A Route (62) less explored!

For most people, the best part of any holiday is the holiday itself. Reasonable right? Of

course it is. It’s what you’ve been looking forward to for months: you finally get the

opportunity to chill, party and adventure without the thought of work to greet

your hangover. What a pleasure.

While this is true for most reasonable human beings, there are some of us who value the

road trip there and back as much as the holiday itself. For those of us who live in places like

South Africa, we understand that the trip there and back can be as awesome as the holiday on the other side – or the one just finished!

I recently had a little 10 day getaway in St Francis (Jeep top down and all!), a gem of a place tucked away in a far-off corner of Africa’s Eastern Cape. While the holiday was awesome, filled with tit-bits of safari, surfing and lazy day booze-cruising, the trip back was as brilliant.

Yes, I should have been buried in my depression returning home, but the road trip between the Eastern Cape and Cape Town is just too awesome to leave a man sad.

No, I’m not going to dive into the immense beauty of the Garden Route because you’ve

already read all about it in blogs like these. Besides, I could dedicate an entire book to the

beauty of the Garden Route and still not capture how mesmerising it is. Instead, like John

Keats does in his ‘Ode to Autumn’, I will dedicate this piece to a less celebrated route: Route

62.

No, it’s not the gorgeous spring beauty we’re accustomed to, but it’s the splendid and

under appreciated inland alternative that, like autumn, deserves this praise.

When I arrived in George, still an odd 400 kilometers from Cape Town, I decided to turn off

towards Oudtshoorn, an ostrich-loving Karoo town situated about an hour inland from the

coast. Around here, through the magnificent Outeniqua pass, South Africa dries out pretty

quickly and what you’re left with is hardy, semi-arid desert that, when traversed by route

62, is randomly broken by mountain gorges as green as a watered suburb. It’s an

extraordinary place to say the least!

The route is an immense painting of the most scenic and ancient of dry places South Africa

has to offer, water-holed by fantastic and bizarre stops like Ronnies Sex Shop, a

restaurant-come-bar as odd as its awesome owners.

Then there’s Barrydale – a Karoo loving little town of curio shops that relies on the comings-and-goings of passer-byers like me, a town that was founded for no other reason but to combat the vastness and emptiness of the farms around it (or so it seems).

Then, as wine farms greet us more frequently, there’s Montagu; without doubt the prettiest old school town South Africa never knew it had. It’s a gem best left undisturbed between the majestic Cape Mountains.

Route 62 has an awesome surprise around every corner, and if you’re up for the tad bit

longer drive from Cape Town towards the Addo, or vice versa, I sincerely recommend it.

Certainly, for road trip lovers like me, it’s the type of road you live to find, and as it passes

you by, it saddens you that you might never drive it again.

What a place! And forever better driven in a Jeep...