Wilgewandel to Die Top (23 km)
The hills embrace us at Schoemanspoort outside Oudtshoorn. The tar road winds along the foot of the cliffs beside the chattering Grobbelaars River - a worthy appetiser for the Prince of Passes.
 First we stop at the Wilgewandel Holiday Farm, which offers shady willow trees, donkey-cart and
camel rides, and a foefie slide over a farm dam. At the restaurant, people are enjoying Karoo lamb, bobotie and ostrich dishes. A girl feeds a tame peacock and a quad bike growls in the distance.
Peet Vermaak, a manager at Wilgewandel, sits down with us and looks up at the mountain. “I just can’t get enough of that pass,” he says somewhat pensively. “The silence at Die Top...”
The writer Rudyard Kipling, who wrote among other things The Jungle Book, visited South Africa between 1898 and 1908, and he was equally impressed:
Sudden the desert changes
The raw glare softens and clings,
Till the aching Oudtshoorn ranges
Stand up like the thrones of kings.
We set off. “Drive slooowly, otherwise you might as well have taken the tar road,” says Katot Meyer, an expert on the Little Karoo and just the right company for a drive over the pass.
“Bain didn’t scar the mountain at all,” he says, binoculars in his hands. “It’s almost as if he did only what was necessary.”
We roll down our windows. After about a kilometre we encounter the first stone ruins: Die Stalletjie, where the horses and mules of the post wagon used to stop for feed and water. Then the road swings sharply to the right: Witdraaie, the first two hairpin bends, hewed out of limestone. They’re nothing compared to the ones we’ll have to negotiate later.
The road straightens out and slants upwards, flanked by pine stumps on either side of the road. These trees were planted in 1927 as part of an experimental plantation. Until about a year ago this was a popular picnic site - among the stumps are the remains of a cement table - but because they are aliens, the pines were chopped down in 2004 after this mountain area got World Heritage status.
About 200 m further is another ruin on the right: Hotelletjie, an overnight place built shortly after the pass was opened. It is recorded that Jan Terblanche of the farm Matjiesrivier had the first green cooldrink in the region here. (Creme Soda? No one knows.)
I offer Katot a sip of Coke. “No thanks,” he says. “I’m waiting for the mountain water.” The water is less than a kilometre further at Fonteintjie, a tiny, permanent water source. Katot and I lie flat on our stomachs on the rocks and drink our fill.
In the old days, residents of Prince Albert often left a watermelon in the cool stream so they would have padkos when they returned from Oudtshoorn.
Around here the view also starts to come into its own. Katot points out the Kammanassie Mountain in the distance, towards Uniondale. The next hairpin bend, Skelmdraai, is a hairy one. Now the road gets really steep as it climbs up to Boegoekloof.
Katot shows me where the date 1886 is chiselled out on a high retaining wall. A few metres below is the old footpath used by donkeys in the years before the pass was built. It’s densely overgrown, but still visible. If you look up, it seems a lunatic undertaking to build a road over these steep mountains.
About 500 m further we reach the final landmark on the south side of the pass: Die Grootklip. From here you can see Die Top properly for the first time. 
 A car comes barrelling towards us from the crest. The occupants stare straight ahead and look grumpy. “Look at the sullen faces,” Katot says. “They should slow down and enjoy the scenery.”

Die Top to Prince Albert (19 km)
We encounter a few tourists at Die Top, among them a pale Danish family staring into the distance, wide-eyed. “Beautiful… beautiful.”
I clamber up the little koppie at Die Top. To the south is the Matjiesrivier valley in the Little Karoo, with Andriesberg rumpling off behind it. You can see Oudtshoorn and on the horizon the blue-grey Outeniqua Mountain range. On the other side is the Great Karoo, with the Nuweveld Mountains hazy beyond Beaufort West on the northern horizon.
You can see the road making a few lazy twists and then suddenly… gone… swallowed by a deep kloof. Prince Albert is only 19 km north of where I’m standing now, yet it seems a long journey away.
What would motivate someone to conceive of such a road? Did Bain perhaps stand on this very koppie and draw an imaginary line from here to the other side of Teeberg? Perhaps a road builder has something in common with a composer, who often “hears” music in his or her head before the notes are even played or written down. Bain would have had to “see” this road.
I’m reluctant to leave. This is the kind of place where you have to wait until it’s evening and the moon appears above the Swartberg.
In Prince Albert, someone tells me you can turn off your car’s headlights and drive down the pass when there’s a full moon. It’s probably not legal or safe, but it sounds like something you should experience at least once.
I’d also like to see what it looks like here when it snows. There is a local legend about Thys de Wit of the farm Scholtzkloof, who slogged over the mountain in a horse-drawn cart in 1888, shortly after the pass opened. It’s said that it took a very long time to cross the mountain and the horses’ hooves sank deep into the snow. It was so cold that their hooves fell off, and the animals had to be shot.
Writer and traveller Lawrence Green sings the Swartberg’s praises in Karoo (1955): “I have travelled only one road in my lifetime more dramatic, and that was the fifteen thousand foot pass beyond Darjeeling that leads into Tibet.”
I haven’t travelled the Tibetan pass, but I can well believe that the Swartberg Pass is one of the most beautiful roads on earth.

