Route 62: A photo essay
South Africa is a colossal country to traverse. Leaving the wild coast, heading inland means crossing scrub, mountains, deserts and the tracks of more than one large animal. But a new way of crossing the country is emerging, and it comes with a strange flair, from a far-away continent.
“We’ll make our first stop here”, Uriel opens the sliding doors of the van. It has been a quiet few hours sitting in the back. The whole time I have been gazing out the window like someone in a longing early-noughties music video, watching Cape Town change and evolve with each mile. As the road has gone on, I have seen each of its faces, starting at pleasant Green Point with its care-free joggers, early morning dog walkers, coffee shops and Atlantic views. Then it is on through the city’s heart, its CBD, its towers, its rush, its Table Mountain backdrop. And beyond this the city sprawls. It webs out between the hills into a juxtaposition of wealthy suburbs and desperate townships.
The sun shines brightly the whole way out, flushing the hills with the golds and deep greens of grass and fynbos. The road straightens. It widens. Inexplicably it feels American. A collision of the Old World and the New as we drive a six-lane highway through well-established vineyards.
We head past Paarl, the Winelands largest town, on an agonisingly straight stretch of highway, all the while taking in the pretty Cape Dutch buildings and row upon row of grapevines. Worcester is next, no medieval cathedrals like back in the UK, almost strip-mall like buildings when viewed from the lofty heights of Highway 1. When we turn off and drive through the town it changes. Small grassy gardens and an angelic, brilliant white church. Distinctly European. Here, we turn in the right direction, the numbers on the route are rising. Route 60.
Now, the towns are virtually gone. The colours are fading, vine greens are spreading further and further afield of each other, visions of a dust bowl are on the horizon. Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men comes quickly to mind. For almost an hour, this scenery never changes, flashes of green, circular farms, rows of vines, barren mountains behind. A different kind of beauty. Then, we leave the road and head for the most modern building I have seen in thirty-plus miles.
The "old town" of Cape Town. In the foreground are the walls of the Castle of Good Hope. The Lion's Head Mountain in the background is a popular hike for the outdoorsy © Matthew Walsh / Finding Earth 2023
Cape Town is situated right on nature's doorstep, especially when viewed from the top of Table Mountain like this © Matthew Walsh / Finding Earth 2023
I sit at a devilish table in the Ashton Winery. Five wines, a rainbow of pale greens, straws, reds, pinks. In front of each glass, a chocolate. Truffled, orange, caramel, dark, even curry leaf. It is all laid out with the neatness of the vine rows themselves. I would never claim to be a sommelier. Phrases such as “lingering creamy aftertaste”, “layers of mocha” and “subtle aftertaste of dark fruit” fall with almost complete deafness on my unintelligent palate. It’s wine. It’s good. I’m told it’s the best. It’s going to my head.
This is an oft lauded side of South Africa. I would argue one of the two that draw most to this particular corner of the African continent. Wine and wildlife.
Each taster, generously bordering on half a glass, goes down easier than the last. We ask to move outside. The air-conditioning is polar and outside is a cloudless winelands 25 degrees and the sun would be a perfect complement to cellar cool wine and chocolates. They begin to melt into my fingers as I try to balance sipping, savouring and conversing before Uriel gives us the sign that it’s time to get back on the road.
This red from the Ashton Winery is a shining example of the Western Cape's vineyard heritage © Matthew Walsh / Finding Earth 2023
Route 62 now officially begins. This is not the tourist Route 62 but now the actual road itself, and it is beginning to swerve and meander through mountain passes. It has an almost eerie feel to it after so many miles of open, flat and green vineyards. The land has now risen around into sheer orange walls. Just down from the road, now snaking like an alpine slope through the canyon, is the Cogmanskloof river eponymous too of the canyon we now drive through.
It seems as though we are getting a taster session not only of wines but of the country itself as we leave canyons and tunnels behind and once again the landscape shifts. It is as though we have passed through the heavy curtain onto a new stage.
Beyond the towering rock of the Langebergs, the world dries up. The predictable and quenching Atlantic rains that kiss South Africa’s southwest corner cannot breach this barrier with full force as we have. Flat cape land has turned into flowing van Gogh hills and the sun looks deadly through the window, baking the land until well done.
Upon cresting each hill, the road dips down and repeats, it’s like a mirage. Like the fevered daydreams I know I would have if I wandered a day or two in this heat. Soon, an even more fever-dream sight comes into view. This is Diesel and Crème and it looks about as South African as apple pie.
The scrubby landscape along Route 62 seems to change character with every turn of the road © Matthew Walsh / Finding Earth 2023
Diesel and Crème has taken the likeness of name between this Route 62 and the famous Route 66 to heart. Out front on the dusty roadside just outside the rather American-sounding town of Barrydale, are all things 66. It’s a Vegas-esque level of extravagance. Old motorbikes, the front bumper of a car, a metal Shell sign and advertisements for cigarettes and motor oil. Something doesn’t stick though. These are still distinctly South African, with South African brands and Afrikaans slogans, being the mother-tongue of this part of the country. Even the bikes and car bumper are the rugged Japanese brands that made this part of the world inhabitable, rather than the slick and polished Harley Davidsons of the great American road trip.
