I cut my biker’s milk teeth on the Chapman’s Peak road, eighteen years ago. The first time I rode the Peak was on a little Garelli 50 – a Supersport, mind. Later on I had a successions of Bonnevilles, Lightnings and Commandos, but I never got near learning everything that road had to teach me. And not only about riding bikes, either.
The first time I came to London I made friends with a biker named John. John and I had some good raps about bikes. Neither of us had a bike then because we were too poverty-stricken. But we could still talk, and one night I told John all about Chapman’s Peak and the good feelings I’d had riding bikes on it. The Ultimate Ride, I called it.
‘Maybe we’ll ride it together some day,’ John said. It was just talk because the Peninsula and riding a bike on Chapman’s Peak seemed very far away that winter’s night in suburban London.
‘It’s summer there now,’ I said.
Only it wasn’t just talk in the end. Four years later John and I and several other folks were sharing a big house at Noordhoek Beach. John had judiciously equipped himself with a Ducati Desmo 750, I had a ’75 Trident, and we often rode on the Chapman’s Peak road. John agreed with me; it was The Ultimate Ride.The road was built by Italian soldiers, captured by South Africans troops in Ethiopia and the desert during WW2 and sent to labour camps in South Africa. They built it well. The approach to the Peak are easy enough and no more difficult than any other coast roads on the mountainous Peninsula. But the main section is carved out of about three miles of rather sheer cliff, more than 1 000 feet above the sea. The road there is a succession of tight corners, often steep, and it’s bordered all the way along on the sea side by a stone parapet. But the surface isn’t always in good shape. There are usually road workers around somewhere. The whole area, road and all, is a nature reserve. You often see animals there: baboons. buck, rock rabbits, sometimes even a porcupine.
The Cape is one of the floral kingdoms of the world and the mountain vegetation is special. A square yard of good Cape mountainside probably contains more varieties of plant than the whole of the British Isles. So, the mountains are protected and there’s no picking flowers, no lighting fires except at the special picnic spots along the scenic drives including the Peak. And at the picnic spots there are signs warning of the danger of fire. The signs don’t help much. There are fires every dry season anyway. There are other signs along the Peak road, too. You find several of them, all on the steep section, warning in words and pictures of falling rocks. These signs don’t help much either. John and I often talked about the Danger of Falling Rocks, especially that winter when the Peninsula lived up to it’s original name of the Cape of Storms, with weeks of gales and cloudbursts fit to loosen the rocks above the road. Every time we rode the Peak we’d have to steer round piles of rubble on the tarmac. Some were quite big rocks, other powdered by the impact of a long fall…
One day a rock fell on to the road about 20 feet in front of where I was driving. It bounced over the parapet and tumbled down the cliff to the sea. It was about a foot across, that rock. Some weeks later a huge boulder flattened the rear section of a delivery van, but it missed the cab and no-one was hurt. We heard tales from neighbours, long-time residence at Noordhoek, who told fearful tales of rockslides, but they were all narrow escapes. There were no stories of serious injuries or deaths caused by those Falling Rocks on the signs.
But there had been plenty of other deaths there on the Peak road. The summer before a biker on a big Honda had a head-on with a VW Kombi. He died. In the autumn rains some idiot drove a stolen MGB straight over the parapet. The car plunged hundreds of feet down the cliff before something stopped it. It was completely wrecked. Police and mountain club people spent two days searching for a body, but then he gave himself up at a police station. He hadn’t been hurt at all; he’d been flung out of the car near the top and climbed back up to the road to hitch a lift back to Cape Town.
Some time after a heavy biker arrived from Johannesburg on an immense Harley Super Glide. He got drunk one night at one of the beachfront hotels, staggered outside, straddled his bike, kicked into life and roared off straight past the sign that say To Chapman’s Peak. Moving fast, he plunged straight off at the first corner, bounced off some rocks and landed in a small bay that belongs to a holiday resort down there. He only broke a leg, and they even patched his Harley up for him. Tough beasts, the pair of them.
Other people just crash on that road. They don’t make it through a corner or they try to overtake when the white lines say no, and they crash. It’s just that kind of road – people crash on it all the time. It’s edgy and unforgiving, quite apart from the Falling Rocks. That’s what I liked about it.I remember one special ride. It was an autumn afternoon. It had rained earlier, but now the sun was out. I was riding home from my job in the city. There wasn’t much traffic about and there were still some wet patches left by the rain. Some of the corners were slippery. I had a close encounter with a manhole cover just as I was coming out of a corner slightly wetter than I’d judged it to be, and an interesting slide on a patch of gravel that a truck had spilt on another corner, probably while he was having troubles of his own.
I decided to race the sun – to see if I could get to the top of the Peak before it set – then I’d have a good view to take in while I stopped and had a smoke. The Trident handled well and had plenty of smooth power, and as I straightened up and accelerated out of the corners into the short straights, then changed down again, leaning into another corner, then up and over the other way… it seemed to me that I was vertical and bike was stationary. It was the road, the world, that was whirling under me like this, up and down, from side to side, rushing straight at me, then just blowing in my face as it swept past.
