Childhood Road Trips
June 29, 2005 at 10:17 AM
by Ashleigh
When I was a kid my mom would pack me off for the summer holidays with my ouma and oupa (granny and grandpa) to holiday in their caravan. Other members of our family would come too so there were usually two cars and one caravan.
Ouma would cook huge quantities of 'padkos' (road food) for us to take in many many of those old fashioned blue coolerboxes. Coolerboxes of the variety where you had to put icepacks in with the food to keep it cool. Ouma made wonderful food - sandwiches, crumbed minute steak, crumbed chicken, potato salad, pasta salad, chopped up fruit, vienna sausages and the best thing of all, vetkoek with cooked savoury mince inside. A vetkoek is sort of a large puffed doughnut made with unsweetened dough, fried in hot oil and as it fries it puffs up leaving a nice big space in the middle to stuff with whatever you please. Savoury stuffings like savoury mince are common, so is jam or syrup for sweet vetkoek I liked them just plain. They'd be kept cold and were even more delicious cold than warm.
We'd hitch the caravan up, duly packed with tents and groundsheets and all that kind of stuff and set off at around 2 am in order to reach the Zimbabwean borderpost with South Africa by 6 am when it opened. Then we would drive over the border into South Africa and through Messina, up to Louis Trichart, through the tunnels - the best part for a kid! - and just outside Louis Trichart we would stop and have breakfast. If it had been a long wait at the borderpost then we might stop in Messina, but it was usually so hot that we'd wait for the cooler air in the moutains.
Oupa was always very diligent about stopping often at lay-byes and picnicking and giving us kids a chance to stretch our legs (and pee). So we stopped for breakfast, tea time at 10, lunch at 12, tea again at about 3 and then around 5 we should have reached the campsite where we would be staying the night.
My memories are very hazy of the actual journeys. I remember arguing with my cousin who was one year younger than me, and some things like when I ate too many cherries and got a sore stomach; the incident of sticking the sunglasses stems up our noses to make ourselves sneeze; rubbing soap in my cousin's eyes in the bath and getting a spanking; the disprin (dissolvable aspirin) addiction I had at 5 years old; the special toilet bag that my other gran made me for the trips that had a special flower shaped soap in it.
Using the communal bathrooms at campsites, needing to stop and pee on the side of the road in the shelter of the car door. The heat ... and getting in bed with ouma and oupa in the dark mornings with the scent of coffee in the air before the sun rose and watching the sun rising and with it the heat hitting the ground and the instant shimmer of an African summer.