The Country Garden Tour

The day didn’t start well. With the two old legends serviced and prepped the day before, the last thing you want to do is run out of petrol in your driveway.

- Nick Yell

Especially when you then have to get in the car with your adventure kit on and drive to the garage with a petrol can, all the while knowing your better half is gnashing her teeth at your startling ineptitude.

But things improve dramatically once the bikes are fully fuelled and we are whistling up the N2 on this brisk spring morning in the Overberg. Our destination is the appropriately named guest farm, The Country Garden, in an uber fertile valley below the Klein Swartberg outside Ladismith. It’s here that my old friends, the Tuffin family, decided to lay their hats after selling up their successful horticultural business in Cape Town ten years back.

In a quest for a slightly different route plan, Annette and I will be following Overberg dirt tracks to Stormsvlei, a tar stretch via the Bonnievale wine lands to Montagu and then onto my old favourite, yet never boring, the Ouberg Pass and Kannaland route to Ladysmith. The next day we plan to wash the Karoo dust from our hair by dousing our heads in the warm waters off Witsand and then to head homeward via the new pont at Malgas.

With the Cape’s dams, at last, overflowing and the farmlands sodden with unusually high spring rainfall, the verges of the Jongensklip dirt tracks are bursting with exuberantly colourful wildflowers, their honeyed floral scents pleasurably intoxicating. The landscape has been washed clean (thanks for that Annette) and not even our knobbly tyres are able to coax a plume of dust from the damp dirt tracks. Riding conditions are perfect.