The Other Side of the Garden

South Africa’s Garden Route is a lush, romantic drive. Typically. The other half is the dramatic inland drive through red desert, past big birds and big mountains and big bottles of wine...

- Vardhan Kondvikar

I have some tangential history with Mercedes-Benz in South Africa.My family, for some reason, decided to make a 1963 fintail part of it – it was second-hand and had been used rather badly, so it kept going wrong, but it was magnificent. Vast, with creaky leather, and to a six-year-old boy, something between the Titanic and a spaceship, designed for epic trips, possibly catching wild animals on the way. God knows why I wasn’t allowed to take it on one.

Years later, car gone, I found a South African car magazine that had a fintail, the same kind, being driven through the Karoo, an arid, ochre semi-desert, clouds of red dust enticingly backlit, the whole seeming exactly the kind of once-in-a life time journey I’d dreamt of. The CLA I’m in is rather smaller, but the Karoo – probably from ‘garo’, a Khoikhoi word meaning ‘desert’ – is just as epic. This is the flip-side of the Garden Route, that lush, romantic, wine-strewn drive between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. This is haunting, beautiful, and you only need to go through a small part of it to feel its muscles. And this is only the Klein Karoo, the little one...

Starting off in Port Elizabeth, you wouldn’t imagine you’re going to find this in your path. PE is often windy, often rainy, a great destination for whale-watching, and the road to Knysna is a highway with little to do other than get used to South Africa’s interesting view of overtaking: if you’re being passed, you move all the way to the left, driving on the wide shoulder, so that the guy passing you doesn’t have to stress out. He flashes his hazard lights to thank you, you flash your high beams to tell him it wasn’t a problem.