Cape Town to Clanwilliam - 13th June

Cape Town to Clanwilliam - 13th June





Short: Up early and head straight to Twende to pickup the tent, Tent is outfitted, pickup supplies at a nearby grocery store and mall, begin driving north to Clanwilliam in the Cederberg mountains, come within 25 km’s of Clanwilliam and turn around, Head back to Cape Town to pickup Nikolai’s passport, turn around and head back to Cederberg mountains

Long: We left Cape Town early this morning and headed straight to Twende to pickup the tent. At Twende the tent was fitted to the roof rack and meanwhile Niki and I met with both Minette and Claudia (Cliff’s wife and our primary contact while purchasing the car). Interestingly both Claudia and Minette were both leading overland tours before working at Twende, and were able to provide some last minute advice on places to see and people to meet up with along the way to Namibia.

After saying farewell to Twende we stocked up on groceries and also did some last minute shopping at the local mall. I dumped my sleeping bag to safe room and therefore picked up a cheap duvet…Niki did the same…although I’m not quite sure why. The shopping areas are all quite nice and interestingly all of the parking lots have attendants in yellow who facilitate parking, keep watch over the cars, and gladly accept a few rand for their services. A quick lunch and we began the drive north. The drive to Clanwilliam in the Cederberg mountains is a nice, paved, two lane road, the scenery consists of rolling hills with farms and mountains in the distance, and for the most part we had a nice drive. There were a few issues. The first issue occurred as onto the N7 onramp. I was driving and as I made the left hand turn my brand new sunglasses skimmed across the dashboard and directly out my window, landing in the middle of the onramp. I stopped and Nikolai quickly picked up the glasses before they were driven over, but not before they suffered a few nicks. A few minutes later our primary source of music, Nikolai’s I-pod, froze and is not currently unusable. However, the absolute BEST issue we had occurred while I was mentioning something about the Namibian border. Nikolai began having spasms and yelling “shit,” and I immediately suspected turrets. Unfortunately it wasn’t turrets, instead Nikolai remembered he left his jacket, and more importantly, his passport, back in Cape Town.

Our two hour drive back to Cape Town was pretty much exactly the same as it was heading up. After Deetje’s neighbor kindly let us back into the house, Nikolai picked up his jacket and passport and we were on our way again. On the way out of town we stopped to refuel. We calculate we will get approximately 800-1000 km’s per tank. At 9.72 rand per liter ($1.2 per liter) fuel will not be cheap, but is about what we expected. We also threw a few beers in the fridge (Betsy is outfitted with a small fridge in the back). The sun set as we drove back north out of Cape Town and two and a half hours later we pulled into Clanwilliam, a small town in the middle of the Cederberg mountains. We stopped at a small restaurant in the city for directions to the closest campground and were relieved to find it was only 2kms away. We camped at a nice campground at the Clanwilliam reservoir/dam for the night and surprisingly had no issues pitching the tent. Before heading to bed we had a few beers on Betsy’s hood and made friends with a curious cat that kept hanging around.