Photograph: No trees for shade

The sun went behind a cloud and I took advantage of the temporary coolness, leaving them to hitch-hike.

The road climbed a steep hill and, needless to say, the heat set in again. It seemed to takes ages and my pedalling felt like crawling as I went from one rare piece of shade to the next, watching my water supply run low.

To conserve water I would take small sips and swirl the water around in my mouth before swallowing it.

For many stretches of the ride I preferred to travel on the opposite side of the road, facing oncoming traffic as pedestrians do, for fear of vehicles coming too close to me from behind. This meant I would have to clear right off the road to avoid possible head-on collisions.

I was facing oncoming traffic when a large horse-and-trailer bus came up from behind. A passenger, leaning out of the window, whistled at me.

It was one of those fellows from the brick works. They had finally found a lift!

His hat blew off his head and landed in the road. I picked it up with the intention of posting it back to him. The three had given me their addresses so that I could send them photographs I took of them during the moments we shared the shade of a rare Eastern Cape roadside tree. 

The road dropped down a mountainside that made for a welcome free-wheel. Then suddenly the scenery changed from low-lying scrub and thicket to the lush farmland of the citrus orchards beside the Sundays River. By now I was low on water and terribly thirsty so I went to a farmhouse close to the side of the road to ask for water. No one answered my knock on the door, so I helped myself to water by turning on a tap connected to a thick garden hose. 

I glugged and glugged it down, only to realise that it was heavy in chlorine. 

COMMENT: Can you recall when you’ve been crazily thirsty?

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The village of Addo was abuzz with Friday afternoon activity, particularly around a little supermarket shop that was run by an Afrikaans-speaking family whose son, aged about ten, stood barefoot at the till.

I ordered a meat pie and a Fanta in response to my body’s crying demands and I hoped that somewhere, somehow I could soon repeat the experience of the night before at a beachfront pub in PE with my friend Guy Rogers, a reporter with the Herald newspaper. The beers we drank had gone down so well and I was ready for another!

Next to me on the table outside the Addo shop, a group of people I presumed to be farm workers devoured cream buns before they boarded the back of a bakkie, their visit to “town” having come to an end.

I pedalled on, over a railway line and past a police station, towards the Aardvark Backpackers, which the “Coast to Coast” backpackers’ guide had advertised as a place where French and German were spoken.

Daniel, a Swiss-German who bought the place with his Swiss-French wife, Claude, to escape the stresses of Europe’s rat race, was busy watering the lawn when I arrived.

His little corner of the Eastern Cape was close, but far, from PE in that there were none of the water restrictions experienced in “Die Baai”.

Daniel and Claude had chosen to settle there two years ago because it was “nice scenery, nice weather and we love the elephant park”.

He said he had passed this “crazy cyclist” on the road earlier in the day. I rested in a hammock in the garden. A little boy came up to me, making all sorts of sounds as he sprayed me with jacaranda blossom he had picked up on the floor. I tried to speak to him but he answered me only in little grunts. I feared the poor child may have some handicaps.

Later, I realised this was not the case at all. In the company of his parents, from Switzerland, with whom the boy was travelling South Africa for three months, he turned into a chatterbox, but only in the two languages he spoke: German and Swiss German.

His dad was a software engineer, his mum a lawyer.

COMMENT: How any languages do you speak?

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She had been born and bred in the former East Germany and was fourteen years old when the Berlin Wall came down.

The Berlin Wall divided the German city of Berlin. The country we know as Germany today had also been divided: West Germany was a Western country and East Germany was a communist country.

Half of the city of Berlin was under communist rule and the other half under Western rule. In those days communist countries and Western countries were enemies and there were many wars all over the world in which the communists supported the one side and the West supported the other. Shortly before communism ended in Europe, the Berlin Wall came down.

The little boy’s mother told me how different life had been under communism, which is a system that does not allow people to own companies. In non-communist countries, businesses are forever trying to do better than one another and therefore are always offering people new things.

Under communism the government ran everything in East Germany.

“You’d be considered radical if you brought a plastic bag to school with an advert on it,” she said.

She told me her brother had been in Berlin when the wall came down and brought home a sweet – a Christmas Santa Claus on a lollipop.

“It was so surprising to see something so colourful in our fridge.”

Many people back in the old East Germany, she said, wished for the old communist days because the government always provided the important things people needed, such as housing, schools and jobs.

Since the end of communism, when West Germany and East Germany had become one country, companies from the West had done business ruthlessly in the East; many people with qualifications from the old East Germany were told they were not worth the paper they were written on and many folks felt they had no future. Many people were drinking a lot.

Back in Switzerland, the mother had a job that involved making life easier for migrants in Switzerland.

Swiss companies were wanting many people from India who were good at information technology (IT). She had to help them get their papers in order so that they could live in Switzerland legally. People with IT skills from India were in great demand in Switzerland and she had the job of getting their papers sorted out quickly.

The Swiss family, like many other tourists I met at backpackers’ lodges, had with them a copy of Nelson Mandela’s biography Long Walk to Freedom, still considered top of the book list on a visit to South Africa.

COMMENT: Have you read Long Walk to Freedom?