On The Back Roads: Encounters With People And Places

Tafelberg

This book rekindles that recurring idea: to give up the madness and the rat race, rummage for the old, "worn Shell road map", fill 'er up and just drive. Dana Snyman seems to be really living his life, travelling the small, unknown roads through South Africa, and telling the stories of simple, salt-of-the-Earth folk.

Snyman is boyishly proud of his "Epol-brown" 1973 Regal Valiant. He writes about his car like the Lone Ranger might talk about Silver. And he associates Valiants, in particular, with the old days in South Africa, so his road trip is also a nostalgic meandering through the memories of his childhood.

Going Nowhere Slowly fans will love Snyman's storytelling. The difference is that Snyman travels on his own so he doesn't take his own company along - he chats up strangers at bars, asks pedestrians and "karretjies-mense" for directions and has tea with people he's only just met. It takes a certain amount of confidence to travel this way but Snyman seems to have an unassuming way about him which people warm to.

On the Back Roads reveals parts of South Africa that are unfamiliar in name but familiar in spirit, sometimes quaint and always intriguing.

He unearths a sense of history and old myths about stock thieves; he hunts for graves, talks about ghost hitchhikers as if they were old friends and jogs the memories of retired train drivers.

He sets out to find the Moordenaars Karoo - "one of the few places in South Africa that doesn't yet have any Eskom power" - and the heart of the Bushveld. Snyman pulls over at a place that sells "17 different kinds of game biltong" but even this is only considered "amateur Bushveld".

Snyman's writing is as unpretentious as "Proudly South African" humour is, and doesn't hang its head in shame for its Afrikaans flavour.

There is one out-of-place chapter on a river boat on Lake Tanganyika which feels a bit far from home, but Snyman shows off a South Africa that feels as comfortable as a Karoo stoep in the afternoon sun.