
I like reading details about things like the projects that the other guest in Somerset East was involved with. Also the windpump background.

Very cool report so far - on the one hand I can't wait for you to post the rest, but then I also realize that the quicker you post it all, the quicker it will be over...

Thanks!

 

[JonW]

Very lekker trip and report Tok, enjoying it immensely.

 

[Watty]

[
Nearby is a memorial to Slagtersnek.  I couldnâ??t remember what happened there.  Turns out to be one of the catalysts for the Groot Trek.

The Slagtersnek rebellion

In 1815 a farmer (Freek Bezuidenhoudt), who had been accused of ill-treating one of his labourers, was summoned before court in Cradock.  When the landdros of Somerset East attempted to arrest him for contempt of court he resisted arrest and was killed in a subsequent shoot-out.  What made this incident even more inflammatory was the fact that he was shot by coloured troops under the command of an English ensign.  His brother swore to avenge his death and this led to a revolt against Governor Somersetâ??s government in which disaffected sixty men took part. This rebellion was quickly and severely suppressed by Colonel Jacob Glen Cuyler, an American in the British army.

After the revolt was crushed, a tribunal was held in which 39 men were found guilty. Five of them were sentenced to be hanged at Slagtersnek and the others were imprisoned.

This hanging became something of a cause célèbre as four out of five of the ropes broke. Despite the popular belief that this was an act of God, Cuyler sent away for fresh rope which caused a delay of several hours before the remaining four were hung for the second time.

Occurrences like this strengthened negative feelings against the British government.

 

[tok-tokkie]

Saturday  Day 5    Hogsback rundfart    230km  5h31m

Did a little outride

My surname is Malan so the Nico Malan pass on my map beconed.  Took it from the top down.  Nice flowing tarred pass.

My map showed a minor road leading back north to Whittlesea which would allow me to come back to Seymour & Hogsback over the Devilâ??s Bellows (odd name â?? what lies there?) and Katberg pass.  Trailrider had waxed lyrical about Katberg pass saying it had everything from forest track to sand and rocks sized from mossie to volstruis egg size.  I had images of van Zyleâ??s in Koakoland so this approach suited me just fine as I could always duck back and get around the Katberg pass if it was too much for me.  Trailrider had also done the direct road from Seymor to Hogsback but rated Katberg way above that.  Well I rated that road from Seymour to Katberg as more than I wanted to do again & here was something Trailrider rates higher & it has SAND â?? the very thing that has put me under the surgeonâ??s knife.  A handy escape route was essential before I would go there.

But the minor road â?? Jeep track â?? to Whittlesea was a delight.  Hardly used at all it seems but in good condition.  Winds up the escarpment then you meander across the plateau to Whittelsea â?? descending slowly all the way.

This is the bit climbing up the escarpment.  On the photo of Nico Malanâ??s this is just off picture on the left.

This is the track to Whittlesea on the plateau.

The road to the Devilâ??s Bellows is very little used.  It is overgrown with weeds in several places and not much used at all judging by the tyre tracks.  Lots of cow pats and goat droppings on it.  I was not even sure I was on the right road but Karin Garmin said I was doing just fine so that was reassuring.  Then I came to a section that LuckyStriker had shown in his post & I knew all was well and Karin was not delusional.

Rode along the top and saw this view.  I was the one being delusional.  I had expected that the Devilâ??s Bellows would take me down the escarpment & that the Katberg Pass was going to take me up again; not having realized that the winding climb up from Whittelsea had, in fact, been the Devilâ??s Bellows with LuckyStrikerâ??s picture being the crux of the matter. (Ho ha - I made a typo there which I just spotted in time - I wrote Devil's Elbows which i think is just as good if not better)  So here I was innocently looking down from the top of Katberg thinking I was about to go down Devilâ??s Bellows when in fact I was about to launch myself into the dreaded Katberg pass with all the terrible terrors Trailrider had warned of.

Start of Katberg Pass from the top (except I thought it was the Devilâ??s Bellows).

While taking that photo my bike eased forwards off the side stand & fell on its side.  I am not strong enough to pick it back up by myself unaided.  You see that peculiar toolbox/crashbar thing  across the front of the bike?  Well it contains, tyre levers, spare tube, spanners and the 3 pipes you see laid out on the track between the bike & my ATGATT.  (In the post box that lives where the right silencer used to be is a compressor, another spare tube & some more tools).  Those 3 pipes fit into each other to make a moerse long lever which fits into the passenger footrest hanger and enables whimpy me to put the bike back on its tyres.  I had just used it & felt all vindicated for having devised & created a way for me to get around my handicap.  That toolbox opens from both ends so I can get to the pipes no matter which way it falls.

