BOOK REVIEW: When the ox wagon was king of the road
One tollgate recorded 4,500 ox wagons a year travelling from the Cape to the interior
24 March 2020 - 16:00
Until as recently as the early years of the 20th century Cape ox wagons travelled about in SA. The wagons could offer a top speed of only two miles an hour, but this slow pace had its compensations, writes Lawrence Green in his book When the Journey’s Over. The following report is from that work.
The leisurely pace of travel gave a person “time to think, and to observe”, and it could be said that “in the cloudless winter, a long wagon journey in the interior of SA was the finest life in the world”, Green writes...
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