Windswept and Weary

It’s an overcast morning by the coast. The South African border officials are very friendly, if somewhat incredulous that we don’t have a license plate number to enter on the forms. By the time we start riding the wind has already picked up. Here at the coast it almost always blows south to north. While Ben pedals stoically into the gusts Lina weaves around him trying to catch the perfect windbreak angle. It’s a tiresome 90km slog to the first town Port Nolloth and we are visibly worn out by the time we’ve gotten ourselves a room.

Port Nolloth and (as we will come to learn) most places in north western South Africa have a vibe of former glory, of being a bit left behind. The faded Coca Cola billboards, dusty corner shops and locals cruising around in cars from the 70s. The cafes serve mediocre toasted sandwiches for €1.50 and nice filter coffee for even less. You can buy crocheted hats, handmade earrings and home baked rusks (very dry biscuits that you dunk in your coffee). Hotels have flower print rugs on the carpeted floors and turn-of-the-century pictures on the walls. Everything looks slightly shabby.

We have stopped counting how many warnings we have received from (mostly white) people about South Africa. In cities you’re not supposed to stop at red lights because people might hijack your car (not sure what this means for cyclists). Robberies and worse at gunpoint are supposedly a common thing and everyone seems to have a cautionary tale. But when we tell them that we’re traveling in the Western Cape they always talk about how lovely it is there and that we shouldn’t worry.

After all these mixed messages we are not sure what to expect and enter each town with some apprehension. But people are just as friendly as they were elsewhere on our route. In the days after Port Nolloth we return to the main road up in the hills. We’ll only really be able to say this in hindsight but we might be staying in our last cheap (slightly shit) guesthouses of the trip. Already we are probably past seeing giraffes or oryxes on the farms next to the roads. It’s strange to think that we might never be here again in our lives.

We are quite conscious of how perspective can change your experience of a place. If this had been our first country and our first month of riding we would have looked open-mouthed at the boulder-strewn and windswept landscape. But at this point we’ve seen it all before and we’re often cycling on autopilot. With only a couple of weeks of cycling left to go we feel a certain mental fatigue settling in. We are reminded of our fresh-faced rookie start in Kenya as the 15th of February approaches and cannot quite believe how we got from there to where we are now.

Every now and then there are still things that surprise us and bring us back to the reality at hand. Often it’s the tiny mice and pudgy rock hyraxes flitting from bush to bush and (as if possessed by a death wish) across the road in front of trucks. It’s an all you can eat buffet for the birds of prey circling the area and building their nests on the telephone poles. One day we wake up to thick mist that just won’t disperse. For the first time since Rwanda our fingers freeze around the handlebars and a fine drizzle keeps us hydrated all day. Even the locals can’t explain this unseasonable weather.

And everywhere we go, we are met by the wind. It blows and blows like the wolf in the Three Little Pigs. But we are plucky little pigs and though it’s not always glamorous or fun or devoid of grumbling, we do push through it day after day. It’s a good lesson that you can cycle all day even if you can’t be bothered to cycle. And in this way we do make progress and Cape Town slowly enters the bottom part of our maps. A week or so left and we will our spirits into a mode of appreciation. Soon enough we will miss the headwind.