The Other Side of the Garden

South Africa’s Garden Route is a lush, romantic drive. Typically. The other half is the dramatic inland drive through red desert, past big birds and big mountains and big bottles of wine...

- Vardhan Kondvikar

I have some tangential history with Mercedes-Benz in South Africa.My family, for some reason, decided to make a 1963 fintail part of it – it was second-hand and had been used rather badly, so it kept going wrong, but it was magnificent. Vast, with creaky leather, and to a six-year-old boy, something between the Titanic and a spaceship, designed for epic trips, possibly catching wild animals on the way. God knows why I wasn’t allowed to take it on one.

Years later, car gone, I found a South African car magazine that had a fintail, the same kind, being driven through the Karoo, an arid, ochre semi-desert, clouds of red dust enticingly backlit, the whole seeming exactly the kind of once-in-a life time journey I’d dreamt of. The CLA I’m in is rather smaller, but the Karoo – probably from ‘garo’, a Khoikhoi word meaning ‘desert’ – is just as epic. This is the flip-side of the Garden Route, that lush, romantic, wine-strewn drive between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. This is haunting, beautiful, and you only need to go through a small part of it to feel its muscles. And this is only the Klein Karoo, the little one...