Getaway on assignment: off the grid destinations

Posted by Teagan Cunniffe on 24 July 2014

On a recent assignment for Getaway, Paul Maughan-Brown and I covered more than 5000km in search of social isolation. Here’s what we found along the way.

It was on a stretch of road up towards Namaqualand that the first pang of travel-thrill hit me. We had just passed an arm of a wind turbine (have you any idea how big those things are?) being transported on the back of a long truck, the GPS showed a small vehicle slowly edging its way along an expansive map and Paul’s music didn’t seem to be all that bad. I breathed in as joy enveloped me and promptly sent a tweet to Getaway HQ, rubbing in the fact that I was on the road and they weren’t.

Besides never-ending road, what lay before us was a three-week assignment to some of the best places South Africa has to offer, with the only requirements being restricted cellphone and WiFi-signal, and ideally 4×4 access. Our journey took us from rocky Richtersveld to lush greens of KZN’s coastal bush, with a myriad of altitudes in between.

Here are some of the photographs from the assignment – get the latest issue for the full story, and destination details!