Ngonini to Pigg’s Peak
S 26º 04’ 98” – E 31º 15’ 09”
I woke at 4.15am, and lay thinking about the next few days, then got up at 5.00am and went outside to sit on the veranda, being careful not to startle Belinda the dog, who I had heard could be a handful with people she did not know. She lay in her basket near the front door and as I stepped out of the house, she wagged her tail, indicating she didn’t mind me wandering around unsupervised!! I patted her, then sat on the couch, lit my first stick and watched the sky lighten…
With the kids fed and dressed for school, Charlotte loaded them into the car and left for Malelane, where their school “River View” was located…a 50-odd km drive from Ngonini, through the border and north to the N4. Louis left soon thereafter, and I spent an hour or so, updating parts of my journal and downloading photographs from the day before. By 9.00am I was ready to take the short ride to Pigg’s Peak, and rode carefully down the gravel road back to the gate and turned right onto the road leading to town… I looked carefully at every security guard I passed, hoping to find the idiot who had misdirected me the evening before, still miffed at having dropped my bike…
Loaded and ready to depart from the Barnard’s home at Ngonini….
I rode past Ntonjeni, and up the short winding pass above it, stopped at Louis’s office to thank him for the stop-over and found he was out in the forests that surround Pigg’s Peak, attending to one of his vehicles. I mounted up again and cruised past the entrance to the Orion Hotel, where a celebrity poker competition had been held the night before. Darren Scott and Minki van der Westhuizen were part of the line-up who were there as a precursor to the more serious poker players who would be involved in a competition later that night…
The dry and blackened landscape, which I remembered from the devastation of the previous year’s huge fire, was beginning to recover and the area was a lot greener than when I had last ridden through, 10 weeks before… Many of the trees, which had still been standing when I left, had been felled and had been transported to the various sawmills for processing… It would be many years before the area around Pigg’s Peak resembled the countryside we were all used to…
I stopped in town to buy some water and considered whether or not I should refuel… I decided to continue on the same tank, as I still had a range of over 100km left in it, and could make the Ngwenya Border post and then refuel there… I idled my way down through the town itself, remembering how much smaller it had been when I first saw it more than 20 years ago… It still had a special significance for me, as both my daughters had spent the first few years of their childhood here… I stopped outside the Highlands Inn, remembering the first time Vanessa and I had stopped here on our very first visit to the northern parts of Swaziland… We lived on a pineapple farm in Malkerns at the time, and used to spend one weekend each month driving to parts of the country we had never visited before, to get a better idea of the country we had settled in… Idyllic times…
Swaziland Plantations nestles in the valley south of Pigg’s Peak…
I let the clutch out and eased back onto the tar road, and pointed the Big Fella down the hill… As I rounded the last bend leading to the valley where I had spent so many years of my life, the Swaziland Plantations sawmill complex came into view, and I felt my throat tighten… Smoke curled up from the incinerator, muddy pools in the mill told of recent rains, and noise from the hammering of the frame-saws floated up to me as I rode slowly down the hill and into the entrance of the mill…
Skirting through Northern Swaziland on my way through to Pigg’s Peak…
The security guards did not recognise me at first and wanted me to sign the indemnity form which visitors are required to fill out before entering the premises… The looks on their faces when recognition finally dawned made me realise that it was different Mr. B. who rode through the gates today… I rode down to the office block, dismounted and walked through the doors and into reception, my helmet still on… Guy was busy at his computer when I walked into his office… I took my helmet off and hugged him as he got up to greet me. I had missed him and seeing him got the emotions going again.
Once the helmet was off, I was called a host of names ranging from “Saddam”, through to “Kingsley Holgate” and I think an “Osama” was thrown in as well… Stoffel came into the office and said I looked like “Jopie Addam”, the mountain man from the TV series of the same name… I could see that the beard was going to cause a stir…
I went into the factory and surprised a number of people who at first had no idea who I was… I walked through the production lines, shaking hands with my supervisors, who all seemed genuinely glad to see me!!! Some joked and said they thought I was “late”, a Swazi-ism meaning “having passed away”!! I assured them I was far from “late”, and would be demonstrating that fact in the weeks to come… William Mazibuko shook my hand a number of times, at one point saying that he did not think he would ever see me again… There had been times when I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see him again either!!