I had dropped the bike earlier in Baviaans but then I had the panniers on & they held the bike up sufficiently that I was able to pick it up without the moerse long lever.

When I got to this woody section of the pass I realized that I must be on the fabled Katberg pass that Trailrider had raved about.  (Something odd has happened here.  Flikr has distorted the picture to squash it from side to side.  I think I know what the problem is but just imagine that my bike did not get squashed when it fell over higher up the pass.)

Damned if I was going to take the shortcut from Seymour to Hogsback again so went over the dam and up the nice pass into Hogsback.  What a nice day and Katberg is a damp squib in my book.  Do the Jeep track pass â?? much nicer I think.  Devilâ??s Bellows really is very nice though.

 

[Trailrider]

I'm starting to think the road we were on was not the Katberg pass at all... We were lost after all. : We did do the section down to Seymor, but we came along a 2spoor from the Tarkastad side? I'll see if I can identify on a map. :-\

Great report so far Tok Tokkie! ;D :thumleft:

Edit:

I tried to find it on Google Earth. We definately came through the Post Retief Conservancy and a gate (I signed the book "WD Bash!"). It seems we were on some back roads (after getting lost from the locked gate on Watty's route), eventualy T'd into the Katberg pass and ended up riding to Wittlesea before we realized we were heading in the wrong direction and rode to Balfour. We thought all of it were Katberg pass. :confused5:

Unfortunatly the forum does not allow the upload of .kmz (Google Earth) files. :-[

 

[Eisbein]

I've said it too often, but here I go again - Awesome ride report!

I have seen that mechanism that locks the front tool carrier and it really is well made. Awesome idea about making the lever to be able to lift the bike again after it went for a nap...

Very cool and thanks for the regular updates.

 

[Kykdaar]

Awesome report, thank you.

 

[Grondpad]

Best Bash report by far!  8)

 

[growweblaar]

Very nice, TT . Great mix of text and pictures in the right relationship. I also like your bike-pickup-lever and other mods ;D. Why don't you share them in the Pooratech thread: https://wilddog.net.za/forum/index.php?topic=12116.0

 

[mountainboy]

Very cool TT

I love this report!!!

you inspire me!!

 

[tok-tokkie]

Sunday    Day 6    Hogsback to Colchester  337 km  7h44m

On Friday night I was talking to Trailrider & he said he was going to ride the little yellow road (map colour) along the coast from Port Alfred to PE which includes going through Woody Cape Nature Reserve.  He invited me to join in.  I had made no definite plans for a return route â?? and was going to ask for advice.  I have never been to Port Alfred and had not seen that part of the coast so I was very pleased to be able to join.

Besides talking to Trailrider and Eisbein I talked to Ektoknbike which was interesting.  He suddenly said â??Hier praat ek Engels en ek praat nooit Engels nieâ??  Thanks man, your red wine was great.  I want to buy a couple of cases.

Besides Trailrider there was also Snap Crackle Pop on his 125 Honda, Eisbein & Letsgofishing.  Trailrider has given an excellent account of our doings so I will only add bits that have not already been reported.  I felt I was the guest on this trip so stuck in the middle of the group and did not stop for photographs. 

When we were in the Double Drift Nature Reserve Letsgofishing took the lead but asked me if Karin Garmin could find Breakfast Vlei as we were going to turn left there towards Grahamstown.  I was about third in the group as we rode along & Karin says to me that I am arriving at my destination on the right.  I assure you there was no vlei to be seen on my right.  In fact I didnâ??t even see a junction in the road at all.  Seems she was right because we ended up in Peddie without ever noticing a turn off.  A similar thing happened three days later so I am learning to believe Karin and have a good look when she tells me something and not think that she has had a typical female bad map reading day & my destination must obviously be around the corner or over the hill as it clearly isnâ??t here.

At Peddie Eisbein & Letsgofishing hightailed it for Grahamstown & home but the three of us  pootled off down to the coast.  I say pootled & remember that SCP was on his 125  (he also has a KLE400) but if you look at the distances I travelled this trip & the hours on the road & you will see that my average speed was hardly any different this day from those before.

Trailrider led us into some interesting neighbourhoods & grassy twee spoor but we hit the coast road just at the Fish River Sun (or some Sun ecological catastrophe). 

