The Gothic peculiarities and curious secrets of Route 63

There’s a secret library somewhere in the middle of a small Karoo hotel, its shelves of books untouched, its armchairs never used. No whiff of stale cigar smoke, no sign of any living being having been present in a long while. If there are presences here, they are unseen. In a Victorian house in Calvinia, a staircase leads nowhere, or are there stories to tell beyond the trapdoor up there? The dusty blue 1940s automobile in the yard of a bizarre bazaar in Williston guards its mysterious past in clammy steel, and you wonder who once drove it and what went wrong, while on the gravel road between Fraserburg and Williston, if you turn the wrong way at the tattered windsock you will never find the corbelled house you were looking for and may be lost in the wilderness forever, adrift like a waif in the hot Karoo breeze. Like that windsock. Welcome to the Gothic Karoo of Route 63.

The journey had begun innocently enough. I’d left home in Cradock at 6.30am. I aimed Picasso towards Graaff-Reinet and my blue Japanese saloon had me there before eight, so the Desert Springs Spur wasn’t even open yet. I tootled around, then darted inside for a proper breakfast. You need that to start a journey like this. Maybe a stiff brannewyn too.

The R63 from Graaffies to Calvinia, my ultimate destination, winds bewitchingly through mountainous terrain before you find Murraysburg in its verdant valley. Barely 10 km in, a tortoise suddenly appears in the road ahead of me where it hadn’t been a second ago. There’s a cold breeze on my neck when I stop the car to pick it up and put it across a farm fence, which is what we should do when we find a tortoise on the road. When I glance back at where I’d put it, it’s gone.

The eye-catching beauty that makes Murraysburg one of the lovelier Karoo towns soon dissipates into arid Karoo as you begin to approach the N1 where you stop at a four-way intersection, check for traffic, and cross towards Victoria West after skirting Hutchinson, an odd little hamlet that seems unchanged in many decades. Maybe it isn’t really there at all.

Crawling through Vic West brings all sorts of memories. Pottie lived here once; Johann Potgieter, one of the greatest of Karoo writers and long an inspiration to me. And there was the time, many moons gone by, when I came here for a film festival in the art deco Apollo Cinema, where Karoo flappers and lounge lizards of the Twenties once watched noir silent movies and inhaled hits of snuff before disappearing into their Victorian cottages for a cigar and a Dubonnet before bed.

At the latter-day festival circa the millennium, cineastes from Cape Town and Joburg clad in black coats and festooned with red scarves draped themselves on chaise longues to discuss directors’ cuts and cinematographic nuance while exchanging knowing glances. It was a pivotal time for my family; it was the dying days (though we didn’t know it) of the magazine I then worked for. The publisher had started a back-to-back TV show, and I directed a tiny insert for it about the Victoria West festival, with slide guitar creating the kind of mood that might impress people in black coats and scarlet scarves. But the cost of the TV show took the whole empire down, we were all retrenched, and we went to live in England and lick our wounds. Time, the Big Sky, and the yearning for journeys like these would eventually draw us back to the Karoo. There is no solace for the Karoo Soul in England.

The Apollo recently had a revamp and has occasional movie screenings and live shows. It is, legend has it, the only remaining cinema of its ilk in the country, and retains its Gothic Twenties allure. But the bubble soon bursts. Driving out of town to find the continuing R63 towards Loxton takes you past the same cottages built when Victoria was young but now they are drab shadows of their former fine fettle, like movie stars jilted by Hollywood and living in penury on the streets; brother, can you spare a dime?

Loxton passes to the left and Carnarvon soon finds me. Picasso is thirsty by now so I give the old boy a top-up. On the way into town I’d seen a bright, pristine sign, Lemon Tree Café. It looked as though it had been painted yesterday, so surely would be open for coffee. But, says the petrol attendant, “It closed, meneer.” Is the sign like The Eyes of Dr TJ Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby, alluding to a past denied; and am I to find myself in the Valley of Ashes as I drive out of town? “You can go to the Lord Carnarvon down there,” the man snaps me out of my reverie. Like new restaurants in Cape Town that disappear within a season, things come and go in the Karoo too. If they were ever there.

At the Lord Carnarvon Small Hotel, all I wanted was a coffee but I had a slice of frozen cheesecake, a harbinger of other strangeness to come, and an unbidden tour of the place. Old furniture and intrigue everywhere, vibrant Karoo colour (never go minimalist in the Karoo, it looks silly), and tucked in the middle, out of sight to most, a darkly mysterious secret library they call The Green Room. A stuffed peacock in a corner watches you with dead eyes from a corner, its vivid plumage offsetting the emerald walls. A port decanter on a table needs replenishing, as if someone had been there last night. But the library is out of bounds; one staff member says she’s worked there for 18 months and it was only the third time she’d been inside. You must ask to see it when you visit. Tell them the Man in the Blue Car said so.

