Get Lost!

This weekend I had the priviledge of attending Abel and Karien Jordaan's wedding at Moolmanshoek in the Southern Freestate. Moolmanshoek is a beautiful private game and stud farm near Ficksburg and if you can find your way there you will have a great time...IF being the operative word in that sentence.

I left Spirit of Adventure at 14:30 after running a teambuilding day for the I.T. company Isiqina. The drive was wonderful. A few localized storms were moving through the Drakensberg as a drove through Winterton and Bergville looking across at the mountains. The Stormy yet sunny afternoon light combined with the irridescant summer colours to produce some of the best views of the berg I've ever seen from there. Cathkin peak, hiding Monk's Cowl and ships prow pass (the scene of a fifteen hour epic I must tell you about some day. Check the humblehamster blog for more details) was beautifully outlined. Cathederal peak stood proudly free of the escarpment and reminded me of the view from on top which I was enjoying just last month. The Saddle, The Rockeries, The Sentinal...it just got better and better. Then Sterkfontein Dam slid past with sun out my left window and black maelstrooms out the right. I kept on being broken by the beauty of what I was seeing all the way through Golden Gate with the fiesta dominating Lichens pass. This must be one of the best driving roads in the country by the way. I dropped a gear and shot up towards Clarens then left onto the Fouriesburg road.

I could now see through the farm lands and sandstone cliffs and Koppies to the Maluti Mountains of Lesotho, I was getting drunk on the sight of that high kingdom and might well have pulled off and gone hiking right there and then if it weren't for the knowledge that a beautiful woman was waiting for me at a reportedly enchanting farm, so I sped on singing loudly to Keane and overflowing with joy :) ... this is when the music in the movie starts to change.

The simplified map on the website showed that you needed to drive through Ficksburg towards Rosendal and start looking for a small dirt road called the S384. I would then need to follow this road until it ended at Moolmanshoek on a... hoek in the road. I was getting so keen to see Burn, my girlfriend, and to beat sunset that I missed the tiny faded board six k's BEFORE Ficksburg and drove on and on and on with no sign of the dirt road I needed. About forty k's after Ficksburg I got to Clocolan with fumes left in my petrol tank and a flat phone battery. I was lost. I found a friendly traveling rep who explained how far wrong I had gone at the petrol station and I then sped off back down the road and into the rain and the night. I was stressing about Burn and her family starting to worry about me as I should have been there already so I plunged into the darkness with far less joy that I'd had earlier. I found the Rosendal road that the confounded map had shown as a simple route through ficksburg and headed down it. The rain was heavy and it was completely dark exept for the blinding lights of on-coming trucks so I counted off the thirty k's I needed to cover before getting to the junction. And there it was. With no sign or board to confirm it.

Now here's the thing, had I not already been late and lost it would have been less important that I got this right yet it is infinitely more likely that I would have made a good decision. Having already been delayed due to carelessness it was now even more important that I make certain it was the right road but do you think I could be relied upon to make a good call in my desperation to waste not another minute? of course not. I remember thinking that another five k's up the road to check that this was not a red herring before the real S384 would have been a good plan but the idea of driving any further in the wrong direction seemed so awful that I decided to just go for it and headed down the un-named farm road into the unknown, wet blackness.

I hit a T junction after a while with a sign saying that it was the road I had been looking for to start with. I had taken an earlier road but it had brought me to where I was supposed to be! Now all I had to do was decide if I would go left or right... I started toward the left then changed my mind and went right. Later I would find that I would have been there in ten minutes if I had gone left but instead I spent at least forty minutes getting further and further away from what I thought I would be seeing around the next bend. I found a four way junction still without a sign or board of any kind so I pressed on along the bumpy tracks untill I found some lights which turned out to be a farm. I drove in and found my way arond the dairy to the farm house. I rang and rang the bell but got no answer so I headed back out the way I thought I had come in but suddenly nothing in the tunnel of light from my headlamps was familiar, I was lost in the farm! Suddenly I was on a tar road which I couldn't understand and I was cursing alloud in my car. Somehow I managed to get back onto the dirt road I had been on before so that I could re-trace my steps. It was about nine o'clock and I had been expected from just after seven so poor Burn had been going out of her mind wondering what had happened to me. She was driving around with her dad trying to find me when we stumbled accross eachother and they lead me home.

It was the most frustrating, painfull, powerless and scary evening of my life and it must have been even worse for Burn. I recovered with good doses of meat and pap followed by marshmallows on the braai but the moral of the story is deeply ingrained. Following your gut can be over-rated and you're most likely to do it when you can least afford a mistake!