IT was bitterly cold and, no matter which knobs I pushed, pulled or twiddled, the car heater refused to produce anything warmer than an Arctic breeze. I put on an anorak. Deidre got into a sleeping bag and spread a map across her knees, in an attempt to look like an efficient navigator.
“Do you know the way?” she asked hopefully. She breathed a sigh of relief when I said I thought I did and put the map back in the cubby-hole.
All we had to do was to get onto the airport road and after that it was simplicity itself.
The trouble was that we never found the airport road. It was during our second circuit of the power station that Deidre ventured to ask if we were lost. It was a difficult question to answer. It depended on one’s definition of the word.
On the one hand, how could we be lost, when we knew perfectly well that we were outside the power station? On the other hand, had we been going in the right direction, we should have been several kilometres south of the power station.
I had no idea as to how to get from where we were to where we should have been, so we went back to Johannesburg and started again.
We missed the power station on our second attempt, but we also missed the airport road. However, we seemed to be heading the right way, following signposts to Something-fontein, which I knew to be east of the city, so I didn’t worry unduly that the countryside was unfamiliar.
It was only when the sun rose in the south that I realised that something was amiss. Deidre had been sleeping peacefully since our second departure from town, but she woke up when I stopped the car and reached for the map.“Where are we?” she asked, “and when are we going to stop for breakfast?”
She was a bit disconcerted to hear that we were well on our way to either Botswana or Rhodesia – I wasn’t sure which – and that breakfast would be delayed by at least an hour, while we found out where we were and got to where we were supposed to be.
She maintained that any normal idiot ought to be able to tell the difference between Elandsfontein and Olifantsfontein. I thought it was most unreasonable of her.
We joined the road somewhere in the East Rand, rapidly waving goodbye to the last of the mine dumps and heading through agricultural land. The scenery on the first section is not particularly inspiring – a gently rolling plateau, where maize fields alternate with millet and cabbage and acres of sunflowers.
The sunflowers surprise some visitors – those who come from countries which use olive or corn oil for cooking!
The sun shone and the concrete was behind us, so we sped happily across the plateau and through the gap in the Drakensberg mountains.
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