WHAT is your favourite padkos? How about egg sarmies, ouma’s best cold roast chicken or rusks with coffee out of a flask? Or is there some other road trip treat without which you would not leave home?
There is also a foraging aspect to road trip supplies. It is fun to stops in little towns to top up the padkos with specialities like biltong from Nieuwoudville or Poffadder’s famous curried mince vetkoek. There are also all sorts of deli delights and country treats to be had at padstals along the way. In fact, foraging is one of the joys of a road trip.
Then, if all else fails there is the humble pie, a road trip standby that, for some unknown reason always tastes so very good when you are travelling. In South Africa, a reasonably good pie is fairly easy to come by and if it doesn’t top the health food list it is a pretty dependable source of travel nutrition.
When Bill and I left Oviston Nature Reserve, crossing into the Northern Cape and heading for Mokala National Park, it was early in the morning. Although we’d had a light breakfast we were soon feeling a little peckish. What we really felt like, we both agreed, was a nice meat pie.
The road wound its way between rocky, well-vegetated hills, over pretty little passes and across wide expanses of sepia grasslands, the landscape flattening out as we neared Colesberg. We planned to stop there to do some shopping for our five days in Mokala and also to take a look at the town.
From a historical point of view Colesberg was an interesting place. We were travelling with our copy of Chris Schoeman’s ‘The Historical Karoo’ (Zebra Press). According to his chapter on Colesberg, the town, originally named Toverberg after a nearby landmark mountain, saw much action during the Anglo-Boer War. At one point it even served as the southern front. It was founded in 1830 and obtained municipal status ten years later.
Colesberg boasts many buildings of historical interest, including the imposing Georgian mansion, Coniston House, the ‘Horse and Mill’ pub – a restored coach house, built in 1840, which has a horse mill inside it – and some lovely old churches and Karoo cottages.
It really is an attractive, pleasant town and we enjoyed taking a look at its striking, well maintained old buildings. By the time we’d finished our sight-seeing stroll we were pretty hungry and ready for a brunch-time pie. We found a suitable supermarket and were able to stock up on all the supplies we needed – except the pies. We hadn’t noticed, but the town was experiencing a total power outage and the store’s bakery was closed. Thanks to the lack of electricity there was not a pie to be had anywhere else in town.
I suppose we could have found something else to munch but by then we were really, really, really feeling like pies. Not to worry – we were passing through other towns where we were sure to be able to buy a couple of these road trip delicacies.
We drove through Petrusrus but couldn’t find a pie shop, so carried on to Orania, the odd little Afrikaner enclave that straddles the R369 . There were quite a few likely looking shops but it was a Sunday and every single business in the neat, clean and rather pretty town seemed to be closed. We took a drive around the quiet streets, photographed the famous koeksuster monument, then left without any pies.
Our next and last hope was Hopetown, like Orania situated on the Orange River and the place where South Africa’s first diamonds were found. Perhaps seeing it on empty tummies didn’t help but Hopetown seemed to have lost some of its sparkle. It just didn’t live up to its hopeful name. As for our pie quest, the one take-away outlet we found lacked anything vaguely resembling an edible pie. We declared our pie quest hopeless and acknowledged that it had come to an end. Raiding our camping fridge we came up with a scratched together lunch of cheese, biscuits, pickles and fruit. It was adequate but a pie really would have been so much nicer. Soon we were on our way, heading for Mokala National Park.
Such a lovely warm welcome awaited us at reception. The Mokala staff members are all so friendly and helpful and they go out of their way to make their guests feel special. After we’d booked in and were heading back to our vehicle to drive to the camping ground Bill suddenly had a brain wave. We’d spent the morning on a quest to find pies and we’d completely forgotten that Mokala is home to perhaps the ultimate ones.
Its Mosu Restaurant at Mosu Lodge is just behind the main reception where we had just booked in. And one of the restaurant’s specialities was its famous, secret-recipe venison pie, a treat we’d sampled on a previous visit to the park.
The service at the attractive restaurant was as good as we remembered – and the venison pies were even better. It was a hot afternoon so we washed down the meal with chilled white wine; perhaps unwisely – we still had to put up our tent – but we were also pretty thirsty by then.
We were rather sleepy after the pies and the wine but all the natural beauty we encountered on the short drive to the Motswedi Luxury Campsite soon woke us up; as did the happy anticipation of spending five days in one of South Africa’s newest and loveliest national parks.
