A Thin Blue (Water) Line

Over the years, we’ve enjoyed road trips in many different vehicles. From two-wheelers and two-wheel-drive SUVs to 4x4s, big and small… Heck, we even did an air safari through Namibia. This month was a first though: we went on a 1 000km road trip in a 15-ton lorry, carrying a 7.5-ton load. It was a trip like no other and one which demonstrated that in life, it’s often the small, seemingly insignificant things that really matter.

- Danie Botha

IT’S the small things.The small things that you normally take for granted, and maybe don’t appreciate as much as you should. Until, that is, you are forced to make do without that supposedly insignificant thing.

Let’s use a random example like, er, say Eskom. Just about everything we do is somehow connected to 220 volts of electrical current.

When some anonymous Eskom employee flips a switch in a control room to activate a load-shedding schedule, and those 220 volts are gone, you realise exactly how dependent of those volts you really are.

Your phone doesn’t work because the service providers’ towers or control rooms are down. You can’t have a hot bath or shower. You can’t cook. You can’t watch television. The traffic is an absolute nightmare, with traffic lights down all over the city.

Then, much later, when that same Eskom employee flips the ‘on’ switch again... boy, do you appreciate those volts.

Yep, it’s the small things in life that you don’t always fully appreciate until you lose it. Like electricity.

And water. We’re on our way to Beaufort West, a major post in the heart of the Karoo. We leftCape Town at 3am in an Isuzu FTR 850 long-wheel base truck, carrying 7 500 litres of precious water.

Tumelo Maketekete is behind the wheel. Strangely, he seems to be enjoying the slow drive, the Isuzu’s speed limited to the prescribed 80km/h.

Truth be told, speed was never Tumelo’s thing. And he does seem to possess copious amounts of patience as he aims for the emergency lane, allowing another car to ‘speed’ past at the legal 120km/h.

From the passenger seat, it seems as if everything is happening in slow motion. The ankle-high shrubbery next to the road ambles past at a sedate pace. The horizon stays remarkably the same for a very long time. There is no radio, no air-conditioning.