I spend a good while alone with my camera photographing around. I take one of the Karoo Moon Motel sign, its pink Cadillac racing towards vacant rooms. Another is taken of the bourbon barrels with Route 62 painted on the side in the same iconic crest seen across the States.
It feels strange. Familiar. Without reading too much into it I could be anywhere west of the Mississippi. These dusty roads could be in Arizona or eastern California, parts of a country that have been so ingrained through popular culture and brands that it doesn’t feel even remotely alien. A bizarre contrast to the land I was actually standing in, one of giant mammals and as many as eleven official languages. It feels right, at this point, that I chow down on a burger like the wild animals that roam these hills before we’re once again turning rubber into dust and burning some miles.
Afrikaans signs outside Diesel and Crème betray the South African roots of this very American diner © Matthew Walsh / Finding Earth 2023
The Route 62 sign has taken on the familiar form of America's icon, Route 66 © Matthew Walsh / Finding Earth 2023
The Karoo Moon Motel appears as though pulled directly from a 60s movie © Matthew Walsh / Finding Earth 2023
Leaving Diesel and Crème’s spliced United States of South Africa aesthetic behind leads us back to the open road. The tourist board may want us to think this is America, that this road trip is a cultural artery across country. The land has other ideas. This is still Africa, bold and unique as ever, we are reminded as we drive into a swarm.
The road has flattened, and what runs alongside is now a dead straight colonial railway rather than a twisting river. And thudding on metal is the new soundtrack to this journey. Each one like a golf ball, like being caught in heavy hail. But each hailstone is living, breathing, darkening whole patches of the sky. They’re locusts. It’s a sight that Attenborough has introduced to the masses in his programmes, but nothing quite prepares you for it. In front of the van, the view looks almost fizzing, like the sky has turned to TV static. I imagine beyond the pounded glass panes that the sound of beating locust wings is much the same too. Out the side windows they streak the landscape in ribbons of millions upon millions. They’re unapologetic in their advance and we match them.
As unexpected a spectacle as this was for me, not so is it for the locals. The Klein Karoo town of Calitzdorp accommodates us for a moment or two, we stretch our legs as some entrepreneurs clear the cemetery of bugs that has formed all over the van. On the way out of town the locusts have lazed into a carpet, rolling like a turbulent black sea. Vervet monkeys take their pick of the glut at the roadside, plucking fattened locusts from the crowd like a child with a pick’n’mix bag.
But now our Route 62 is ending, final destination: Oudtshoorn, thirty-five or so miles across the skirts of the dry Karoo.
Oudtshoorn looks out of place. An old Voertrekker town littered with Disneyland-style mansions in the middle of semi-desert. Most have been built on the feather industry that bloomed here in the Victorian era. Ostrich feathers from the self-styled ‘ostrich capital of the world’ would adorn the hats of many a wealthy woman back then. And they could fetch a price fitting of the world’s largest bird. I gawp at their old-money splendour as we approach the end of our drive and the final surprise the route has in store.
Just outside of town is a game reserve. Buffelsdrift. It is a common sight in South Africa but this one is special. Uriel stops the van and ushers us to meet the three men who are waiting for us. They greet us warmly, geared up as rangers and each holding a 5-foot stick, and then introduce us to their children. A more unlikely family I have never seen, as three young elephants march from the bush poking each other in the rump as they go.
They have been saved here. After their mother was killed by poachers in Kruger National Park, they came to Buffelsdrift. Every day these men fed them, cared for them, trained them, talked to them, sang to them, hugged them, slept by them. Loved them. And now they walked with us through the Karoo at sunset.
The air is now empty of locusts, the American diners left behind, the Oudtshoorn mansions gone to the distance, the wineries and skyscrapers of the Cape hundreds of miles away. Nothing but ourselves and these icons of a continent. The tourism board has tried hard to make this anything but Africa, to draw people in with familiar “Route 66” road signs, with burgers and shakes and Coca-Cola. Route 62 is none of those things though, it isn’t American or comfortable or familiar. It is a great artery through one of the most diverse countries on Earth.
It is the essence of South Africa.
The "ostrich capital of the world" has some questionable attractions © Matthew Walsh / Finding Earth 2023
Oudtshoorn's elephants are testament to South African conservation efforts and stunning symbols of national identity © Matthew Walsh / Finding Earth 2023
Buffelsdrift's elephant trio with one of their adoptive fathers. The men spend day and night wholly devoted to the lives of their unusual family © Matthew Walsh / Finding Earth 2023
