The Reggie's Rush Of The R26

After months of cycling around South Africa, Ian McNaught Davis has a padkos-induced epiphany on the road to Wepener.

In the 1990s, there was a TV show called Reggie’s Rush, where the luckiest child in the world could run amok in a toy shop and take whatever he or she wanted for 60 glorious seconds, without being arrested or getting a hiding from mom.

The show warped my ten-year-old mind. I frothed with schadenfreude whenever some undeserving punk couldn’t reach a Test Match cricket board game or remote-control helicopter on the top shelf. Worse, Reggie’s Rush cursed me with the hope that I’d one day be summoned to the all-you-can-steal buffet. Surely I would get my chance…

Hope eventually turned into bitterness when I realised that nobody in my primary-school-sized universe had ever appeared on Reggie’s Rush, let alone Simba Surprise. This cynicism for freebies stayed with me as a journalist, when I was regularly reminded that if you want a free lunch, you’ve got to listen to a publicist tell you how wonderful a toaster or mouthwash or a government policy is.

After several years of munching canapés that came with terms and conditions, I couldn’t take it any more. I quit my job and cycled around South Africa for six months.

Four months into the trip, while lying in a bath in a stranger’s house on a farm in the Free State, I had an epiphany: I realised Reggie’s Rush wasn’t just a child hood fantasy. It was real and I had found it on the R26 between Zastron and Wepener!

To explain how I got to my epiphany, I need to start where most stories end: karaoke.