The scariest adventure I experienced in South Africa wasn’t climbing a 57-meter crane or repelling 367 feet off a cliff.
It wasn’t running off a mountain and parasailing over high-rise apartment buildings, either.
Believe it or not, but it wasn’t even bungy jumping from a 708-foot-tall bridge.
The most sustained fear I experienced was driving over 700 miles of N1—up then back down South Africa’s southeastern coast.
I’m not kidding. My hands were sweating almost constantly, even though I had the air conditioning vents on full blast and louvered toward my hands on the steering wheel.
I’d previously driven rental cars in other countries.
I’d previously driven on the left side of the road in both rural and urban settings.
I’d previously even driven a manual transmission economy car with the shifter in my left hand.
What I had never done for 600km at a time was play chicken with lorries and BMWs at 75mph. For the vast majority of that stretch of winding, rolling highway, part of the famous “Garden Route,” N1 is a two-to-three-lane road. Oh, and for a large portion of it, the speed limit is 120km.
With Cape Town being a significant global sea port, this road is dotted with large trucks—some with double trailers. Cape Town’s affluence also fills the roads with zooming Audis, Mercedes, and even Lamborghinis. Just to make things even more interesting, you’ve also got crowded mini buses, bloated tourist buses, and Lilliputian vehicles like this thrown in the mix.
In the four-lane stretches, this rolling melting pot works much like any metro traffic. Those few miles of the journey arrived like oases in a desert. The rest of the time you had center lines like those we have in the States.
And then whatever this means.
Regardless of the lines, though, the unwritten rules worked like this: slower vehicles would pull as far onto the shoulder as possible at whatever speed they could manage. The faster vehicle would cheat the center line, pass, and then flash the hazard lights as a show of gratitude—all the while having to pay attention to drivers doing the same coming in the other direction.
As a passing vehicle, sometimes I was a foot into the opposite traffic and sometimes the entire width of my Chevrolet Spark charging at oncoming windshields.
That’s right. I didn’t have my supercharged MINI Cooper (with its 150mph-rated tires and racing brake fluid) to run this obstacle course. I had between 50 and 67hp, depending on which European measurement you use to convert to horsepower. Just a guess, but I’d imagine those 13″ economy tires on the rough asphalt weren’t getting even the blistering 15.3-second 0-to-60 performance Chevrolet boasts.
To add degree of difficulty, the producers of this reality show added intermittent wind along this coastal drive, gusts that absolutely loved toying with the high-profile design of my rental car.
No professional driver. No closed course. Just me doing what so many drivers in front of me and behind me were doing over and over again: trying to calculate if I could get back to my lane before the oncoming vehicle turned my already compact car into a deflated accordion.
If I were to measure the adrenaline rushes of my life in terms of cost per hour of participation, negotiating the Garden Route proved far more affordable than bungy jumping, sky diving, hang gliding, etc. That said, I wouldn’t mind paying extravagantly for safer ways to get my hits of endorphins, dopamine, and norepinephrine.
My South African road trip made me grateful for the car in my garage, the spacious roads back in the States, and the guardian angels that shoved 2,000 pounds of Spark and 200 pounds of me into safety at just the right times.