Interestingly Trailrider turns left and proceeds to ride up the road with the ocean on his right side.  Remember he said he was going towards PE this day.  Well obviously he has some secret plan and clever trick for lunch nearby.  Well no actually; as after 20 minutes of this he stops and asks where does my Zumo say we are headed.  KZN.  O gats I have made a mistake.  So we turn around and proceed with the ocean over our left shoulder.  It sounds so obvious but I think I understand perfectly what went wrong.  Trailrider has a little luggage frame over his headlight that comes as standard on his bike.  He carries a 5 litre petrol can there in a vinyl bag with a clear map pocket on top.  So he has the map right there in front of him as he rides.  On a Zumo you can have the map displayed 3 different ways.  North up,  track up or 3 dimensional.  I soon realized that track up is the way to use it on the bike & north up when you take it off the bike.  We were riding south before we hit the coast road but Trailrider had a map with north up in front of him â?? I have tried my Zumo that way and it is highly confusing. Track down instead of track up so left = right.  So Trailrider got confused.  But it was bloody funny.

So we get to Port Alfred instead of East London thank goodness.  I knew nothing about this bit of the country & was really surprised that we kept crossing one river estuary after the next.  This being not a fashionable part of the country they have relatively few houses on them and it is all really quite low key and pleasant.  We kept crossing bridges with a fine estuary and some houses scattered along the edge & sprinkled on the hillside behind.  So we arrive at Port Alfred by cresting a hill and dropping down while circling to the right & the whole flood plain is jammed tight with the most horrific damn Tuscan development.  Bliksem it was ugly but I am so pleased it was there attached to an existing urban development & not on one of the quaint estuaries we had left behind.  Then there is this nice arched bridge over the river which we crossed then turned beside it & went out to the beach where there was a nice Italian place for lunch & beers.  Some chicks were at the table over my right shoulder who were impressed by my biker mates I hear but I was unaware of this feature.  There was a bell thing on the table which rang the bell in the kitchen by radio beams or something â?? that I had not seen before.

This is where the river enters the sea at Port Alfred.  The lunch place was right behind me as I took this photo.  Nice place.

As Trailrider has reported we were foiled in our attempt to ride the yellow road through Woody Cape Nature Reserve so had to slab it on the tar to Colchester where we were to camp the night.  We all three bitched about riding tar and the beers made us drowsy.  I cranked up Bruce Springsteen & he kept me awake.  Pink Floyd â??Animalsâ?? & â??Wish You Were Hereâ?? and Joe Satriani â??Surfing With the Alienâ?? turned out to be the music I listened to by far the most on this trip but full throttle Springsteen melts tar.

So Trailrider has told you what a surprise the Colchester camp site was.  I was gobsmakked by the beauty of the place.  Why?  Because it is still the same as when Bartholomew Dias sailed past, still the same as when Mohammed walked this earth probably.  Absolutely pristine.  I am an old surfer & my favourite surf spot on the peninsula is Scarbourough because when you stand in the car park & check the break (point, not the beach break as the rip there kills me) you see not even a telegraph pole; there is nothing to show you that people have been around.  It is a great wave to surf but that setting really makes a big difference to how I feel about the spot.  (You can surf in the Cape Point Nature Reserve also & those spots are absolutely unspoiled but then you are not in an urban area.  I salute Nature Conservation for permitting surfing there).  Here is an estuary 30km from PE which is pristine; I had never imagined such a thing could exist.

Estuary first glimpse.

Estuary for real with track to campsite at mouth on left.

Dune

Sandbar at the mouth from our camp site.

Setting up camp.  Nobody else about â?? all to ourselves.

This is 30 km from PE so the wind huffed & puffed & blew Snap Crackle Popâ??s house down in the night.  Mine is the little one with yellow & it was so wind proof that I had to open the doors each end to let some air through.  It was also waterproof the first night in Hogsback.  Well pleased with it; I bought it the day before I left & made them erect it in the shop so I could see how to do it & how big it really is. K-Way Makulu.  Makulu means big to me & they say it is a 2 man well me & my vrou are going to be mighty closer than usual when we share it.  It is a bit bulky & heavy when packed up.

There is a Spar just where you turn off into the camp site so that was convenient but this was Sunday evening & no beer was to be had so I was sent to buy Lite Coke & ice & drank lots of it with Trailriderâ??s brandy from his poison bottle.  Snap Crackle Pop did the braaing & the washing.  I was the lazy sod doing nothing. Good times.  Thanks guys that was great. 

