Tuesday 31 August: The High Veld

Well, I wasn’t on the road quite as long today as yesterday, and I didn’t cover quite as many miles. But like New Zealand and the US, this is a place where you have to be prepared for a long haul on the roads if you want to see stuff.

I’m now in Nelspruit, another World Cup host city. If you followed the tournament, it’s the place where the stantions of the new stadium are designed and painted to look like giraffes. I’ve covered 530 kilometres, and have travelled north east (always a good direction to move in, I feel). I’m booked into a cheap and cheerful Formula 1 motel on the outskirts of the city. It’s not very glamorous, I know – but I like to think of it as a small act of homage to Lewis Hamilton, who won the Belgian Grand Prix yesterday. Frankly, it was convenient and inexpensive and I don’t expect to spend many hours cooped up in the tiny room.

I was up bright and early again today, to say goodbye to Brenda Diseko as she left for work, and then to the children as Bishop Stephen took them into school. Those who know me well are aware of the aversion I have, generally speaking, to being addressed as ‘Father’. It’s not entirely a reasonable reaction, I realise. A canonical colleague pointed out to me that although Jesus did indeed say, ‘Call no-one your father on earth, because you have one ‘Father’, the one who is in heaven’, he also said, ‘You are not to be called teacher, because you have one teacher and you are all students’, and yet I don’t at all mind if people call me ‘Doctor Wilcox’ (in fact, I rather like it) , when ‘doctor’ just means ‘teacher’. But somehow, the title ‘Father Wilcox’ or ‘Father Pete’ invokes a whole set of associations I just find ghastly. Anyway, all I was wanting to say is that here it has seemed much less grating, and certainly on the lips of the Diseko children. They’re so lovely, I can’t bring myself to correct them when they say, as they have been saying all weekend ‘Yes Father Pete’, ‘No Father Pete, ‘Thank you Father Pete’. It’s made me chuckle instead.

Bishop Stephen then drove me into Klerksdorp so that I could hire a car. We stopped by the Diocesan Office, where he recorded a message for our ‘Church on Fire’ event in November, when the Archbishop of Canterbury is visiting the Diocese of Lichfield and we’ll be holding a festival service on the afternoon of Saturday 6 November. The service will include a greeting from the bishops of each of our partner dioceses, and I’m now carrying Bishop Stephen’s message on my iphone.

I then set off from Klerksdorp at about 9.30, stopping in Potschefstroom at an internet café and a tourist info, to plan the day ahead. Actually I stopped before that, in Ikageng. Incredibly, on Sunday I had failed to take a single photo. And I did so want an image of the Cathedral from the outside. So on impulse I pulled off the motorway at the Ikageng junction and although I had no address or contact details for the Cathedral and only a hazy recollection of the route we’d taken on Sunday, I thought I’d make at least a brief effort to find it. At one point I took a wrong turning, and found myself at a dead end in a particularly forlorn section of housing, and it did occur to me that this might not have been my best idea ever. But retracing my steps, I saw where I’d gone astray and at once found the Cathedral, took my photos and was back on the motorway in a few minutes, with no trace of trouble.

By lunchtime, I was through the motorway madness which is Johannesburg and by 2pm I’d reached the High Veld. I might have lost my way in the labyrinth around Jo’burg, except that I’d heeded the warnings in the guidebooks and had invested some time on Google Maps ‘Get Directions’, mapping out my route.

The High Veld is a bit like the highlands of Scotland (or at times the Peak District), at the end of a particularly blistering summer: beautiful, in a brown, bare and dusty sort of a way – although every now and again a chemical works, or a mining operation or a power station blots the vista. There was one particularly ugly example at a place called Nankwe. The plant included what I can only assume was a weigh-station, but I was rather tickled by the potentially anti-Papist message of the sign which said, 'Mass Restrictions. Control Here'.

My plan, such as it is, is to get up bright and early again tomorrow (5am) in order to get into the Kruger Park as soon as it opens. I’ll spend at least the morning driving around looking for those lions. If I fail, I’ll book myself onto a guided tour on Thursday. But I’m ever hopeful.