What will I remember about Riebeek West if I never return to the place? The man who chased the cockatiel? Or the abandoned school, where youths with dark minds wrote charcoal words on the walls like: “Why must we live in a cruel world but must still die?” Or the wind, which blew and blew incessantly, rushing down the slope of the mountain, erasing all other sound, chasing it deep into the Swartland where someone must’ve had his eardrums blown? Or maybe the starlings, which gathered in the tall pine trees in front of the guesthouse by dusk, their tweets rising in crescendo before flocking away, the consensus having shifted to another roosting place for the night? Maybe it will be place names: Faai de Jager Houtwerke, Knolfontein, Leeuvlei. 

I’m driving towards Gouda, the Swartland’s last dry strokes of summer being painted as I speed along. This time of year there are only five colours to work with. White are the clouds and the bakkies. The sky is light blue, that exact hue of a sun-bleached Ford Sierra. The mountains are grey, or purple, depending on your outlook on life. Yellow are the fields and ground and sheep. The bluegums are washed-out green as if they’re all covered in dust, which they are.

Into the Boland I go, which is also dry and baking. I sleep outside Ceres in Prince Alfred Hamlet with my cousin and his wife and their little boy, Simon. It was Simon’s third birthday the day before and we’re eating the leftover chips. As with all kids’ parties, the chips were mixed together, all the different flavours. Now it tastes a bit like Nik Naks and fruit chutney and Fanta Orange. We swim and then Simon climbs a tree while I make sure he doesn’t fall out. Later we sit on the stoep and burst the remaining balloons.

The next morning I head north, up the Gydo Pass. When I pull over and get out, the pass is alive with the noise of trucks. Going downhill their exhausts and brakes burp-burp loudly; uphill they race like dragsters. Those descending are all filled with apples, some red, some green, always in separate trucks. They offload down in Ceres at the storage sheds (today the town looks nothing like the idyllic picture on the back of the fruit juice box – unless you’re talking about a flattened one) and then race back up to the apple orchards where the harvest is in full swing. High in the sky the silver cigar of an aeroplane is descending towards Cape Town – maybe it’s going to load some apples and take them to Europe.

Time is money. That’s the feeling you get when you see the larger machinations of farming in action like this. We’re inclined to romanticise farming – the farmer who rises in the morning, puts his hat on and strides out onto his land to dig his hands in the soil or count his sheep – but much of it is pure business. And the business side is vital, because without it we’d have more subsistence farming, lower food production and more unemployment… and more made-in-Chinas.

Later, while driving between the apple farms at Op Die Berg, I chat to some of the farm workers. It turns out very few of them are from around here. Most come from Sterkspruit, a town in the Eastern Cape’s north-east corner (it used to be a shard of the Transkei).
A massive baboon crosses the road with the casual arrogance of a celebrity chef; he’s on his way to an apple orchard. North of Op Die Berg I pass a farm called Tandfontein and a turn-off for Donkerbospad, and eventually exit the Koue Bokkeveld by descending the dusty Middelberg Pass. 

Now I’m in the Olifants River valley, just outside the town of Citrusdal. It’s almost sunset and there are a number of power walkers and runners and dog walkers. I’ll sleep here tonight. Why not?

Michell’s Pass between Wolseley and Ceres. Pull over at the Tolhuis Restaurant for good food or a quick coffee.

I’m still wearing my swimming shorts, as I’ve just taken a dip in a mountain stream, and my right knee is being lashed by the sun through the windscreen. Foot loosely on the petrol, I’m crawling, doing about 20 km/h. It feels as if the Condor is being pulled along the road by some invisible natural force, the horizon a tide I’m forever being sucked into.

The Cederberg peaks are all around me. I’ve cleared Uitkyk Pass and now the road is easy again. Yesterday I pitched my little yellow tent under the pines down at Algeria. It’s easy to see why this area is popular as a weekend retreat: It’s accessible yet isolated, and there’s plenty to do.
The area is still recovering from the veld fires of early 2009, but the fynbos is already making a comeback, slowly regreening the ash-coloured slopes.

I stop to watch a troop of baboons. They’re so relaxed you’d swear they’re on Myprodol. You can see no one has fired a gun at them in ages, as the case should be in a protected area.

I get out where a new bridge has been built. Someone’s already added graffiti. Who drives out here with spray-paint in the boot? Probably the same kids who played toktokkie when they were younger.

My days are divided into three cups of coffee (I make strong filter for my flask every morning). The first cup is for breakfast. Then I’m awake and I can drive the Condor with the perky alertness of a Jenson Button. Now I’m on my second cup of strong stuff and looking at an ant lion’s trap. It’s the perfect trap, and soon it will be the black hole of some unlucky ant passing by.

