Namaqua’s flower show just a faint memory
Travelling in vain across hard land to find a treat of nature
The journey home is not straightforward when you’ve grown up in seven towns. You might be spoilt for choice, but there are also great distances involved. Port Nolloth and Louwsburg, for instance, are almost at opposite ends of SA — separated by 1,700km as the crow flies and a lot further on some atrocious roads.
Much of the road to Port Nolloth was bad, as was part of the railway during the first journey there in the heat of January 1955. The entire trip took seven days: first 1,300km by rail from a previous hometown, Ventersburg, in the middle of the Free State to Cape Town; a wait for further bookings; another rail trip to Bitterfontein that was so slow it took as long as the first even though it was half the distance; and another two days by road. Today the trip is an easy day’s drive on the N7, but you can miss a lot that a railway carriage provided...
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