NIPPLES 6

The return leg starts. Bikes are prepped and packed early. 

Engines fire and the procession makes its way trough Mossel Bay and toward the Outeniqua Pass. We climb and bank like fighters moving into position through the challenging pass. It takes me a few bends to find my mojo. Eventually I settle in behind Greg on his behemoth Trophy. He seems quite at home on the big bike and I have the reassuring feeling if the guy in front of me can make it, so can I. I loosen up and begin enjoying the bends.

The route runs to Uniondale, the town of the supposed-ghost fame, and on to Williowmore, of Deliverance fame. On this occasion we stop at a dandy little sandwich bar & coffee joint whose owner wants lots of pics of the biker group visiting her joint.

Pulling out of a very dry Willowmore, we set our sights on Graaff-Reinet, the town whose moniker is the Gem of the Karoo. It’s not Graaff-Reinet proper we’re aiming for, but Nieu Bethesda in the Graaff-Reinet magisterial district.

Some way past Graaff-Reinet, we take a twisting, winding road that could have been made with motorcycling in mind. It is narrow, well surfaced, dead quiet, and has many inexplicably tight bends, given that it isn’t a very hilly area. But all good things come to and end, and the tarmac is no exception. It gives way to the 12 kilometres of dirt road leading to Nieu Bethesda.

Nieu Bethesda is a village of whitewashed, Cape-Dutch style dwellings wedged in a remote corner of the Karoo. It’s a cool stop on a road trip, but living there isn’t for the faint-hearted. You need an artistic temperament (meaning, you need to be a bit nuts), plus a preparedness to get dirt under your fingernails. There isn’t a supermarket or convenience shop here. You want something done, you DIY. Not ideal for a three-left-elbows fumbler like me.
I resolve to ride this dirt road with the utmost care, given that I have, a week before the trip, collected the freshly-resprayed Bandit from Club House Motorcycles, and I’m not about to make it the shortest-lived spray job in local history.

The Bandit transitions from tarmac to gravel. Having ridden gravel in my GS days I’m suspicious of it. Most gravel roads are actually quite manageable, but it takes just a dozen metres of that treacherous deep sand to dump you unceremoniously on the deck. Not the kind of treatment a heavy, plasticky Bandit relishes, especially a freshly-resprayed one. The Bandit’s 17-inch cast rims have none of the cushioning effect the 19- or 21-inch wire-laced rims of an adventure bike should have. The cast rims pass every newton of the shock up to you.

Nieu Bethesda materialises up ahead, and it turns out I had overthought the gravel road. The road presented no insurmountable challenge. There were a few corrugated sections but they were just a nuisance, not a headache. I was cautious as heck, what with my newly-repaired bike, but had I known what was coming I might have done it a little faster.

We roll into the village. Nieu Bethesda’s 1 000 residents once included one Helen Martins, an artist who crafted statues of owls. By all accounts she was a rather troubled woman. A walk through her house, now preserved as a museum, bears this out. For one thing she had a collection of mirrors – not special ones, just supermarket-shelf mirrors – that could constitute a wholesale supply. This is because she required her boyfriend to bring her a new mirror every time he visited. The collection of mirrors bears testimony to a frequency of visits that makes one wonder what he was taking, given that Viagra wasn’t invented until two decades after Helen Martins' story ended. 

Helen Martins took her life horrifically, by drinking acid. This happened in 1976.

Nieu Bethesda. Like a good blanc de blanc it is cold, and very, very dry. 

Having visited The Owl House, the Helen Martins museum, some years ago, and emerging with the feeling I didn’t belong there, I inform the lads they are free to visit the museum, but I won’t be joining them. They seem to take my cue. We park off at a dandy little restaurant for a bottle of lunch instead. Then we make our way a kilometre or two to the guest farm that will be tonight’s stay.
 

Nieu Bethesda. Blink and you'll miss it.  

The accommodation is great. Little rooms, each with a shower bathroom, and, tellingly, an oil heater. We were cautioned Nieu Bethesda will be cold. It was in Nieu Bethesda’s honour we were warned to replace the battery and the coolant in our bikes. The creeping chill that accompanies the advancing evening bears this out.

The dining hall has an enormous fireplace. The walls are decorated with farming, leatherworking and medical tools and implements telling the history of this Sneeuberg (“Snee-you-bairch”; Snow Mountain) farming area.  The red wine goes down, the volume goes up, and by the time the fire is lit, we are cautioned not to get close lest the flames detonate our boozy breath.

 
We were told the implements on the wall were from the original settler-village dental surgery, but we weren't sure whether to believe it. 

No amount of consciousness-altering fluid could detract from the Karoo sky over a chilly Nieu Bethesda. We Joburgers are used to a midnight-blue sky with a punctuated by the odd pale-gold pinprick. The sky over Nieu Bethesda is black. There is no word for this black. It is not jet black, not inky black; it’s just an indefinably deep black. This incredible, infinite black is rent by a band of stars so thick you can cut them with a knife. The horizons are almost empty, yet the starry band over your head leaves you in no doubt the Milky Way is the most apt name any language could confer on this phenomenon. I gaze at it wondrously for a while, before the cold gets the better of me and I beat a retreat to the relative warmth of the room.   

The next am vindicates the warnings we were given about Nieu Bethesda temperatures. Icy frost coats the bikes. 


Nieu Bethesda mornings. A fortnight later the whole village was snowed under. 

Any radiator that had been neglected may well have iced up. Perhaps I’m a sissy but I really feel the cold. I scrape the ice off the Bandit and mount my luggage over the saddle. One thing I don’t fear is that the Japanese-reliable Suzuki will feel the cold as badly as I do, and true to form, she rises to the occasion. It takes just a momentary whirr of the starter to bring the 1250 to life, and she’s ready to roll.

The exit route will not be the same one we used to enter the village. The exit will be some 30 kilometres of gravel road. With my newly-repaired-bike caution, I feel my way along cautiously, knowing I could go faster, but ever wary of those dozen-metre sand banks that used to deposit me and my GS on the deck in my BMW years. Kilometre by kilometre the Bandit bears its rider along the gravel. There’s the odd hump, a band of corrugations here and there, a couple of bridges, the odd section where a rock juts out right in your path, but again, nothing your Corolla would get into a sweat about.

Twenty to thirty minutes pass as the kilometres of gravel pass under the bike and recede in the mirrors, until the tar intersection comes into sight. The bikes group together. Expedition leader Clive grasps each rider’s gloved hand between his own two and delivers a sort of bear-hug handshake in acknowledgement of triumph over the gravel section. Then we head for the final stay of the trip.

It will prove a bit, erm, interesting. I’ll tell you about it, knickers and all.         
 

Regards
Stan L
South Africa