 

[Scribble]

great report
am learning alot love
the lever to lift the bike

 

[Eisbein]

Again - very cool!

I love the humour bits in between as well.

 

[Trailrider]

Cool report Tok Tokkie. There is a lot more poison where those came from ;D

Can't wait for the rest!

 

[tok-tokkie]

Monday  Day 7  Colchester to Baviaanskloof    248km  7h39m

I passed through Baviaans on day 2.  Having been led astray by TR & SCP  I asked if I could ride with them to George instead of cutting north to Graaf-Reinet & the Great Karoo.

Again I stuck between them.  We slabbed down to PE.  Roads got confusing so I was asked to guide through the dorp with Karinâ??s help.  I have not worked out how to set waypoints directly into the Zumo so could not take us through Bethelsdorp & Lourie to Hankey as TR wished.  Had to just ask for Hankey so Karin took us straight down the N2 of course â?? but that is the shortest, if most boring, route.  On to Patensie where we filled up.  (Since then I have found a whole page of additional settings for the Zumo â?? if I had it set to â??shortestâ?? as against â??quickestâ?? route she would probably been on the same page as us.)

It is somewhat different this time as I was  not riding alone through Baviaans and dropping the bike is not such an issue.  But I did just that as TR has shown in his thread about this part of his Bash ride.

Baviaans

The helicopter that I saw on the way through was still there.  It turns out they have relocated some rhino into the kloof but the female keeps walking out to the south & they have to catch her & bring her back.  She is pregnant; they are concerned that darting he may have affected the pregnancy.  The rhino was in a truck â?? you can see the door of the truck on the right of the photo.

Trailrider just loves watercrossings.  First photos are Snap Crackle pop, second two are Trailrider.  I messed up the first photo but TR was very happy to have a good excuse to ride back through and do it again.

At another driffie with a concrete bottom TR rode around in circles in the water.  Since the flooding Baviaans must be very different now with the reeds & papyrus washed away and the passes now bedeviled with wash-aways, scoured ruts and exposed rocks.

TR had arranged for us to spend the night in the cave at Bakkrans.  This is the interior of the shop there.  Shops like this are becoming rare nowadays with self service, trolleys & check out counters being the norm.  This is how it all used to be.

Shop

Two pathetic photos of Bakkrans.  Read TRâ??s report for decent photos and proper description.  He includes a photo of a Knysna Lourie; what he does not tell you is that mother nature has blessed it with the most beauriful colours â?? especially the copper wings when seen in flight but has compensated that with with the most awful â??songâ?? â?? much worse than a Hadeda.  They gave a good chorus before going to bed & again when they got up.

More brandy from the poison bottle that night.  Ice was more expensive than petrol here â?? except there was no petrol to be had but TR had his little can on the front of his bike.

This is way off topic but is possibly interesting as it is something that happened to me while I was on the trip.  I had been talking to TR & SCP about what a fantastic ride I had had on the JSE & NYSE the last two years.  Well this is what happened while I was on the Bash trip to one of my shares.  It is the worst of my shares but the NYSE took quite a slide while I was away.

 

[tok-tokkie]

Tuesday  Day 8  Bakkrans to George  288km  9h01m

I was woken by the awful squawking of the lovely Knysna Loeries.  The cave is on the side of a narrow kloof, the floor of the kloof has lovely indigenous trees which are home to many birds.  Cape Robins compensated for the Louries with their delightful song.

Bakkrans is towards the end of Baviaanskloof.  There is 37km of flat gravel road after Baviaans before joining the tarred N9.  This wheat (? Watty put me right again please) field on the way to Uniondale.

We filled up in Uniondale.  My Dakkie took 9 litres and Snap Crackle Popâ??s 125 took 9,1 litres.  Dakkies are extremely fuel efficient.

We went through Uniondale Poort which has since been extensively damaged by floods and the road is now closed.  Then through Prince Alfredâ??s Pass.  From Avontuur at the start of the pass to Knysna is 80km & you can count that whole distance as being the pass.  Going the way we did the first bit down to De Vlugt is on the side of fynbos mountain slopes.  De Vlugt is on a flat section then you descend going down a kloof with the road largely on dry stone retaining walls.  This pass was built over four years starting in 1863 and what you see today is pretty well identical to what Thomas Baine & his band of 250 convicts built all those years ago (140 years ago).  Here are SCP & TR on a bridge which has had a concrete span inserted at some stage (Baine used stinkwood).

