Road trip: Highway Africa 2009

Aliwal North: Although right now I'm sitting on the Eastern Cape side of the Orange River - in heat reminiscent of summer's end, spring's very beginning - hurriedly downing a Windhoek Lager and a chicken schitzel, this road trip actually started 800km ago late yesterday afternoon.

I'm on my way to Grahamstown for the Digital Citizen Indaba that starts tomorrow morning and runs until Sunday afternoon. It's followed by the 13th Highway Africa Digital Journalism conference that opens with a dinner on Sunday evening. Funny enough, and I wonder why (has it got anything at all to do with the 2010 world cup soccer?), the dinner is being held at the 'splinter nuut' soccer stadium in Port Elizabeth, 120km away from Grahamstown.

Tonight - I admit it might be ambitious - I'm aiming to sleep in the artist's forest village of Hogsback. It's in the cool and misty Amatola Mountains of the old Ciskei apartheid-homeland (maybe they were also just trying to be creative in their very own special way). Hogsback is 49km along a gravel road from Cathcart.

I first scoured these backways of the Stormberg region (and have been passionately in love with them ever since) as a long-haired, over-principled and vegetarian journalism and English Literature student at Rhodes University. These particular wanderings began in the very same year that Nelson Mandela was released from Robben Island. I remember well the celebrations at my so-called 'English liberal' university.