Driving back to Algeria, I stop at the top of Uitkyk Pass again. The light is better now, and it’s time for my last cup of coffee. If you get a good view, you should use it. Otherwise, what? Yes, life’s too short.

Far down below I can see people unpacking a vehicle outside one of the chalets. Their voices are loud, excited. In the city you can talk loudly but no one on the other side of the street will hear you. Here, surrounded by so much silence, your voice almost doesn’t know what to do with itself.

Suddenly I hear something above me. It’s two Verreaux’s eagles, their wings cutting the air like fighter jets. They’re diving into the kloof, wings folded back. Then they put the flaps up and slow down, easing into a glide as they enter a shaded section of the kloof, their black feathers disappearing into the background with just the white Y-shapes on their backs visible, like floating wishbones.

Mountain water is premium water and I stop to fill my bottle at the marked spring on the pass. It’s sweet and cold and without a middle man; as “bottled at source” as it gets.
That night the moon wakes me. One slope is slowly lit, as if a veil is pulled down over it, but a veil that uncovers rather than hides.

I am inside the husk of my tent, and I am small.

My little yellow tent pitched at Algeria in the Cederberg.

Trawal, Klawer, Vredendal and then eastwards, across the Knersvlakte and up Vanrhyns Pass where, as so often happens, a truck has overturned and blocked the road. Luckily the Condor can sneak around the side of the wreck, pulling its boep in like a guy squeezing through the aisles at Edgars to get to the takkies.

I’ve got two evangelists in the car with me, Dawid and Enstine Fouché, hitchhikers I picked up in Vanrhynsdorp. They’re heading for Upington, but I can’t take them much further than Nieuwoudtville, as I’m spending the night with a friend near Oorlogskloof.

“Ouboet, what are you doing there?” Dawid asks rhetorically when we see a baboon sitting next to the road. He – Dawid – is wearing a tie.

The next morning I pick up two more hitchhikers. They’re younger – Jacobus Bhaha and Angeline Cloete. Their story is a sad one. It’s the story of so many people in South Africa, people who have virtually nothing. They’ve been kicked off the farm where they worked and now they’re here in the car with me, a few hastily grabbed essentials in a plastic bag.

“It’s not easy being me, Meneer,” Jacobus says.
I drop them in Nieuwoudtville too. They walk off, Jacobus with his arm around Angeline’s sobbing shoulders. 

I follow the course of the Oorlogs River in the direction of Calvinia, slowly getting rid of the sadness of that scene.

In Calvinia it’s lunchtime and I find the world’s finest burger: Myl 250’s Deluxe Lamb Burger. It would be another two days before I truly feel hungry again.

My friend in Nieuwoudtville told me about the Gannaga Pass, which climbs up the Roggeveld Mountains to connect the Tanqua Karoo with Middelpos. From Calvinia I drive south towards the Tanqua, down the Bloukrans Pass, past the farm with the “Trespassers Will Be Shot” sign, past dust devils rising from the stone-eyed earth and crows and pale chanting goshawks and equally pale lost Dutch tourists in a motorhome.

The Gannaga Pass is all mine, except for two smartass klipspringers that think I can’t see them when they’re standing still, and seven, eight, nine, ten dassies that follow one another into the same hole. There’s some good stonework on the pass, like a tapeworm clinging to the side of the mountain. It doesn’t look like anything will ever be able to erase it.

Middelpos is the middle of this place. Middelpos is all there is. Some people are born in Middelpos and stay here forever. Middelpos sounds like boerboels and exotic birds and smells like goats, because that’s what Helena and Koos van der Westhuizen farm with.

The Van der Westhuizens own the shop that is to Middelpos what the sun is to our solar system. If you see someone with polished shoes in Middelpos, they bought that tin of Military Tan Nugget at the Middelpos shop. If someone smells like Blue Stratos – same thing. 

Next to the shop there’s a police station and a garage. Middelpos is small – a couple of hundred souls if everyone sleeps at home that night. Helena tells me that Koos is out of town. He’s in Williston for the SA Milch Goat Breeders’ Society Show.

I sleep at the hotel, which is old and rambling, like that other legendary Karoo hotel, Melton Wold, between Loxton and Victoria West. Inside it’s dark as a shipwreck, you have to switch on a light even if you just want to scratch your head or think clearly.

For breakfast I spread the goat’s butter extra-thick on my toast as I peruse the regional newspaper, the Noordwester en Oewernuus. The headline, “Kevin Brand op 7de Laan” catches my eye. Kevin, I discover, works on the set of the soapie. The report says in one episode he was the man who carried the bowl of fruit juice that later landed on Paula’s hair. He is the son of Mr Sammy and Mrs Toekies Brand, well-known teachers in Calvinia.

