Day 356 / 121

Date: 3 April 2023
Sleeping location: (Floor of) Fort Brown General Store, 33.1298S, 26.6162E, South Africa
Distance (km today/total/total Part 2): 110 / 22161 / 7324
Estimated climb (m today/total/total Part 2): 1100 / 209500 / 91500
For 24 years I’ve been living next door to: Alice 
Day in three words: Beaufort Annoyance Scale

On and off wind and rain in the night meant a very broken sleep, and thunderstorms in the morning meant a lazy getaway whilst I waited for it to clear, made a load of food and watched a dog running round like crazy after the monkeys in the trees. It cleared up around 9.30 and I was away a bit after 10. I had three days to cover a bit less than 300km to Port Elizabeth/Gqeberha to meet my dad for the final chapter, and I knew my vague route but nothing else.

Straight out of Hogsback I had a big descent down a narrow twisty road through trees, like a green tunnel. Down at the bottom, looking back at the huge forested mountains I’d come down from, I couldn't even see the road. It's like a secret passage up to the secret hippy kingdom. After that it was more empty rolling savannah for the rest of the day with a wind apparently coming from every direction at once except behind me. It didn't slow me down too much initially as this was mostly a gentle downhill section, but it was noisy and annoying*. It also rained on me for a bit even though there wasn't a rain cloud for miles, the droplets apparently being shipped in from elsewhere by the wind.

Then I arrived in the big, busy and rundown town of Alice, providing an interesting angle on the song by Smokie - maybe the singer had been living in the village one over from Alice, and Roy Chubby Brown should have been saying “WHERE the fuck is Alice”. (Shortly after Alice was a sign for Roxeni, who presumably doesn’t have to put on the red light-i.) In Alice I turned right and had a 20km section along a big, empty, wide rolling road through big, empty, wide rolling savannah, under a dark angry sky with the wind now from my left so less of an annoyance. There were more thunderstorms about but thankfully to my right so they were being blown away from me. There was nowhere to stop so I just kept going for almost 60km before taking lunch in the garden of a library in the town of Fort Beaufort, aptly named given the wind issues of the day. Here I met a black man called Zola who had been trying to make a claim for some white land on behalf a school (I think, he talked very fast) for 13 years now. Another reminder of the race-based inequality surrounding land ownership here, a legacy of the apartheid years. 

After Fort Beaufort the road went into the middle of nowhere and stayed there. After some citrus farms on the outskirts of FB there was nothing except huge open savannah for 50km, all of it fenced off. There was absolutely no chance of getting any water but I had seen a place called Fort Brown, which had a police station, on the map and headed for that. The landscape was quite beautiful and I saw lots of antelope and warthogs, but the headwind made progress slow and I didn't hit Fort Brown until just after sunset. It was a tiny village but the shop was open and I went down and asked two people sitting outside if there was anywhere I could camp. They were Piet and Ronel, the shop proprietors, and after a bit of conversation they said that I could sleep on the floor of the shop. 

They also lived there so we sat and chatted while I made my dinner of peanut butter noodles with soya mince. Piet and Ronel seemed to exist entirely on a diet of fags, spirits and mixer and toast with margarine and were intrigued by my very low budget dinner; when I gave them some to try they seemed to think it was way more delicious than is surely possible. After I looked at some pictures of her dogs Ronel warmed to me and brought me some curried eggs (tasty) and a carved wooden heart (cute but impractical, now strapped to Maggie’s front rack) as gifts. They were a funny pair, but nice and they had some interesting stories and information. The entire village, including the shop and thousands of acres of nearby land, belongs to an American who flies in the ultra rich for bespoke safaris. It is 36,000 Rand (£1,600/$2,000) a night to stay there and there were rumours of Travolta a few weeks earlier. Meanwhile Piet and Ronel sell bread to the locals, who all work on the ranch, and soda and trinkets to passing truck drivers. Again, same place, parallel lives.

*I swear noise levels have little to do with wind strength and I have never really understood why