Road to riches lay with smashing barriers to expansion

Published May 20, 2014

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Passes & Poorts

Getaway’s top 30

scenic mountain routes

in the Western Cape

Marion Whitehead

Jacana Media

Review:

Tony Weaver

THIS is a very welcome reprint of Whitehead’s popular 2010 book, and, unlike many recent travel books, is aimed mostly at the South African and not the foreign tourist market as evidenced by the excellent detail and local information.

It hardly needs saying, but one of the most outstanding features of the Western Cape was also one of its greatest barriers to early expansion by Dutch and British colonial settlers – the formidable ring of mountains that cuts the coastal areas off from the hinterland.

Whitehead traces the history of road building and pass cutting, and particularly the formidable trio of British colonial men who pioneered the most significant of the road building efforts – Sir Galbraith Lowry Cole (governor-general from 1823 to 1833), surveyor-general Major Charles Cornwallis Michell and road builder Andrew Geddes Bain (and his even more famous road building son, Thomas).

And of course, here you have the names of three of our most famous Western Cape passes – Sir Lowry’s Pass, Bain’s Kloof and Michell’s Pass. The Bain father and son duo was formidable.

As Wikipedia tells us, “(Thomas) Bain built 24 major mountain roads and passes in the second half of the 1800s. His father built eight during the first half of the same century. One of the few passes in South Africa not built by a Bain during that period was Montagu Pass from George to Oudtshoorn, which was built from 1843 ti 1847 by Henry Fancourt White.”

Whitehead’s book combines all this history in loving detail with an equally excellent eye for quirky anecdotes, and a wealth of information on scenic detours, hiking and mountain biking paths leading off the passes, accommodation and dining options, and detailed maps of the paths themselves.

This is the perfect companion volume to the more technical 2002 book by Ross Graham, The Romance of Cape Mountain Passes and joins Graham and Erasmus’s On Route in the elite collection of books in my Land Rover’s travelling library.

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