ABOUT 800M BEYOND Die Top you can turn right onto the plateau where the opening ceremony was held on 10 January 1888, and the centenary celebration on 10 February 1988.
During the construction of the pass there was a tiny settlement with a butchery and small school on this plateau. Shortly after the pass was opened, you had to pay a toll at the Ou Tolhuis. And so you carry on down the mountain. First you pass a forestry path on the right, which is a 4x4 trail nowadays (get your permit beforehand from CapeNature). A mere 100 m further you’ll see the pass’s second permanent spring, Fonteintjie 1884. There isn’t a signboard, so you have to look carefully. If you get out of your car and look around, you’ll see the “1884” chiselled into the rock.
Ou Tol is the name of the two forestry bungalows about 500 m further. One is for the rangers and the other one is an overnight hut for hikers on the Swartberg trails.
At the side of the road at Ou Tol is a weather-beaten Voortrekker memorial celebrating the “Eerste verjaardag van die besoek van Magrieta Prinsloo aan Prins Albert” (“The first anniversary of
Magrieta Prinsloo’s visit to Prince Albert”). It was the name of one of the ox-wagons of the centenary trek in 1938.
 If you read up about the area, you’ll discover a story for just about every corner in the pass. Not far from where we are now, a constable apparently shot and killed a bystander, Chrisjan Swanepoel, in 1900 when he wanted to show off with his rifle and threaten a prisoner. The story goes that Chrisjan still haunts the mountains...
With this ghost story still lingering in my mind, we see overgrown mounds of rubble on the right of the road - presumably these are the graves of prisoners who died working on the pass. And just after that we drive through Neville’s Corner, the place where John Fitz Neville died after being thrown off his horse in 1888. He was clerk of works during construction of the pass. Other sources say that he died after a dynamite explosion.
We’re still driving on a plateau, past a signboard saying Gamkaskloof/“Die Hel”. After this turnoff
was completed and opened in 1962, the isolated community in the Gamkaskloof, about 55 km from here, started emptying out as more and more people moved to the surrounding towns.
Nowadays, Die Hel is a popular tourist destination. You’ll find food, accommodation and campsites in the valley, but the authentic character of the place and its people can now be found only in the memory bank of the descendants.
Being on a plateau, you might be under the impression that your journey will get easier from here. But no. Teeberg is a good place to get out and stretch your legs, because the Zigzag hairpin bends are a mere 3 km away. From here onwards it is wise to heed Katot’s advice and follow “the rules of common sense”: “Use your hooter before sharp bends, always keep left and look out for dust. And stop for oncoming traffic.” This is where you need to keep your wits about you.
In the days before hooters, whips cracked as oxwagons inched around the corners. You know you’re in the Zigzag once the impressive retaining walls start curling around the mountain. Bain used a drystone method to build these walls. No clay or cement was used, and smaller stones were neatly packed in-between the big ones.
From the second-last hairpin bend you see the famous view of the pass that has been reproduced on countless postcards and in books. It still looks exactly like photographs taken 100 years ago  when motorcars started driving the pass for the first time.

