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June 20th.
Almost everyone we spoke with thought it was a bit crazy to drive across the Great Karoo, but we assured them we Americans like open spaces. I think for people from other countries, it seems like a long drive. To us it was an adventure – across the entire country, blasting through the desert, finding A-Ha’s “Take On Me” while flipping around the radio, talking about everything we’d seen so far, getting used to driving on the left side of the road, working through a big bag of fresh oranges I had picked up at a market on the way, marvelling that we were on the other side of the ocean, utterly free, going as we pleased. We saw some ostriches on the side of the road and I chased after them to make them run – Catherine was terrified that one would kick me in the chest and it would be the death of me. But they ran away. We saw a lot of cows too and sheep, but mostly it was just lightly rolling semidesert, like eastern Wyoming or Colorado. We were still driving as night fell, and for the last stretch it was a bit terrifying: the darkness was utter and complete, and the road utterly unknown ahead of us. There were no other cars: if someone blocked the road there would be no law to help us out there in the desert night. But there was no one out there at all, and when we stopped to get out, above us was a canopy of completely unfamiliar white stars on a black sky, the Milky Way looking thicker and more irregular than it does up north, and two little wisps of what looked like motionless, undissolving vapor – the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, our two companion galaxies. Directly overhead was the Southern Cross, the only part of all this that was familiar. We are gasoline junkies, we Americans, I will confess, but who can resist the intoxication of it all?
We passed through a fabulous mountain pass in our descent off the high plain, from the Great Karoo into the Little Karoo. Now at Oudtshoorn, the self-proclaimed “ostrich capital of the world.” You can’t make this stuff up.
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