THE BEGINNERS BEGIN

From Alexandra, South Africa to Alexandria, Egypt

IN JULIA'S WORDS

As we set off …

Things I’m afraid of:

• Losing my tweezers and developing a scraggly moustache
• Losing my sense of humour under duress and revealing the blunt bitch that lurks just beneath this amiable veneer
• Hating the food so much that I have wet dreams about Woolworths and feel so homesick I have to come home
• Forgetting that my own cultural norms are just that – my own – and doing unforgivably daft things like putting out my hand to greet someone (in the greetee’s view, an ATROCIOUS faux pas. Stoneable). In fact, not just forgetting, plain not knowing: what if I wave cheerfully and look someone in the eye, and this, in their language, is fighting talk? If I walk on THAT narrow path between stones and it turns out to be Sacred and only for Spirits to walk?
• All the obvious road stuff: getting stuck in a muddy ditch in the middle of a two-week torrent with terrible gyppo guts and the muddy ditch turning out to be exactly on the meeting point of two continental plates, which take it upon themselves at exactly that moment to shift, etc
• All the obvious health stuff: contracting a disease that causes my brain to melt and drip, drip, drip out of my nose; nicking a finger and watching as the bright-purple infection eats my finger down to a mere stub between sunup and lunch; putting my mind down in a distant, unmarked sleepy hollow and never finding it again
• Demons and bandits

Things I’m expecting to be thrilled by:

• Learning how to be an uber organised camp camper (boa feathers filed neatly in the “Dressing up” slider draw)
• Living comfortably in our thinged-down Big Red Car (BRC) incarnation
• Ways of being that I’ve never before even suspected. Like using snakes to charm belts, like using coconut shells as merry-go-rounds for very small dogs on the swirls of rapids 
• Smells not quite sniffed before, but with a whiff of a certain something that drops you through a notch in time and place and lands you in fond, parallel distances
• Grooving with children on a song-filled sunset beach
• Throwing myself on the mercy of the world – and of people – and being gently caught
• Expanses downtrodden by the grace of wild hooves and groaning with antiquities’ forests, so otherworld that my townie eyes swoon
• The silences of people-free places where it’s possible – or so I’ve heard those-who-know say – to hear the sigh and whispered belch of the ancient, and the unborn, ones
• Whole new ways of loving Rehana

Notes on the road

5 April, Friday 2013

So the beginners begin…

Larf at us if you must, but we have destination Egypt fixed for us and our Big Red Car (BRC).

This is despite (because of?) our eminent ignorance. Of our car, not least. OK, so we’ve got a handle on what Old Man Emus may be (fat ol’ shock absorbers) and a vague idea of how a rooftop tent may be assembled (the trick’s climbing on the roof and jiggying the ladder in the right way); but no clue whatsoever about how to use a compressor (it allegedly blows up yer tyres, which those-who-know would have thoughtfully deflated prior to driving on sand/rocky stretches); nor what the fuck to do with the troubling bulge of the orange plastic INFLATABLE jack we’re taking with us to overcome punctures. Actually, when it comes to changing a flat tyre in nowhere’s midst, my preferred technique will be: break out the flares and loudhailer (haven’t bought those yet).

Heck, we only have a half-morning’s training by Toyota on how to work that small stick-shift thingy (with worrying codes on it like H4 and L4) –  which, if you’re not clear, is that goody-gadge magic stick located just down from that familiar stick-shift thing that makes this extraordinary ve-hicle into an extraordinary 4x4 mo-bile.

By the time we roared off in the BRC from Johannesburg around 1 in the afternoon of Friday the 5th, most everybody was frayed. Our tenants (Rehana’s sister Zarina and her family) moved in a month before we left; our stuff was more-or-less packed in the cottage by then as hers moved in. Strange it is in your own kitchen to reach for a pot or a plate and to find it where you expect to – except it’s somebody else’s.

And that’s not all!!! The night before we up-and-left, Daiyan (my 15-year-old nephew) and I confessed to each other: he feels like a dead zombie; I, a flailing fish.

Dead zombie and flailing fish. Such was the household human contents as me, Rehana, Picca, and all our stuff, were crammed into the BRC.

