I have dreamed, for a long time, of having a travelling radio station. It would be an old army truck - preferably a Dodge Power Wagon, though those are rare as unicorn hooves - kitted out with a mixing desk, a boss transmitter, and a drop-down side so I can check out the view while broadcasting from the Karoo or let the booming surf spice my transmissions from the wild Wild Coast.
I told my friend René, whose family farm sheep out in big sky country, west of Brandvlei in the Northern Cape, where the only sounds are the wind and sheep and the faraway, spooky moan of the big ore trains going to the sea, that I would call the station Radio Jackal.
Her eyes grew wide. "Nobody will speak to you if you call it that."
"Why not?"
She waved a hand in the vague direction of home. "No one out there likes jackals."
In case I had forgotten that, the carcass hanging from a fence on the road from Merweville was a stark reminder.
"Stop!" shouted Scott, my colleague and fellow roadtripper. We skittered to a halt, got out of the car and were enveloped in silence.
The jackal was rank. It had been there some time.
"Is it a warning?"
"What, to other jackals?" Scott laughed. "'Hey! Stay away!' Would other jackals care?"
We agreed that they probably wouldn't. "More for us," the average jackal would say.
Either way, we had been told back in Merweville that the farmers out here are a hardy lot, and that we might expect to see things like dead jackals strung from fences. This is, after all, the Moordenaars Karoo.
Meanwhile, I got to thinking that I needed another name for my radio station. And, no, "Rooikat Radio" - the other name I had picked out - wouldn't be much good either.
We drove on.
It was the second day of our fast and dirty road trip, on which we would spend a great deal of time taking the paths less travelled - such as the R356, 104km of gravel up and over the Nuweveld mountains to Sutherland, and the deep and lonely defile of Seweweekspoort, so named because of the time it took the first trek farmers to find their way through.
Lucky for us, Ford had lent us a brand-new Everest XLT, which made comically light work of anything we threw at it.
IN THE BEGINNING
I find Scott outside the Ansteys Building in downtown Joburg just after dawn and we head south, Alpha Blondy and the Kalahari Surfers and Malcolm Gladwell's podcast taking turns on the stereo.
We leap down the N1. Bloem. Colesberg. Beaufort West. At Leeu-Gamka, we stop to help a guy - an embarrassed mechanic who has ventured onto the road without a toolkit - whose intercooler pipe has come adrift. It turns out that not only do I have the number 14 spanner he needs, but I have two. I give him the spare and hope he makes it home.
At Prince Albert Road, we swing north and drive under a sky the colour of blood to Merweville, where a huge plate of boerekos awaits us at the Springbok Lodge.
I forget to ask our hosts, Mary-Anne and Johan van Heerden, about the "Englishman's grave", last resting place of Walter Oliphant Arnot, an Australian who fought for the British during the Anglo-Boer War.
Arnot shot himself with his rifle while on patrol in 1902, apparently after being accused of insubordination. It seems he had refused to take part in the burning of Boer farms.
His widow paid for a headstone and the people of Merweville promised to look after his grave forever.
UPWARDS AND ONWARDS
Mary-Anne feeds us well and we are on our way a little after 8am. Ahead are 100km of gravel, two mountain passes, numerous farm gates ... and one dead jackal.
The Everest romps up the 1:10 incline of Rammelkop Pass- a 263m gain in altitude in just under 3km - like a mountain goat.
We make Sutherland early enough to catch the afternoon tour of its most famous attraction - the big telescope.
But the lenses are being cleaned. It all feels a bit ho-hum until we are led into one of the smaller telescopes, where a white-haired astronomer - who looks remarkably like Professor Decimus Phostle in Tintin and The Shooting Star - breaks from his labours to give an impromptu and captivating talk about dwarf stars and red giants and sub-dwarf stars and what's inside them.
The sun is five billion years old. What a brief spark the life of one jackal.
In the morning, we turn south and roll across the Roggeveld under a grey sky. It's undulating country but the plunge of the plateau and into the steep-sided Verlatenkloof Pass takes us by surprise.
All the years I've driven past the Sutherland turn-off at Matjiesfontein, I had no idea what beauty lay just around the bend in the road. So it goes.
INTO THE POORT
We drove with the intention of getting off the main drag. At Laingsburg - where a forgotten rowing boat advertises the Flood Museum - we take a sharp right to Seweweekspoort, a road of twists and turns that takes you from the Great Karoo to the little one.
The last time I took this road was with my adventure-loving mother and we drove into the dark in a loaded Kombi whose petrol warning light flickered all the way from Laingsburg to a lonely Ladismith, where we rolled into a garage on the fumes of 87 Octane. (Leaded.)
Now we have lots of fuel but also an army truck driven by a soldier whose pants are clearly on fire. We pass him on the uphills. He rattles past on the downhills. Never give a bored soldier any piece of equipment that you want to keep in good shape.
He passes us one last time, on the Huisrivier Pass near Calitzdorp. It's raining now and the road is slick and I am not surprised, as the Samil roars past on a tight bend, to see him drift over the line.
I wonder if the driver in the oncoming bakkie needed a change of underwear.
The rain follows us to Calitzdorp where we spend the night in the old railway station and race the handcars up and down the tracks.
The new day brings two more passes. The first - the Outeniqua over the eponymous mountain range - is shrouded in mist and scavenged by trucks. But the second - the 74km gravel rollercoaster named for Prince Alfred - is why we came in the first place.
Never mind the logging trucks and the little saloon picking its way over the rough bits like an old codger at the beach, our happiness swoops with every bend, every glimpse of old yellowwoods reaching for the sky.
At Spitskop, we stop to admire the view of the deep, wooded valleys from the same spot where an Italian silk spinner named Giuseppe Sciociatti once kept watch for forest fires.
Then it's up and over, off the dirt and through the dorps of Avontuur and Uniondale, making time to Graaff-Reinet. That night we eat ostrich fillets at The Coldstream and later fall in among farmers at the Graaff-Reinet Club. They welcome us with good cheer and the drinks flow nicely.
They all like the idea about the travelling radio station. But, no, not the jackals.
ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS
SUTHERLAND
The South African Astronomical Observatory - site of the Large Telescope - is a fascinating diversion. Tours R60pp.
Local resident Jurg Wagenar offers private stargazing with powerful telescopes at his home outside town. I finally got to see what Alpha Centauri reallylooks like. R120pp. Visit discoversutherland.co.za
MATJIESFONTEIN
Apart from its lovely old buildings, the transport museum here - a fine collection of vintage and classic cars, a well-kept steam locomotive and a couple of wooden railway coaches from the 1920s - is also a worthwhile detour.
GRAAFF-REINET
The Valley of Desolation, Camdeboo National Park. A spectacular viewpoint looking over the plains of the Camdeboo. Go as early as you can to get the morning sun on the rocks. R35pp.
CALITZDORP
Converted into a backpackers when the railway closed, the town's station has a private bar and two hand-pump cars of the kind that railwaymen once used to inspect the tracks. There are not many places in the world where you can sleep in an old ticket office.
KNYSNA
The King Edward VII tree, a 700-year-old Outeniqua yellowwood - one of the oldest of its kind - towers 40m off the forest floor. 17km from Knysna on the Prince Alfred Pass road (R339).
