A GUIDE TO SOUTH AFRICA'S MOUNTAIN PASSES AND
POORTS Patrick Coyne
Š Patrick Coyne 2010 First published in 2010 by Osborne Porter Literary Services PO Box 1957, Westville, 3630 info@osborne-porter.com www.osborne-porter.com Layout: Ginny Porter Osborne Porter Literary Services ISBN 978-0-9814489-0-9
Although every effort is made to ensure accuracy, the publishers, personnel, printers, distributors and/or other related parties do not accept any responsibility whatsoever for any errors or omissions, or any effect arising there from. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, translated or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the author.
Dedication To the memory of my parents, Dick and Winnie Coyne, who introduced me to the grandeur and fascination of our country's passes, and with love and thanks to my wife, Helen, for sharing the journey and putting up with a passes-mad, classic-car-mad eccentric.
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Ab bout the Au uthor Patrick Coynne, who is a retired Headmasster, is in his oown words, booth a classic car c fanatic and a a passes fanatiic. When he annd his wife Helen decided to drive over fifty of the couuntry’s p it went mountain passes, without sayinng that they would w tackle them in i their classicc 1960 Rover – thoough some off their friends gloom mily suggested that their first sttop should be ‘an AA-recommended psychiaatrist’. Yet the journey was bboth fascinatinng and completeely successful.. Once it was over, o the workk began, and thhis book is the result r of yearss of research into finding ouut the intriguinng history and origin o of each pass p and poortt. Patrick’s career as a writer begaan in 1959 w with an articcle published in CAR magaziine about the Coynes’ car trip to Lesothho, then Basutolland. He had many more articles a publishhed in both thhe South Africcan CAR annd CARAVAN N magaziness, and also in GETAWAY magazine. In 1997 he publlished his firstt book, Cross of o school fou unded in 18448, St Georgee’s Gold, the sttory of his old Grammar Scchool, Cape Town (Ampeersand Press), which had a foreword by Archbishop Desmond D Tutu u. In 2006 his book Ten Yeaars S Serioous, was pub blished by W Writers’ Circcle of Being Slightly Publishing, its i second ediition being pu ublished in 20008 by Osbornne Porter Literaary Services. In I 2009 this company published his boook Share the Staage! Play Prodduction in Prim mary Schools, which has beeen translated intto Afrikaans. During all this, Patrrick has been n prolific in the writing of successful sttage and radio plays. He hass twice won F First Prize in thhe Science Fictiion SA’s annuual short story competition, and he has woon many compeetitions organissed by the Sou uth African Wrriters’ Circle, of which he is a past Vice-Chhairman.
PREFACE
PREFACE Passes have fascinated me ever since I was a very small boy, when my parents took me with them on camping holidays in our small car. During one of the first trips I watched a blue-grey mountain range loom up in front of us and gradually fill the windscreen. I gathered that we would be crossing that formidable barrier by means of a ‘pass'. It was the first time I had heard the word, and I noticed that my parents used it in tones of the greatest respect. It seemed that a difficult, even dangerous obstacle lay before us. The nose of the car tilted upwards and the pass began. We were always laden with holiday luggage, and as the gradient increased the car would begin to falter. My father would change down, the engine note rising, the bellowing exhaust echoing from the rocky walls around us. Soon he would begin winding the steeringwheel from lock to lock as the curves grew tighter. By now the rear wheels were spinning and juddering on the gravelly corrugations. On some badly cambered roads the car tended to slide sideways into the ditch or towards the edge with its sheer drop to the valley below. At every blind corner my father would give a long blast on the hooter. Sometimes we would hear a faint answering hoot, and a car would suddenly appear coming towards us, often well over on our side of the road, and emergency avoiding action had to be taken. All the while my father would be watching the water temperature gauge. A following wind or worse, a hot ‘berg' wind, might easily encourage the radiator water to boil, making a lengthy stop necessary for cooling off and topping up. On one occasion, when there was no spare water or any sort of container in the car, to my disgust one of my Wellington boots was pressed into service to carry water from a nearby mountain stream. Punctures were not uncommon; then the whole family would be inspanned to look for suitable boulders to chock the wheels so that the car wouldn't fall off the jack while the wheel was being changed. Delays such as these meant that when we finally restarted the sun
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PREFACE might be much lower, often blindingly in the driver's eyes as we crept upwards. But in the end we would reach the summit of the pass, with a triumphant howl from the exhaust as we changed into top gear. Perhaps at these times we felt something of the elation the trekkers of old must have felt as their wagons gained the saddle of some great mountain range and they looked down on the new country that lay below. There was always a consciousness of history as we drove over a mountain pass or through a tortuous poort. We might glimpse the remnants of the old wagon routes with their apparently impossible gradients. The cry ‘Look, there's the old road!' would cause craning of necks and awestruck comments on the steepness and narrowness of the first passes built for motor traffic. It was only in later years that I learnt a bit more about our country's proud tradition of pass-building and first heard the names of the great engineers such as Andrew Geddes Bain and his son Thomas, Henry Fancourt White, Charles Michell and P A de Villiers. These names are better known today than they were in years gone by. This must be due to the recent surge of interest in the past and the efforts of civic authorities in researching and preserving their own local histories. Not all our passes are steeped in history; some were built in relatively modern times. Nearly all the old passes have been rebuilt – often several times – in the pursuit of improved safety standards and higher speeds for modern traffic. The team of civil engineers that plans, surveys, designs, lays out and builds the modern-day pass or poort is worthy of just as much admiration for its achievements as the engineer in the Nineteenth century who worked more or less in isolation. What is a pass? Dictionary definitions of the word seem rather at odds with the way we use it. In English dictionaries the words ‘neck' or ‘col' are used as synonyms for the word ‘pass'. The Afrikaans equivalents are nek or bergpas. The Oxford Paperback Dictionary defines ‘pass' as a ‘gap in a mountain range, allowing access to the other side', but A Dictionary of South African English defines nek as a ‘raised narrow strip of land usually between and connecting two mountains'. So the dictionaries all appear to limit the meaning of the ii
