From my saddle I saw South Africa in its Sunday best – observations on a six-day ride across the country

The Free State town of Frankfort (population 26,000) may seem like a strange place for the start of a six-day international Mountain Bike Race (MTB), the inaugural Old Mutual go2berg. 

It’s a 150-year-old agricultural town that the new South Africa looks like it forgot. Notable mainly for the Wilge River that winds round it and the landmark grain silos that tower above it. Its main claim to fame may be the burning of its Dutch Reformed church by the British during the South African war. More recently it briefly made media ripples because of a fight between Eskom and a local solar farm that was prohibited from selling energy to alleviate load shedding in the area.

Sadly Eskom won.

Yet two weeks ago, on 3 June 2023, more than 200 bike riders from all corners of South Africa and the world converged on its innocuous and jaded rugby stadium to baptise South Africa’s newest mountain bike race – 17% of them were international riders, several from as far away as Australia. I was one of them.

The race village

Like the Comrades Marathon the Old Mutual Go2Berg is a very South African creation. But before I go further with my observations let me give novices a sense of the set-up and structure of a multiday bike race, and what – other than wheels – helps it to roll. 

A multiday race is broken into “stages.” Each stage centres on a race village: a specially built small tent city from which riders depart each morning and into which, in another town, they will decamp their bodies, bikes and belongings at day’s end. The 200-plus canvas tents in which we sleep are so close that the night is punctuated by a cacophony of farts and snores.

Read more in Daily Maverick: To South Africa with love – new six-day mountain bike race with an unusual mission

After action, portable showers alternate jets of boiling and freezing water, and the village sprouts a phalanx of travelling physios, a bar on wheels (known as the Pig Rig, complements of Notties Brewery), and a special circus tent where, each evening, riders converge to be fed and for a nightly race briefing.

In what feels like a fairground a mixture of musical genres blares out, but while we are in the Free State there’s a preponderance of Afrikaans folk music. 

The responsibility of running the essential functions of each race village is contracted out to a local public school: as you cross the line the kids take your bikes and clean them, parents cook and serve, each school brings their unique character – usually a reflection of the town in which they live – to the day.   

In Frankfort the school was Hoërskool Wilgerivier, a veteran organiser of previous JoBerg2Cs. It has 600 children and, according to Hennie Pelser, the principal, the race provides an “economic injection into the town”.

If the school is a reflection of a community it is also a reflection of a country still in transition to racial integration and equality.

In Frankfort the phalanx of young cheerleaders who greet the racers are all white. By the time we reached Hoërskool Reitz (the second night) the young people were more mixed and with each school it got more diverse. 

One of my highlights was listening to Annetjie Coetzee, the principal of Clarens Primary School. This no-fee school (meaning it caters to learners from the poorest of families) had been founded in 1913. But it is pristine and modern; lamp posts in the school yard carry signs pointing to “Hope”, “Forgiveness”, “Tshwarelo”, “Goodhartigheid”; that caught my eye and made me feel warm on a cold morning. 

Most of its 580 pupils come from Clarens’ adjoining township of Kgubetswana. That evening Coetzee told the riders over dinner how her staff “went beyond the call of duty in preparing to host the race by sneaking into people’s yards in the dark to steal succulents and going through the restaurant’s garbage to collect tins for your table decoration!”

Coetzee tells proudly of how Sibusiso Motsoeneng, a Grade 7 pupil, made the wire bicycles parked on every table. 

The route: You can ride for miles and miles and miles and miles

The go2berg takes place over six days, many mountains and 530km. To make it easier my description divides it into three parts:

• Days one and two: Frankfort to Clarens, the race across the Free State;
• Days three and four: Clarens to Em’seni, dropping from Highveld to Lowveld; and
• Days five and six: Em’seni to the great Ukhahlamba, the magical geography tour.

Gary Green, one of the two founders of the race, jokes that it is routed “through the farms so riders can see what rural areas are like”. He’s right: with less than 10km of the total of 530km being on tar, it is amazing that it’s still possible to travel so far off-road.

I find there’s a whole world to rediscover out there. 

But before embarking you on this journey the greatest credit must go to the trail’s builders. Unfortunately, as is the norm in South African history, most of the trail builders whose names we should know, are unknown. But we give them all thanks! The three I can name are Mbhekeseni Kunene, Sollie Prinsloo and Glen Harrison.

Off we go …

For the first two days the beauty of the route lies in the blandness. It’s winter and the land is bare, or at least that’s how we are attuned to think about it. A low winter sun glances off the earth. The earth is dry now, the flora yellowed. A hot wind blows cold over it. 

Spatial apartheid is still very much alive. To every town its stepchild township.

Outside Frankfort we ride along the Wilge River, lethargic and seemingly resigned. A few forlorn fishermen fish forlornly. My guess is not for pleasure but for food.

Then, as we escape the bounds of the everyday, the beauty is in the emptiness. 

For most of day one’s 80km I’m riding alone. So it feels like the world is you and you are the land.

Rolling with the rolling hills. Pedal. Pedal. Pedal. On and on. The ground grinding beneath you. 

The country roads alternate between cattle paths and human paths.

It’s strangely quiet. No bird life, just cows and some sheep; isolated farms, some looking prim, others on their last legs. 

A few last pink and white cosmos flowers cling to the road sides. A month earlier they would have massed in full bloom, a colourful margin to dusty roads. But these are the bittereinders of summer. 