I had promised to visit Renske on my way through Pigg’s Peak, and Hendrik offered me his pick-up to go up the hill to their house. The road was in a sorry state as a result of the heavy rains they had recently had, and I was glad that I had left the bike down at the office, ever mindful of my little mishap the day before…
I had last seen Renske and Hendrik on Boxing Day when I left his parent’s home in Port Elizabeth on my way to Plettenberg Bay… It seemed ages ago… Renske put her hand to her mouth when I walked through the kitchen door, shocked at my appearance!! It was great seeing her again and I spent a very pleasant half hour, sipping coffee and giving her a brief rundown of my trip… Her messages of encouragement had reached me from time to time on the journey and along with Charlotte’s had helped to keep me going when I was riding through trying conditions…
I then drove the pick-up back down to the mill to collect the Big Fella and continue with the final leg of this amazing trip… One that I had set out on what now seemed a very long time ago…
I briefly considered making a dash for Johannesburg 380km away, and then realised that I would have to ride the last hour or more in the dark… I wanted to savour my return in broad daylight, so decided to overnight in Pigg’s Peak and make an early start the next morning…
I knew that if I chose to stay on the farm that night, I would almost certainly end up with a good few whiskies under my belt and a very late night to boot… Although this wasn’t a bad option at all, I was beginning to feel the effects of the last few long days, and wanted to ride to Johannesburg with a clear head… Having dropped the bike the day before, I wanted no last minute surprises on the very last leg of my journey…I rode the short distance to the Maguga Lodge, the Orion Hotel would have meant going backwards and I don’t like going backwards, remember!!!
The dam had risen considerably since last I was here….
There were luckily rooms available and I managed to get the same room as the one I had used in December. I took a photograph from exactly the same spot as I had taken one from then, and compared the two, noting the difference in water levels… When I passed over the Maguga Dam wall, I noticed that the level of the dam had risen considerably since I had last been there… The heavy rains which had fallen in the past few weeks had apparently almost filled the dam to capacity by mid-February…
Seeing all the people of Pigg’s Peak who had shared part of the journey with me was a special moment for me; Guy and his family in Plettenberg Bay, Hendrik and Renske in Port Elizabeth and Stoffel and Marli in Lutzputs, all formed part of this trip, whether they realised it or not… I remember leaving Stoffel and Marli on the road to the Namibian Border, and thinking that from that moment on I would be among strangers until I reached Malawi many weeks later…
I spent a quiet night, thinking about the parts of the trip that I had the fondest memories of… I thought about the people I had met and who had left lasting impressions on me… I wondered where Allan was, and sent him a text message of encouragement… His reply came back almost immediately, and sent a small shock through my system…
“Hey Dude… Just crashed… I’m ok, bike ok… Need to straighten bracket on my pannier and have x-rays of my fingers… Bus cut me off on the dirt road to Mombasa, slid into a ditch… Going to Arusha tomorrow…”
I thought that it was a very strange co-incidence that we had both dropped our bikes within 24 hours of each other, over 5000 kms apart… I wished (and not for the first time in the last few weeks…!) that I was still riding with him, and hoping that he was not hurt too badly, and that he was still able to ride… Having experienced both riding alone and with a friend, I knew how lonely a solo ride can be and that you need to have a bit of “bottle” to keep going day after day… Allan still had a long way to go, through northern Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, across Kenya and through a very difficult stretch from Isiolo to Moyale on the Ethiopian border…
Allan Karl at Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe…
He then had to ride through Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt, and through Israel, Jordan and then to Istanbul in Turkey… You had to respect Allan’s commitment to fulfilling his dreams… He had been on the road since July 2005, and apart from spending a few months convalescing in the USA after shattering his leg on a Bolivian mountainside, he had kept going, covering more than 75 000 km by the time we parted company in Tanzania… The man is a legend…!!
I remember us spreading two enormous Michelin maps out on the veranda of the house in Dar es Salaam, showing the entire continent, and looking at Africa spread out before me, I saw the portion I had covered, and the distance he still had to go to get to Cairo… I felt a strange sense of apprehension for him…. To think he would be making his way north on his own…
I helped him to plan his route right up to Khartoum, where we agreed it would be best for him to get his bike onto a barge sailing down the Nile… He made notes as I rattled off the towns and cities he would be passing through… I felt a certain sense of pride knowing that he would be using the route I planned with him to get through the rest of the continent…
Before sleep finally overtook me, one last thought swirled through my mind, “Wish I was riding with you, Allan…”
Wherever we went, we drew a crowd… I was the silent, brooding biker, Allan the comedian, who had all and sundry laughing with him in minutes…
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