PREFACE word to the lowest point of the mountain range to be crossed, that is, a saddle or gap in the range. But usage insists that ‘pass' includes the long climb and descent, as well as the actual nek or ‘col'. They are surely part of the total experience of travelling over a mountain pass. Each of the passes described in this book was sought out and driven over for the purpose of this book in an epic tour that my wife Helen and I undertook in our 1960 Rover (except for Sani Pass, which we tackled with a 4x4). The choice of an old car in which to climb the passes was no mere gimmick. Traditionally, passes were daunting prospects to travellers of the past, so we thought that it was important for us to experience a degree of difficulty in negotiating them; using a more modern car would have made it all too easy. But I must admit that as something of an enthusiast I found the challenge of doing the trip in an old car impossible to resist. For those who are interested, technical details of the car and the trip will be found in an appendix at the end of this book. As we were unable to cross all the proposed passes at the time due to some bad weather, I visited the remaining seven-odd passes at a later date using modern cars. In all the cars we were equipped with an aircraft-type altimeter, so that altitudes and gradients could be checked. As this operated on the aneroid principle it had to be set to a known altitude or a known atmospheric pressure at the start of each day. Provided the weather didn't change drastically during the course of the day, the instrument proved to be remarkably accurate and sensitive. On our return we always compared the results with those indicated on large-scale Government Ordnance Survey maps. We were astonished by the many errors in altitudes as published in supposedly authoritative maps and travel-guides, whose figures also varied considerably from each other. However, Roads Department signboards usually agreed with our observations. That extra dimension of mountain passes – the vertical one – is part of their attraction, especially when one approaches a pass after having travelled for hours on level roads. From a combination of altitude and distance travelled one calculates the gradient. This usually refers to the average steepness of a pass and is quoted as a ratio, e.g. 1:16. A pass or poort doesn't exist in isolation. It is essentially a section of a route that links two places where people live or work. iii
PREFACE However, by their very nature, passes don't normally have hotels, shops, petrol stations, or other signs of civilisation along their length, so the traveller planning to cross the mountain range will always bear in mind, whether consciously or unconsciously, the ports of call on either side. For every pass described in this book, complementary information is provided on the nearest towns or cities, including facilities and places of interest to visit. Since about 1974 many of the passes have acquired a further attraction: they became the means of access to hiking trails and nature walks. Brief details of these trails are given under each pass-heading wherever applicable. Some of the mountain passes and poorts discussed in this book are a geologist’s delight, with dramatic and prominent rock formations and strata. In these cases even a layman can’t fail to be fascinated by them. As I consider myself one, I have tried to do justice to their major features while keeping it as simple as possible for readers who are similarly challenged.
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ABOUT THIS BOOK
ABOUT THIS BOOK South Africa's roads are rich in magnificent mountain passes and poorts, any one of which can turn a journey into a memorable experience. Passes were formidable obstacles for vehicles of the past, but nowadays we can enjoy them without worrying whether we shall be able to make it to the top. Information about passes and poorts is not readily available to travellers. Very often it is buried in museum documents or in books which are, anyway, too large and awkward to take along. Hence this book, which is compact enough to fit into a bag or car cubby-hole. A total of 50 of the country's hundreds of passes and poorts have been chosen; 47 are listed in the Quick Reference Table, but three of these are ‘two-in-one' passes. I have included most of the famous ones, some which are not so well known, but which you are likely to meet on the main roads, and also some that are off the beaten track. The following symbols are used to help sort out the five main different types of passes and poorts:
‘WATERSHED' passes – in the shape of an inverted vee, with a climb to the top and a descent to the bottom on the other side. ‘RIVER‐GORGE' passes – vee‐shaped, down to the bottom of a river valley, and up the other side. ‘STEP' or ‘PLATEAU' passes – leading either from a plateau down to lower‐ lying land, or up to a plateau, depending on the direction you are travelling. ‘CUL‐DE‐SAC' passes – once on top, you have to retrace your steps to descend. ‘POORTS' or ‘KLOOFS' – tortuous defiles without much variation in altitude.
ALTITUDES ABOVE SEA-LEVEL are given in metres. Many publications disagree on the actual highest point of any given pass. Wherever possible our figures have been checked by the use of v
ABOUT THIS BOOK ordnance survey maps and a sensitive altimeter in the car during an actual journey. AVERAGE GRADIENTS are quoted for the whole length of and
type passes
and for both sides of and
type passes,
e g: 345 m climbed in 9 km is equivalent to 1 m climbed in 25 m, written as 1:25. The gradient of the steepest section of the pass is also given where this is known. The QUICK REFERENCE TABLE in Appendix 1 lists the passes and poorts alphabetically, and gives basic information, including the page on which you can find more details on each. A BIBLIOGRAPHY giving sources and suggested further reading will be found in Appendix 3. Notes on the LIVES OF TWO FAMOUS PASS-BUILDERS will be found in Appendix 4. TECHNICAL DETAILS OF THE CAR (the classic Rover) used for the journeys on which the book was based will be found in Appendix 5, and some notes on the NATAL ROVER OWNERS’ ASSOCIATION will be found in Appendix 6. Note on sources: In order to make this book more readable, I was determined to refrain from footnotes. All the facts and information recorded were obtained from the excellent sources listed in the Bibliography and Further Reading: Appendix 3. (CP) refers to colour plates which appear in the centre of the book. * * * * *
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