Arriving in Williston at the Milch Goat Breeders’ Show, it’s lunchtime and I’m invited to join. I get some potjiekos and someone buys me a beer. It’s hot and windy, and dust clouds race through the showgrounds. I learn a new word for a cool box: a carrycot.

Someone tells that joke about the young, inexperienced dominee about to deliver his first sermon. An older dominee gives him some advice: Fill the carafe with mampoer instead of water, then you can take a sip to relax your nerves every so often. The day arrives and the young dominee delivers his sermon, his confidence soaring with every passing sip of mampoer. Afterwards he asks the old dominee what he thought of the sermon. “It was very good,” the old dominee tells him, “but there were 10 commandments, not 12 – and 12 disciples, not 10. And Cain beat Abel to death, he didn’t kick him in his moer...”

“Mastag manne, dit kook, dit kook,” says Koos Pansegrouw over the microphone as he welcomes the next batch of aspirant champions to the shed floor. Koos is the vice-chairman of the Milch Goat Breeders’ Society.

“Poena, get out of the way; I want to photograph the goat!” someone yells from the sidelines.

Mervyn Swart of the farm Houtkraal near De Aar wins the main prize – his white Saanen ram named Lattaia Padre, an enormous animal weighing 151 kg, is crowned All-breeds Champion.

A Landbouweekblad reporter has to photograph all the winning goats. Each animal has to stand in profile position, its head turned just so. It’s what happens outside the frame of the photo that’s funny: While the photographer concentrates on her composition, the farmer waves his hat or bashes a plastic bottle on the floor so that the goat will look in that direction.

Landbouweekblad’s photographer in action at the Milch Goat Show in Williston. Mervyn Swart from De Aar poses with his champion goat called Lattaia Padre.

If you think you’ve been hot, you haven’t been to Van Wyksvlei. In Van Wyksvlei the sun is so close that you singe your hair when you straighten your back after pulling up your socks. In 1882 the first government-financed dam in South Africa was built here. Why did they build a dam in the middle of the Great Karoo? Optimistically, they wanted to grow lucerne and wheat. Today, the dam is a tourist attraction, not because you can go fish there or take your rubber duck for a spin, but because it’s never been full. Never. I go have a look. There’s a bit of water in it, about as much you can fit into your swimming pool at home.

But I’m not here for the dam. I’m here for rock art. At Springbokoog outside the town you’ll find some of the country’s finest rock engravings. The black dolerite rocks were the perfect canvasses for the Bushmen to chisel and scratch their art onto.

Last night I slept at a guesthouse run by the De Kocks (where I had delicious cold lamb neck at 10 pm). This morning they directed me to Springbokoog.

I turn out of the main road past the tennis club, which must’ve last seen action when Jimmy Connors was still on the scene. Then I follow a gravel road almost to where it runs out. Even today it’s harsh terrain, but in the 1800s the last of the Bushmen found refuge here as their world got smaller and smaller, modernity and rifles and farming constricting them, eventually killing off their way of life.

But before that happened, they made the engravings you can see at Springbokoog. Farm owner (and artist and golf player of renown) Rina van Wyk takes a break from dosing sheep to take me up to the koppie. For an hour or so I wander among the engravings: elephants, lions, a rhino, gemsbok, ostriches and buck with horns so weird they look like something from Greek mythology. Elsewhere on the farm there’s an engraving of a hippo.

These koppies and rock engravings are our pyramids and hieroglyphics. Sure, they don’t make tourist-friendly silhouettes against the desert sky, but the Bushmen were never people who tried to imitate their god. Their creator, their world, looked them in the eye every day, in every passing cobra and every roaring lion. Springbokoog is like a library of those times: thoughts that are now almost indecipherable to us.

What worries me is what will happen when Rina doesn’t live here any more. She’s been the custodian of the art, but does the government care? Will future generations be able to come here and appreciate the engravings, or will they be forgotten almost as quickly as our forefathers forgot about the people who made them?

Places like Springbokoog are invisible if you don’t know where to look.
I continue my journey through the Northern Cape, heading further east, encountering locusts on the white dirt road to Vosburg, through Britstown, De Aar, Philipstown.

The Great Karoo is best enjoyed alone. It gives and gives and gives when no one is looking. Every grid you drive over becomes a rabbly chorus of sorts. You realise crows are crafty and always have their eye on you. You recognise that something like a sociable weaver nest is a miracle.

Get out of your car at sunset. Stand dead still and close your eyes. Around you you’ll hear the everything of nothing. Lift your arms like a bird spreading its wings.

You’ll hear the landscape breathing. You’ll realise that you’re an ant travelling on the dried veins of this ancient lung, just waiting to become a fossil like so many living things have done here before you. 
Open your eyes slowly and look down at your feet. You’re levitating, aren’t you?