From Port Elizabeth I made my way west along the Garden Route on this particular journey. I've a few non-special images from the Tsitsikamma National Park but most of my images from this period were prints not slides and I don't know I'll ever digitize all those.
One of the reason's I'm posting these images is because I've carried these slides from the UK, to the us, to france, and back to the us and between four residences in the us and they've not seen the light of day. Indeed, they were never unpacked during my two years in Paris! What's the point of having over 30,000 slides if you don't show a few of them now and then?
Suffice to say, in my usual idiom I sped across the Garden Route. I'm sure at the right time of year it's very pretty, but my lack of images suggest I didn't find it so as I churned by in my rented VW Golf ‘Citi', the speedo cable disconnected so as not to record the miles and thus make the rental far more affordable. (I would come unstuck later, picking up a speeding ticket approaching Stellenbosch, but that's a tale for another day.)
Around George I left Route 2 and headed north on Route 12 to Oudtshoorn in the Little (Klein) Karoo – the southern band of this semi-desert region of south africa.
Here we have yet another arrow straight stretch of road with not another car to be seen. My sense is that this was taken somewhere along Route 62, west of Oudtshoorn, but I'm not really sure.
This image reminds me of the photo I posted of the Kingston Range. On that post I included the poem, ‘The Roman Road' by Thomas Hardy. Hardy also wrote a poem about the Karoo:
The Dead Drummer
Thomas Hardy
Young Hodge the Drummer never knew –
Fresh from his Wessex home –
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.
This poem refers to a British soldier, posted to some forlorn outpost guarding railroad tracks or other infrastructure during the Boer War.
I like the reference to ‘strange stars'. I recall that on my first night in the bush in SA I made a point of finding the Southern Cross in the night sky.
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