2 Of Hell, Whales, Sex and Baboons!

ggalcock | September 23, 2010 | Reply

Day 4: Montagu and Prince Alfred Pass’s ….. and finally a new sprocket!

We started the day in George, while we waited for the Dakar sprocket to be fitted, the mechanic showed us a bike which he’d just recovered from die Hel with a smashed cylinder head. Oh, oh we were going there!

But first the Montagu pass, the clouds were settling down on the hill tops, the temperature was dropping, but all it seemed to do was add a sense of atmosphere and mystery to the place.

The old pass has wonderful old stone walls on one side the drops dizzying down into the valley below. The fynbos was full of flowers and colour and the road twists endlessly up into what looks like the clouds!

The other side we hit the tar heading to another pass, The Dakar disappears in my mirror, so Sue and I stop and Seamus calls, the tightening bolt has come out of the newly fitted chain and sprocket. He’s got a handful of them just in case! So we wait at the roadside watching the ostriches, there’s hundreds on the farms around us!

He catches us and we head to Aventuur and the Prince Alfred Pass which descends back down to the coast and the huge forests which encircle Knysna. Another very beautiful pass with its stone walls and endless twists hugging the side of the stream, its gurgling little rapids chuckling along next to us.

Halfway we find a charming little shop and stop for coffee and very yummy melktert from the tannie there. The clouds are by now all around us, the temperature has dropped to 10 degrees and my hand warmers are on full.
The road now enters first commercial forest and then beautiful indigenous forest, snaking under huge yellowwood trees.

Each bike is now in its own world the drizzle and mist enveloping us.

Its cold but its beautiful, at one stage we find a fairytale house, it must have a story but for now its only sign of life is a tendril of smoke out the old chimney.

Day 5 & 6 A whale of a time

The weather now catches us, its freezing, the weather report is talking of snow on the mountains and rain. We hit our first bit new Swellendam.

Then we get to Gansbaai, a warm pub and luckily a warm house to stay in, as the rain pelts the windows and cleans Baviaans dust off our bikes. A few repairs are also in order!

We do the tourist thing in Hermanus, the whales flopping out of the water in huge splashes and resounding cannon shots, impossibly throwing tons of blubber out the water like a multi ton dolphin show!

Day 7.

We are heading to Calitzdorp, the port capital of the world via the R62 and sewe weeks poort. Stopping at Swellendam for breakfast Seamus announces that his clutch is going! FUCK this Dakar and Shameful!

After the regulation abuse of man and bike, he heads off alone to Stellenbosch to replace his clutch and meet us late that night. We climb another pass en route to our own R 62!

Then crazy Ronnies sex shop and road kill café in the middle of nowhere on the R 62. Lots of insinuation, but no sex tho!

The road less traveled!

We pull off the R 62 and head into Sewe weeks poort. It’s a pass through the mountains, not climbing up and over but an amazing road through a crack in the earth. The rocks giving testament to the ripping and flowing of lava and the tectonic shifts of the earth.