WE MAKE IT THROUGH the hairpin bends and stop at Droëwaterval, which, as its name indicates, is usually dry. Then you get the Blikstasie, also called Die Tronk, the ruin of the place where prisoners slept during construction of the pass.
The consensus is that between 200 and 240 convicts worked on the road. Other sources claim the number was closer to 1 000, maybe more. Timothy Mark Goetze, who wrote a thesis on Bain and the construction of the Swartberg Pass, has the most reliable number: sometimes there were up to 447, but never more. 
Anonymously they struggled, with death always a possibility, especially during the biting cold and snow of the winter months. Among the prisoners there were also hierarchies: Like American prisoner-labourers, the chain gang or kettingspan consisted of murderers and other dangerous criminals. The koffiespan consisted of prisoners convicted of lesser crimes who could qualify for sugar in their coffee and tobacco.
It’s still difficult to believe that such a small number of labourers could have built this taxing 24 km stretch of road in such a relatively short time, without modern machinery.
At Malvadraai, about 2 km beyond Blikstasie, we get out and admire the rock formations. The community historian Sue van Waart gives an apt description in her book Swartberg en sy Mense: “The towering cliffs, the dark kloofs with the mangled, almost tortured rock formations that were pressed in layer upon layer, first upwards and then downwards again, the dizzying chasms, make one aware of one’s own insignificance.”
You can linger here all afternoon and see how light and shade change continuously on the rocky walls, sometimes within seconds. Malvadraai is the start of one of the Swartberg Nature Reserve’s most popular hiking trails. Just a pity the small picnic table looks about as mangled as the rock formations.
We’re almost over the pass. We cross the causeway at Tweede Water. Before us, on the highest cliff, it looks as if a small clock has been mounted on the rock. It’s Horlosiekrans, and the shadows in the rock make it look as if the “arms” of the clock are showing twenty past two.
After Horlosiekrans is Eerste Water, the best place to stop for a picnic and a swim. Just behind
Eerste Water is the entrance to Dansbaan and Murasies, the ruins of the first labourer camp.
There’s a cement slab on which people still dance at New Year’s parties, and it’s often used for weddings and choir recitals. I read about a farmer who tells how his father liked to play concertina during the jolly New Year’s parties at the Dansbaan.
One New Year’s Eve a mother left her baby to sleep on an ox-wagon and covered it with a jacket. The other guests, blissfully unaware of the baby under the jacket, all put their jackets on top of it. The baby suffocated, and the farmer’s grandfather never touched his concertina again...
Then, a kilometre further, we get to the end of the pass. I ask Katot whether we should push on and return to Oudtshoorn via Meiringspoort.
“No, let’s turn around right here and drive back over the pass,” he says.
We make a U-turn. A whole new experience awaits us now that we’re driving from the Prince Albert side.
I think of what the 63-year-old Alfred Lodewyk of Prince Albert told me earlier: “It’s very beautiful, this pass. I don’t know if there’s another pass like it in South Africa - or in the world, actually.”

History lesson
Prince Albert’s Fransie Pienaar Museum has a comprehensive exhibition on the Swartberg Pass, and rare photographs and documents in its archive. You have to pay to take pictures or copy any photographs and documents.
Where? 42 Church Street, Prince Albert.
Contact: 023 541 1172

Go on foot
Hike one of the Swartberg Nature reserve’s hiking trails, which vary from a day hike to five days. You can also overnight at Ou tol, Gouekrans and Bothashoek. the best times for hiking are April to May and September to October.
Contact: 044 802 5310/11 or 021 659 3500; www.capenature.co.za

Sleep over
if there isn’t a group of hikers booked in at Ou Tol, you can call CapeNature and book to overnight in the hut.
Contact: Erika Swanepoel on 044 203 6325

Cycle down the pass
Contact Lindsay Steyn of Dennehof Guest House and tours near Prince Albert - he provides the bicycles and support. You can choose to be taken to the top of the pass so you only have to cycle down, or do a longer route that includes Meiringspoort and Montagu Pass.
Contact: Lindsay 023 541 1227; www.dennehof.co.za

Guided tour
The plush Swartberg Country Manor on the Matjiesrivier side of the pass offers guided outings where you can learn more about the plant and wildlife.
Contact: 044 279 3188; www.swartbergmanor.co.za

Go by 4x4
Get a permit for the day-long or overnight Swartberg 4x4 trail.
Contact: 044 802 5310/11 or 021 659 3500

The 2 Hell and Back mountain bike race follows one of the most scenic routes in South Africa. The cyclists start at De Hoek campsite on the Oudtshoorn side of the mountain, cycle up the Swartberg Pass and then turn off to Die Hel, where they camp for the night.
Next morning they take the same 62 km route back to De Hoek. the total distance is 124 km, which includes a few nasty uphills.
When? The“main race” is Saturday, 7 and Sunday, 8 November, with a limit of 500 cyclists. There is another event on Thursday, 5 and Friday, 6 November - it follows the same route but it’s for cyclists who aren’t in a hurry.
Contact: www.ecobound.co.za