Stanley and Daiyan loading up 

Ruhi and Pikka booking their seats

IN REHANA'S WORDS

ODOMETER READING: 238 772

Friday April 5, 2013

Despite planning this trip for five years, leaving Johannesburg was a frantic affair. Our Big Red Car was only (sort of) ready late on Wednesday afternoon. Some of the equipment we ordered in February hasn’t been installed. We’ll get it done in Durban before we leave the country.

When we collected the car at the workshop we were given a few short lessons on our new equipment – two minutes to learn about the winch, one minute for the compressor, one minute on the battery system, a 30-second tutorial on the fridge and the water tank. There are brochures explaining the rest. Our back windows hadn’t been tinted and, with our life’s goods for one year to be stored at the back of our Big Red Car, it was a non-negotiable necessity. We got to the window place half an hour before they closed.

Yesterday Julia went to check on the condition of our one spare wheel (the other one isn’t ready yet, we’ll collect it in Durban) and discovered to her horror that the special tool needed to remove the spare wheel from its bracket was nowhere to be found. After wasting hours on the phone trying to find the tool from every Toyota dealer in Gauteng, I gave up. Another thing to sort out in Durban; hope we don’t get a puncture on the way there.

Our beautiful beast being prepared for the journey

It was our last night in Joburg and we still hadn’t worked out how to put up the rooftop tent. We needed to sleep in it on our first night away from home. We drove to the park down the road, with my grandson Ruhi Khan, niece Sara Bibi and Pikachu, our little doggie.

Jules read the instruction manual and clambered up the side of the car onto the roof via the handy new aluminium mini bench with fold-uppable legs that the team at Northern Offroad had bought us, after they fitted the tent onto the roof rack and realised we weren’t tall enough to open it without being on the car's roof.

Jules managed to wrest off the cover, lowered the tent's ladder and I grabbed the bottom of it, hoisting the tent's platform off the roof. The tent rose up first time. I climbed the ladder and struggled with the zips at the entrance, crawling inside after I figured out how to roll the canvas door up and out of the way. The tent was up enough to sleep in, we reckoned. Julia, Ruhi, Sara and I rolled around on the king size mattress. We had done that before; months ago when the four of us went to a 4X4 expo to see what we were in for. Sara and Ruhi climbed into every single rooftop tent at the expo and rolled around.

We packed the tent away, tried to erect the side awning, failed and gave up. It was getting dark. We were leaving in the morning. We had to get home to check that everything on Julia’s pages of long lists was packed and ready to go.

We took everything we planned to take on our journey and put in the lounge, filling three couches and a huge swathe of the floor. All of this had to fit into a car!

We had to pack the car on the morning we left. We couldn’t park the Big Red Car on our property; the rooftop tent couldn’t clear the garage door. We left the car overnight in my friend Shannon’s huge front garden. Departure day was also packing day.

Departure day. Frantic, fevered busy-ness with everyone pitching in. Ruhi Khan took up position behind the steering wheel in the car. Ruhi kept saying I’m going with Jules and Nana. Pikachu, on the passenger seat, planted her nose between her paws, keeping her head low as if in the hope that, if she wasn’t spotted, we’d drive off with her (we did).

We had planned to leave at noon to get to our first destination – Fouriesburg in the Free State by 3pm. But we couldn’t. Our last task was a quick pic in Alexandra township down the road – not quite the photo I was hoping we’d get – but we were finally off. We’ll take another photo of us and the Big Red Car in Alexandria, Egypt.

We cheated and stopped for a meal at Steers in Bethlehem. After the week that we had, all our steam had run out. Camp cooking seemed a step too far, kinda like building a bridge over the river Kwai after driving all the way there.

We arrived at our first destination, Karmel Guest Farm just outside Fouriesburg, as the sun was setting. The sandstone cliffs behind the campground were bathed in the golden light.

As we raced away from the Johannesburg autumn we found ourselves in a kaleidoscope of greens, golds and the spectacular pinks, whites and occasional reds of roadside cosmos. Autumn’s much prettier when you’re whizzing past it in a big red car and leaving it behind.

There wasn’t anything else to do when we arrived except to put up the tent, which again went up easy (if not properly). We watched the sun set and then made a roaring fire, which was far more entertaining that anything DSTV has to offer. Early to bed, 80-odd destinations to go.

Caramel cliffs in Fouriesburg