Seven days in the Deep Karoo left Chris Marais exhausted, enriched – and covered in a thick layer of fine dust.

You’ve probably done the N1 blacktop stretch between Leeu-Gamka and Matjiesfontein a thousand times in your life − just more than 150 kilometres of the most deadly-boring part of the Karoo, with the emphasis on “deadly”, because of the high accident rate here.

Eighty minutes of rumble strips to keep you awake − not a meerkat in sight and only the vague outline of the Groot Swartberge in the distance to give you hope of something a little more lively down south.

Even I, who loves the Karoo like a dear friend, find it hard to get excited about that 150 km bit of the N1.

Oh yes, there’s the Flood Museum in Laingsburg, followed by an intriguing sign to the Moordenaars-Karoo. Followed by zilch else until you see the cheerful flags atop the Lord Milner Hotel in Matjiesfontein.

So on a high summer’s day I find myself heading, in no tearing rush, to Cape Town on this route, with these thoughts.

Then I realise, heck, you have time on your hands; you have water, biltong and old rock ’n roll tapes; you have a bakkie full of diesel and a head full of daydreams − what’s your problem? Hook a right into the Hard Man’s Karoo; get lost in the dry country. OK, then.

Another reason is something a man from Williston once told me in a bar. He asked me where I was from.

“The Karoo Heartland,” I replied. “Cradock.”

At which he burst out laughing, saying: “That’s not the Karoo! Over there, you just order your water from the Great Fish River. We in Williston have to pray for it – and damn hard too. Where I come from, we call it the Hard Man’s Karoo, boet.”
I bought him another Olaf Bergh and spring water to calm him down.

One very sexy lion

Now when you decide to fly the schedule, take the road less travelled and see what happens, time slows down and the universe comes out to play.

I pull over into Leeu-Gamka, erupting like a spot on some forgettable part of the vast Karoo’s skin. Or so it would seem, until you find out this is where the last Cape lion – the one with the glorious Vidal Sassoon black flowing mane – was shot, back in the mid-1800s.

This sounds awfully rude if you’re a modern-day bunny-hugger, but the old journals all whine in unison about how these handsome matinee-idol lions used to plague the wagon trains, day and night, making merry havoc with delicious oxen.

Hmm, Leeu-Gamka ... A bit like New York, New York, really, because the name means “Lion Lion” in the Afrikaans-Khoikhoi vernacular.

It looks quite lively: a river lined with thorn trees (great for lurking lions of old), a general dealer, B&B, a nursery and, good grief! a railway line that actually works!

I have to take a photo of a working South African railway line, because it looks set to go the way of the Cape lion one of these days.

A motor mechanic driving a bakkie-load of locals stops for a chat. I ask him about the dirt road into the interior. He looks derisively at my brand new Conti Tracs, as if maybe my Isuzu should be wearing old takkies for the occasion.

“Daai pad, dit vreet nuwe bande. Sommer so,” (That road chows new tyres, just like that.) followed by a series of dramatic Jet Li-style hand chops. He says I should drive on to Prince Albert Road and head down the dirt to Merweville.

I ask him how he came to live here. “I’m from Phalaborwa,” he says. “One day I was driving to Cape Town and my car broke down near Leeu-Gamka. That’s it. I never left.”

Now he fixes other N1 break¬downs for a living out here in the glorious nothing.

An arty recycler

So I grit my teeth and take the tar down to Prince Albert Road, where my old friend Jan Schoeman (also known as Outa Lappies) lives in a run-down railway house. 

Although many in the district once thought the lanky, talkative man to be one calamata short of a cocktail party, Outa Lappies is the perfect role model for an environmentally correct life.

He’s the ultimate recycler, taking the waste objects of the Karoo (no shortage of those) and turning them into roadside art. There’s many a Patchwork product gracing the windows of homes as far flung as Norway and Russia – the coloured glass bits and hand-hammered tin figures capture the sunlight and throw dancing images on walls.

Outa Lappies still has his famous handcart. In the 1970s, he festooned it with junk (soon-to-be art) and dragged it more than 16 000 km across the vastness of the Karoo. As he travelled, he picked up more pieces of trash and turned it into collectables for sale to passers-by.

The old man once told me something very wise: “Wake up every day and make something out of nothing.”