Meet Oscar, my handsome travel companion to the Drakensberg.
The attraction at Lanseria Airport was instant and we made a beeline for each other. He’s a sleek silver Land Rover Defender and we’re spending the next two weeks together.
Sprinting down the N3 from Johannesburg towards Harrismith, we were going as swiftly as any blade runner, so I nicknamed him Oscar since it’s the year of the London Olympics. We soon got bored with the N3 and bailed at Villiers before they hit us for another fat toll, taking the R26 to Frankfort instead. It’s a good stretch of tar through the rolling countryside of South Africa’s grain basket. The mealies stand tall, buff blonde at the end of the season, and sorghum heads are heavy with reddish seed. You spot the little towns in the distance not by a towering church spire, but by the great grain silos barrelling up to fluffy white clouds in the cobalt Free State sky.
The last of the cosmos flowers nodded pink and white beside signs warning of tractors crossing. We got stuck behind a huge one loaded on the back of a flat-bed truck, completely dwarfing it. But overtaking is easy on these long straight Free State roads and we soon arrived at Frankfort, where lunch was a pleasant surprise at K-opkofi, a delightful coffee shop on the main road. Meals range from fat, farmer-size steaks to the very tasty tuna and spinach roulade which I enjoyed with a crisp salad.
I resisted the decadent cakes and got back on the road, but south of Frankfort, the R26 deteriorated. The potholes were mostly small, not the big craters that demand you sacrifice a tyre – at least, not if you’re driving a Land Rover – and we drove local style, weaving like drunks.
By the time we took the R57 south of Reitz to Kestell, even Oscar was getting tired of the rash of potholes so widespread we couldn’t avoid them. Some were big enough to provide a portal to another dimension for the likes of Fiat Unos and Chevy Sparks. A burnt out wreck of a small car beside the road proved the point: this is definitely SUV country.
Once past the Bethlehem turnoff, the R57 improved markedly. But I’d recommend skipping the road around Reitz. At Frankfort, rather take the R34 back towards the N3 and decide if you want to continue on it south to explore the countryside as far as Warden.
Happy road trippin’!
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