The Prince Alfred’s Pass offers more than access to a spectacular Cape mountain range, says Matt Covarr. Besides traversing one of Thomas Bain’s finest accomplishments, you can follow historic ox-wagon tracks in your 4x4.

Turning onto a back road often feels like taking “the road to nowhere”, as the well-travelled phrase would have it.

However many times I tell myself that the nowhere must be somewhere (or at least must have been when the road was built), it feels like I’m setting off for that nowhere each time I hit the gravel − and I instinctively hope it ends up somewhere.

Today is no exception. We’ve just turned onto a winding gravel road from the N2 and are on our way to the 150-year-old Prince Alfred’s Pass that traverses the Outeniqua Mountains.

However, as I was about to find out, the Prince Alfred’s Pass is definitely not one of those “roads to nowhere”. Everything but.

In 1863, that colossus of South African roads, Thomas Bain, started work on the Prince Alfred’s Pass that linked the then tiny port of Knysna to the Langkloof farming district.

With a labour force of convicts, Bain completed the pass in 1867, in time for the opening that September by Queen Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred himself. 
 
From Knysna, this 75-km-long gravel road cuts through thick indigenous forest and snakes over what seems like an impenetrable mountain range separating a rapidly changing part of the Garden Route’s coastline from the farming settlement of Avontuur in the hinterland.

The pass is still considered by many as Bain’s finest piece of engineering. This said, he did go on to build a number of other routes across and through the seemingly impassable Cape mountains, most notably the Bloukrans Pass, Swartberg Pass and Meiringspoort.    

We are here not only to experience Bain’s masterpiece, but also to drive Burchell’s Track and follow a nearly forgotten ox-wagon track of another pioneer who traversed these treacherous mountains some forty years before Bain’s pass was constructed.

About a decade ago, Katot Meyer discovered part of William Burchell’s original ox-wagon route on his family farm near De Vlugt.

The famous British botanist after whom numerous species of South African fauna and flora are named, covered more than 7 000 km on his travels in South Africa between 1810 and 1815 and collected nearly 60 000 specimens and objects.