Back on the R63 and Picasso is looking for a sign on the left that says Bakensklip. I’m to turn onto a dirt track here and drive for 15km, then turn right at the grader. A bit further on it’s left at the windsock. These are Karoo directions, far more interesting than the “left at the KFC and first right after Tashas” you find in the city. Finally, Francy Schoeman has told me, “turn left and drive to the corbelled house”. I do find it, but for a while I feel quite lost. But that’s a story for another time, and you’ll find it in your DM168 print newspaper this weekend and, the following Friday, here in TGIFood online. Five or so kilometres in, long before I found the grader, there’d been a rocky incline so bad that I considered turning back. Picasso was not at all pleased. It’s with great relief that Francy Schoeman of Langbaken tells me, after I’ve tasted her world class cheeses, that I don’t need to go back that way but can turn left at the windsock for a 30km quality gravel road that comes out only 5 km before Williston, where I’m to stop for the night. If the windsock is still there.

More strangeness awaits us in Williston, where Picasso looks uncomfortably out of place outside Die Ark and Williston Mall. My fellow Cradockers and Karoo scribes Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit often talk about the Williston Mall, so I knew it was eclectic. Pieter and Elmarie Naudé have collected so many bits and pieces of everything anyone has ever found in the Karoo that there can’t be much left. The place is a museum of relics. It offers so many photo opportunities that your camera may risk imploding.

The “mall” is tongue-in-cheek; there is a shop as such by that name but the junk, mementos and tat are everywhere you look. There is no escaping. You wonder what happens in the Junkyard Theatre, drink something peculiar at Doppies Bar, nod to the taciturn concrete man on the red scooter, and wonder for a moment whether you’d taken a wrong turn at the windsock and ended up at the Owl House. You’re saddened by a pair of antique hospital wheelchairs that hold only memories of their past patients. You look away in case they notice you. 

Before you try to find your way out, make a point of chatting to Pieter about where he found all sorts of things because, as he says, everything in the place has a story. And talk to Elmarie about her famous Karoo Fat Ladies paintings.

My solitary supper that night is at Manna, where the calamari is good and the skaapstertjies succulent but coated in steakhouse sauce. Why, why, why. They don’t seem to notice me thumping my head on the table. After a hurried breakfast next morning I’m eager to get on the road because, at the other end of only an hour’s journey, it’s Family Time and a rare visit to Calvinia, one of my favourite Karoo towns and home to Alta and Erwin Coetzee’s Hantam Huis, a jewel of the Karoo. In a deeply gothic way.

But before finding my family at the Boekehuis, where my wife and daughter have spent a week writing, I stop at Calvinia Vleis, home of the town’s famous meat (they have an annual meat festival) to buy some lamb saddle chops. I inadvertently also buy a “tjoppie stand” and a ribs stand to use for my lamb flank recipe. I need the tools of my braai trade if I’m to come up with great recipes for you. That’s my justification at any rate.

Delightfully, the Hantam Huis is in fine nick, and traipsing through its rooms is like revisiting an old friend. If by old friends you mean worryingly likelike mannequins such as the wedding couple who may have escaped from a Tim Burton movie (the groom brings 10 Rillington Place serial killer John Christie to mind), the dame with a past reclining on the bed and her friend in the bath, or is it a coffin? Creepier still is the little girl holding a posy and the bevy of little dolls behind her, beaming at you.

But the legend framed in glass on a wall of the Hantam Huis elicits a pang of regret. Not at the meaning behind this award, but that it represents values which are no longer held in the esteem they once were: The Cape Times Centenary medal for outstanding achievements in the field of preservation of Cape buildings, historic precincts and the natural environment is awarded to Erwin and Alta Coetzee. And their achievements stand as proud today, even prouder, despite the passing of almost three decades.

We’re told we’re in Rupert Huis for the night, which is a surprise, as it’s always been closed to guests. It’s next door to the Boekehuis and was once owned by Rona Rupert. It’s no longer Rupert-owned but Alta Coetzee, who had run the Boekehuis next door as a library of books by “writers of and on the Karoo”, now owns it and has furnished it to suit the style of all her other guest houses. Writers write in the Boekehuis which has inspired thousands of fine South African words. 

Rupert Huis turns out to be among the best Karoo houses I’ve been inside of, brimful of Hantam character and with richly-coloured walls and friezes, a ghostly staircase that disappears into a mysterious trapdoor, and intrigue everywhere. It may be haunted, it may not be, but slumbering in its rooms you will feel a disquiet and take a while to find your dreams.

The “tjoppie stand” gets used at the braai at the back of Rupert Huis that evening. It looks like a toast rack but sturdier. You slot the chops into it fat side-down so that they get the brunt of the coals and crisp up while the meat cooks less violently. It’s perfect for the saddle chops that are a local favourite. Family time is had, the moments that become more important than ever now that we live far apart; especially now that there’s the GrandBoy, now approaching four.

The slumber in strange beds is sound despite the intense Karoo darkness and silence and the imagined noises you hear from somewhere in the house; and is that creak coming from the wooden staircase in the room next door? But the road beckons again the next morning. Turning Picasso back towards home, you determine to avoid the route via the duplicitous windsock. DM/TGIFood

Tony Jackman is the winner of a regional Vodacom Journalist of the Year (Lifestyle) award for 2022 for his features Battissian Reverie: A Fookian feast in Somerset East, and Eye in the Sky: Paint your celestial palette in Vincent’s hues, as well as Galliova Food Champion 2021.

Follow Tony on Instagram @tony_jackman_cooks.