The question
Late December, Mossel Bay. The plates had just been cleared after a braai when my seven-year-old wandered up barefoot and asked the question that started everything.
“Dad, can we just… go somewhere?”
There is no good argument against that. I opened the map on my phone and looked for a thin wiggly line. Baviaanskloof. Within twenty minutes there was a bed booked at the far end of the valley and nothing else. We planned nothing beyond that, which was the point.
We did not know it yet, but that was the first time we drove the route that Forgotten Routes now runs as The Wilderness. This is the story of that drive.
The last tar
Dawn, two cars out of Mossel Bay: ours, and the grandparents behind us. Over the Outeniqua, up the N9, the country drying out and opening up with every kilometre. Uniondale was the last tar. We dropped the tyres to 1.6 bar there, which is the closest thing the gravel has to a handshake.
The first farm stall had promised roosterkoek but the ovens were still cold, so we pushed on to a little place further along and had whatever they had. The seven-year-old found a tortoise older than everyone present and made friends with it. While he was doing that, a smart city SUV pulled in with its front bumper hanging off.
I handed the driver a bunch of cable ties. “Take these,” I said. “If we see bits of your car further down the road we’ll know who to thank.” He laughed the laugh of a man who had not read about the road before driving it.
That is the thing about the Baviaanskloof. The valley is nearly two hundred kilometres long, there is no fuel in it, no signal and no shortcut out, and it does not care what you arrived in. A standard luxury 4×4 with the tyres down and a driver who is not in a hurry goes through it beautifully. A road car goes through it in pieces.
The well
A few hours in, under a canopy of wild fig, there is a stone well that has been pushing cold, clear water through pipes laid generations ago and has never stopped. A ranger appeared from nowhere, the way rangers do, and pointed us to a path.
“Walk that,” he said. “Those trees saw the Khoikhoi ride through.”
The trunks are enormous. You lower your voice without deciding to. Centuries of leaves underfoot, and nothing to hear but the wind in the tops of the trees. It is one of the quietest places I have ever stood, and it is a ten-minute walk from where you park.
On The Wilderness this is the first stop, and it is the part nobody expects and everybody talks about afterwards. Not the driving. The standing still.
Into the reserve
Gravel became rock at the reserve gate. Some paperwork, a few friendly warnings from the rangers, and then the wilderness proper. The water crossings started small and grew until they were deep, green and overgrown on both banks, one after another, with the mountains closing in on either side. The seven-year-old named the whole stretch Jumanji Lane. The name stuck. It is on our map now.
We passed campsites with braai smoke drifting across the road and would happily have stopped, but our beds were on the other side of the mountain. On the expedition the beds are inside the reserve, standing and waiting, with a chef at the fire and something cold on ice. We did not have that. We had a cooler box and a very dusty seven-year-old. Both work.
The climb
The ascent is steep and loose. Low range, first gear, both cars crawling up with the engines just ticking over, and then a bend and the whole world opening out below us.
There were no phones and no engines anywhere in the distance. We got out and stood in the quiet. The seven-year-old, who does not stop talking, stopped talking. You do not get silence like that at home, and it takes a minute to trust it.
Fire
We reached the far end covered in dust and completely happy. Hot showers, dinner on the coals, sparks going up into more stars than a small boy had believed existed. He fell asleep halfway through a marshmallow.
The next morning the kloof let us out at the far end, the tyres went back up, and the tar felt strange for an hour.
What the kloof taught us
That the best drives are the ones that begin with a question and a map. That silence is worth driving a long way for. And that the car in the garage was built for exactly this, and most of them never get asked.
We went back with the tents, the chef and the champagne, and turned that drive into The Wilderness: a hotel on the beach at Mossel Bay to begin, the last tar at Uniondale, the fig forest on foot, Jumanji Lane, a night under canvas in the middle of the reserve, and the climb out on the last morning. Four cars, two guests each, on request.
Close the laptop, find the wiggly line on the map, and come and drive it with us.
