Hundreds of transport riders took a shortcut through the Karoo between Ceres and Kimberley in the 1800s. Nowadays, Matt Covarr discovered, you have the Forgotten Highway all to yourself.

There’s a timeless feeling about Karoo Poort, a picturesque gorge 43 km east of Ceres that cuts through the Swartruggens Mountains on the R355. I stop next to an old whitewashed building on the side of the road. Chickens scratch in the dust near my Landy as I climb out to have a look around.

“Ken jy die geskiedenis van die gebou?” I ask an old guy sitting in the shade of a massive oak tree smoking a pipe. He narrows his eyes and seems to enter a state of deep thought as he looks up to the tree for answers. “Uh, nee meneer, ek het nou al vergeet, maar ek weet hy’s baie oud.”

His answer sums up the next two days’ wandering along a route that was once traversed by Cecil John Rhodes and explorers such as François Levaillant and David Livingstone. A route that took the stampede of hundreds of starry-eyed diamond diggers, speculators and supplies to Kimberly after the discovery of diamonds there in the early 1870s; a route on which you can explore about 400km of gravel road from Ceres through the Tanqua Karoo and into the Great Karoo without passing more than a handful of vehicles.

Towns like Sutherland, Fraserburg and Loxton sprung up, and farmers along the way opened their doors to weary transport riders and mail coaches heading northeast into the Cape interior.

Unfortunately, the action didn’t last. The construction of the railway line from Cape Town already reached Touws River by the 1870s. This and the outbreak of the Boer War put an end to the good times, leaving the shortest route between Cape Town and Johannesburg to become nothing more than long, lonely stretches of gravel cutting through sleepy Karoo villages, which never saw the limelight they once seemed to be destined for.

The old pipe smoker and I sit in silence under the oak tree for a while. I try to picture laden transport wagons, sometimes up to 30 of them jostling their way through Karoo Poort 150 years ago, the crack of whips carrying through the deep gorge.

I light up the gas stove for an early morning cup of coffee and take in the vast expanse before me. The sky is big; the November air crisp. As I take a sip from the steaming cup, a windmill squeaks into life as a gust of wind catches its blades.