A rider tells me how they hail from Mexico and were brought to South Africa in contaminated horse feed during the Anglo-Boer War. That evening I check Google. He’s right.

When the town of Reitz eventually comes into view, my first sighting comes from the sun’s harsh rebound off corrugated iron shacks that metastasise off the edges of every town. From a distance they look like litter on a hillside. Flashy. But ironically it’s a sign of poverty. Spatial apartheid is still very much alive. To every town its stepchild township: Frankfort-Namahadi, Reitz-Petsana, Clarens-Kgubetswana, Harrismith-Intabazwe. Viewed from Google Earth the inequality is glaring.

I can’t help but think how, 110 years ago the great writer and intellectual Sol Plaatje, one of the founders of the South African Native National Congress, rode across these (then Orange) Free State lands, documenting the “native” dispossession following the passing of the infamous 1913 Natives Land Act. 

As a founding father of the vision of a democratic South Africa, Plaatje would not be impressed at the state of the indigenous people of the Free State now. It’s not their fault. They are the people Plaatje’s successors in the ANC forgot. 

I doubt Plaatje would have. People were in his heart. 

June nights are cold. Even a minus-8 sleeping bag can’t keep all your parts warm. The dark too is unfamiliar, but a full moon lights up the empty plains. You’re in the middle of nowhere except it’s somewhere. When dawn approaches you don’t want to get up. Pack your life back into your race bag, breakfast, stretch and get on the bike again. Miles more gravel roads to travel. On day two, there’s a relentless headwind, making even the downhills uphill. 

On and on. 

Twenty kilometres from Clarens I encounter children coming back from school in a bus, navigating the uneven dirt road, shouting excitedly. 

It took imagination to etch this trail onto the hillside, weaving between rocks, gaining altitude, finding a view across to the escarpment of the Drakensberg.

A little boy and his brother, both in uniform, trudge wearily along the edge of the dirt road, their daily chore. Both make me think how big the task of the democratic government was, and how we should be more understanding of their failures, even forgiving? Patterns of poverty, deprivation and inequality carved deeply into the foundations of South Africa won’t be overcome quickly, even by a good government. 

Which we don’t have. 

On day two, after nearly eight hours of riding I crossed the finish line. This is what exhaustion feels like. By the time I pull into Clarens it’s 4 o’clock and the town is already in the shadow of its mountain. Suddenly it’s cold as hell. I get a beer and try to make my way to a hot shower and hotel. I’m lucky. 

At least I can turn off the cold.

Clarens to Sterkfontein Dam to Em’seni

In the morning, the privilege of a hotel bed makes me yearn for creature comforts and wonder why I subject myself to relative deprivation. Is it just pleasure or is there something to be proved? To whom? 

You may laugh, but with another 90km ahead it’s a serious question.

Ah, but the trails we ride (on days three and four) are beautiful: Winding around sandstone mesas, up passes then long, sweeping downhills, the sun warm but the air cold.

Pushing. Pushing. Pushing. 

Alone again. Only the silhouette of a rider on a rise ahead of you. 

In the last quarter of the race there’s a famous (among our MTB clan) “single track” up and down Mount Paul, a mountain on the edge of Sterkfontein Dam. It took imagination to etch this trail onto the hillside, weaving between rocks, gaining altitude, finding a view across to the escarpment of the Drakensberg. From afar the mountains look benign and beautiful. But I know their power. 

I thank god that there are parts of our country that remain inhospitable to the blight of human settlement.

The day ends riding across the earth fill wall of Sterkfontein Dam. The strong wind that today had aided us to climb mountains is now crashing waves into rocks that line the dam wall, making an out-of-place inland sea spray. 

The inland sea is a deep dark blue, contrasting with sky blue above it. It’s alive. 

That evening, after a sunset to die for, we ate potjiekos compliments of Harriston School. The kids are full of life, laughter and more at ease in their diversity.

Em’seni to Ukahlamba 

The trail that takes us down the escarpment of the Drakensberg, descending 500m in a kilometre. It is the most breathtaking trail of all. 

Then, for two nights we camp on the bank of the great Tugela River. A feeling of peace flows with it. This river is not what it once was. But it still has a gravitas, a calmness, a wisdom. Wind rustles the trees all night and after four days my dreams have become less frenetic and frenzied. 

The earth is having its way with me. 

The ride itself is preposterously beautiful – and taxing – through forests of mountain aloes (Aloe marlothii), over asset-stripped farmlands and then back into unspoilt nature, contouring then climbing the Spion Kop mountain range.

I ride past a group of giraffes. Ears pricked. Gaze intent. But still and  disinterested. “Never sniff at a giraffe,” I think, as I register their beauty. Far from common. 

Shortly after that we ride down the “Grand Canyon”, an empty shale river bed, on a plateau that precedes the final ascent to the Kop. It’s fast and formidable, in one place hardly a metre wide. All on a day’s saddle. 

Then we are onto a virgin track that Mbhekeseni Kunene, the master builder, has engineered up the north slope of Spion Kop. Cheekily, it’s named Boer Way, harking back to the path the Boers took up the mountain 123 years ago. It’s made of 53 ascending switchbacks. At the top I come across half a dozen cyclists felled by the mountain, lying on the grass looking like victims of a sniper’s bullet. Children from the local school step among their bodies, tending to their needs. 

On top of Spion Kop, unbidden, the 1980s