A grader had been through scraping the road just before we went over so the surface was quite loose & slippery.  SCP & I found it quite tricky but TR said he was finding it just fine.  Well look at this photo of him running really wide on a corner.  This is in the lower kloof section.

Waterfall

Cascade

Baine established his base in De Vlugt once the approach road through the forest had been completed.  This is a house occupied by one of the foremen.  Baineâ??s house is set back from the road behind some others.  It has a stoep at the front with quite a drop in front of it.  His 12 year old daughter was attacked by a turkey and fell from the stoep and died.

This house was built subsequently I believe; it is also in De Vlugt.  Miena Moo can tell us more about it since she grew up in it. (Notice the cow sign at her house.)

The kloof section ends about 50 km from Knysna but Baine had a lot of obstacles in this section because it was ancient indigenous forest & the huge trees were very difficult to remove in those days.  TR led us through Koms se Pad which leads round the back of Knysna through the indigenous forest.

#2

#3

That 80 km of road I will make a big detour to do again.  Highly recommended to anyone.  I understand fully why TR never tires of riding it.

We joined the N2 right on the George edge of Knysna and simply followed it over the bridge then turned inland to the Phantom Pass.  This is the first of the seven passes that take you to George without having to go on the N2.  I had not done Prince Alfredâ??s before, nor had I done the Seven Passes.  This road was still being repaired following the closure of the Kaaimansgat pass due to road slippage which made all the N2 traffic have to be diverted though the Seven Passes.  The Southern Cape dogs have really beautiful roads to ride on.  Kos se pad is a delight, so is the Seven Passes but Prince Alfredâ??s is the highlight to me.

 

[tok-tokkie]

Wednesday  Day 9  George to Ladismith  222 km  5h 46m

I stayed in a motel in George.  Had supper at some up market Italian place that served lousy wine by the glass.  Walking back to the motel I saw the one person I know in George (besides TR & SCP now) in the door of a pub but I didnâ??t greet him as I wanted to write up my journal & was ready for bed.

Trailrider recommended that I go up & down Montague pass before heading for Atakwaskloof.  It is the oldest unaltered pass in the country being built 20 years before Prince Alfredâ??s pass.  Because it retains its original layout from the days before dynamite (gunpowder was used) when horse drawn vehicles were the fastest & oxen powered the â??lorriesâ?? it is a twisting & turning delight.  In the picture the road is to be seen at the lower left; along the top is the railway line.  If you look at the 1:250 000 map you will see how much more difficult it is to get a railway line across a mountain because the slope has to be much more gentle and the curves have to be much wider than is possible with a road.  South Africa has a particularly narrow railway track gauge â?? the narrower the gauge to tighter the bends can be which is why ours is so small.

This is a bridge at the base of the pass.

After going up Montague I turned around & came back down.  I would recommend it to any one.  TR recommended a series of back roads leading west along the foothills of the Outeniqua Mountains from Blanco to Ruiterbosch

I stopped at this stream for an early lunch.

Then carried on along this nice back road.  There was a big bush fire somewhere further to the west so it was a bit hazy.

After crossing the road that goes over the Robinson Pass I came to the turn off for the Atakwaskloof.  This was the original access route for wagons to the Little Karoo (Kannaland).  Ensign Isaac Schriver pioneered this route in 1689 by following an elephant track.  In those days it was heavily wooded and it took him 4 days to clear his path and drive through.  Now the forests are all gone, just some pine plantations remain.  (The only other access to the Klein Karoo at that time was Kogmanskloof between Ashton & Montague which I had used eight days before.)  As you can see from the photos this is not a mountain pass, the road runs along the slope of the mountain.

#2

This is towards the end of Atakwaskloof the road from Herbertsdale to Van Wykdorp over the neck in the distance

The next photo is looking back the way I have come through Atakwas.

I had intended to turn right at Van Wyksdorp and go over the Rooiberg pass and spend the night in Calitzdorp where I had spent the first night of the trip.  Karin Garmin told me when I got to Van Wyksdorp sayin it was on my right.  All I saw was verlate vlaktes but there was a hill in front so I expected to find it over the hill.  Well Karin was right (just as she had been about Breakfast Vlei when we were in the Double Drift reserve) of course.  I just blasted along on the road catching up with a truck which was kicking up a huge amount of dust.  He was sticking pretty much to the middle of the road; what wind there was was from our left so I eventually blasted past him on the left as that was where I had the least murky view.  I suspect he got quite a surprise when I suddenly appeared before him on the unexpected side.  Itâ??s a long stretch & I had eaten enough of his dust.