The Road to Christiana
Sunday Morning Snot
This morning I lay in bed with a blocked nose & told eddy there was no ride at the Cradle Loop.
Ek is vol snot, eddy.
“I know,” he said. “We’re in the same bedroom, boet.”
Damn grumpy Belgium bicycle.
So I stayed put, staring at the ceiling, & the mind did what it does on slow Sundays, drifted back to the road trips to Christiana. It’s a good run through the vlaktes. Nothing flashy, just open sky, long horizons, and that particular Highveld quiet that settles once you leave the Magaliesberg behind.
In Christiana there’s an old steel bridge with lattice work across the Vaal. I have no idea of its exact age, but these single-lane iron structures are scattered all over the country, survivors from a time when rivers still dictated the pace of travel. The one at Christiana feels about the same scale as the bridge over the Tugela at Tugela Ferry. As a kid we crossed that one often on the way to visit my mom’s cousin Boet & his wife Loretta on their farm Steinthal, near Helpmekaar south of Dundee. I’d sleep in an old bed in the rondavel & wake to skaaptjops for breakfast. Man, those breakfasts were legendary.
The road to Christiana meanders past Ventersdorp & Wolmaransstad. Along the way the eucalyptus blue gums & firs stand gnarly and windswept, most of them looking like landscape portraits. There’s a spot where five of them rise in silhouette against the horizon in a mealie field. They look like the horsemen of the apocalypse.
Just leaving Magaliesberg on the road out to Ventersdorp is an Engen. I stop there for water or a coffee. About eighty kilometres further I usually need a comfort break. Next to the road stands one of those sentinel trees heavy with weaver nests, some of the nests already lying on the ground around the trunk. Decades of old glass bottles litter the grass. This stop has been popular for ages. The plastic ones are fewer; they get burnt and melted in the roadside fires.
You cover the distances between maize silos on every horizon. Occasionally the mealies give way to sunflower fields, magnificent when they’re in bloom. In the Magaliesberg you still see Hartebeest. Closer to Wolmaransstad the game changes: Roan antelope, Wildebeest, Springbok. Skirt the detour past Klerksdorp & there’s a field of albino Springbok. I used to pull over & stare. Now I just drive past & barely give them a second glance. There’s also an abandoned uranium mine out that way, & those large microwave towers that once carried the voice traffic between north & south in the seventies, eighties and nineties.
Around the farms near Christiana you’ll find coffee-coloured Springbok & even black ones, plus plenty of Nyala. The town itself sits among large potato farms & pecan nut orchards, a school friend of mine has one right next to the Vaal. Christiana is full of potholes. When you sit beside the river it feels almost biblical, like the Euphrates or the Tigris, slow & wide & indifferent. By the Rivers of Babylon.
There isn’t much else on the road except an excellent padstal just before Wolmaransstad. Proper food. Gourmet burger if you’re lucky.
I’ve continued down that road all the way to Kimberley before. It’s a scenic town still carrying its Victorian bones, red-brick mansions with deep verandahs & metal lacework, the kind of houses built when diamond money flowed thick & fast. The Belgravia suburb is full of them, status symbols from the mining-magnate days, complete with turrets, parapets and those distinctive Kimberley bricks. The Town Hall on Market Square is pure late-Victorian swagger. The Big Hole still sits there like an open wound of history. And yes, Kimberley has proper thrift stores, the kind where you can lose an afternoon hunting for something that once belonged to someone who lived through the diamond rush.
eddy interrupted the daydream.
“Next week Mastelek. No excuses. We crank the loop.”
Right.