Cold front

These pics are from dusk on Tuesday as the cold front hit Grahamstown and ripped through the city. I've been chasing it the whole day, for 1000km now. Just behind it, sometimes driving through hail, I finally drove into its eye outside Warden in Free State. For the next hour my car was lashed by rain and a howling wind; I loved it.

1000km is a lot of thinking time: if Highway Africa was the journalistic 'mountain top' experience, then my journey today has been the slide back down into the valley of reality, implementation and the grind of challenges. A community newspaper in SA in a recession, also while they're becoming extinct in the rest of the world, is frontier territory.

I've just stopped at Steers in Ermelo for coffee, fast food and to stretch my legs. I've got another 2hours minimum to go before I'm home and can sleep...albeit in the very battleground itself.

Aliwal North

Aliwal North is just in the Eastern Cape province, other side the wide flowing Orange River. There's already an incredible bleakness, also parchedness and exceptional quality of sunlight about it that is so Great Karoo. And wide open spaces too, not unlike the smiles of the people on the side of the roads in towns with names like Zastron, Rouxville (both in the Free State) and then Jamestown. My only regret today is that I was in a hurry.

Yesterday I squeezed in 200km before sunset. Today, although I was up at 3am tearfully loving a dog retching blood because of severe bronchitis (knowing, too, it would be another six hours before the vet was available), I was on the road from Volksrust by 7am. By sunset I had covered just over 1000km. But a rush it was, which is not how I like it. Not one of the jewels on my path was I able to savour.