I didn’t see any of the signposts, just the tarmac in front and the roadsides blurring past the edge of my vision. Sometimes I took the chance of a neck-twisting glimpse up at the mountains soaring above me, or down at the sea crashing into the rocks hundreds of feet below. The bike and the road and me and this world rushing at us: I was right into it, fused into this action sequence, my body and senses, my instincts, my brain turned right in, all systems working smoothly. It wasn’t quite clear where I ended and the Trident began, or where the bike ended and the road started. And the road doesn’t end, you just leave it for a while now and then…
I made the top with the sun still about five minutes off the horizon, which was mostly clear, but the sky was cloudy and already streaked with those same unreal colours that are new every time. I slowed down and pulled across the outer lane to where the tourists park their cars while they give the scene the mandatory gape. I got off and propped the bike on the side stand, and stood there for a while, despecialising a bit so I could walk, not just ride.You walk from the parking space down a few steps to a safely-railed lookout point. If you climb over the rails and clamber down the rocks a bit, and then turn sharp left, you find yourself in a cave directly over the sea crashing into the foot of the cliff a thousand feet below. A much better lookout point, and that’s where I sat and smoked, watching the sunset, feeling like a mountain eagle in its eyrie. I threw a rock into the sea and climbed back up to the road, geared up again, started the Trident and rode on, feeling quite different, very relaxed and easy. I went through the switchback of cliffhanger corners fast and smoothly, not going too close, but not shying away either, and taking time on the short straight that just gives you the time for a first glimpse of the beach to notice that the lagoon was full again. There’d been a spring tide…
And no rocks fell on me. Falling Rocks didn’t even enter my mind. But they always entered John’s mind on that road.
Like another afternoon when we were going home together over the Peak in a car. John was driving, and we were talking about something or other. We passed East Fort, where there are some old cannons which used to command the bay when the Dutch owned the Cape and the manganese mine in the last century.
We saw a baboon with her baby, her mate staying close. We passed some of the fire signs and then the first sign saying Beware of Falling Rocks, with that picture of falling rocks, Neither of us said anything for a while, and then John said: ‘This is definitely a high-risk road, you know.’‘Yes, but only when the weather’s bad.’
‘The wind’s blowing.’
‘But there hasn’t been any rain for a while to loosen the rocks.’
‘No, but still.’
‘John, are you really scared of being hit by a rock that just happens to plunge down Chapman’s Peak and land at just that very spot and at that precise moment when your head happens to be underneath it?’
‘It could happen.’
‘The odds are remote. You do other things all day that are much more high-risk without even thinking about it – I mean you owe a bike for instance. But you can’t come along this road without the thought crossing your mind that you might get hit on the head by a Falling Rock.’
‘Don’t you think about it? You nearly got hit once.’
‘I think if I got killed by a rock while riding on Chapman’s Peak, well that’d be it, it’d be my time. Only the Angel of Death or someone like that could get such dynamic timing together. No use trying to dodge, no use worrying about it. Look, there goes another one.’
‘Another what?’
‘Sign.’
‘Oh. I don’t worry about it, but the thought of it happening always comes to mind round about here on this road, whether I want it to or not. It’s not just the signs. It’s the thought that counts.’
We laughed.
‘Maybe you shouldn’t think about it either,’ I said. ‘Maybe there’s that Special Rock waiting up there just about ready to go, and you’ll set it rolling at just the wrong moment if you think about it too much, by telekinesis or something, a trick of mind.’‘Look, it’s my rock and I’ll think about it if I want to,’ John said, and laughed again.
‘Telekinesis or something…’
‘But still, he said a bit later, ‘this us definitely a high-risk road.’
‘Ultimate Ride, though.’
‘Yes, sometimes I wonder just how ultimate.’
And as the months went by John started using the other route to the city more often, over Silvermine Pass and along the motorway. He said it was quicker for him where he worked in southern suburbs. Also you don’t get any rockfalls on Silvermine pass. He still rode the Peak, especially when the weather was good and there was no wind or rain. But he didn’t commute that way anymore, not usually.
One evening about half of us at the Noordhoek house were getting dinner together in the kitchen. The other half, including John, hadn’t come home from work yet. Everyone seemed happy. Then the telephone rang, and Dee, John’s lady answered it. And then everything changed. We heard this terrible wailing, and we rushed to find Dee was doing it and the telephone was hanging there at the end of its line. It was all a very bad scene after that.John had ridden his Desmo straight off one of the high corners on the Peak. He’d crashed into the parapet and he and the bike both gone flying over it and down the cliff. John was killed. He died somewhere on the way down. There was a small pile of rubble in the road round about where John would have gone out of control. It was impossible to say whether John or the bike had been hit, but I guess he had – by his special rock. I still rode the Peak after that, and I still didn’t think much about Falling Rocks. But every time I got to John’s corner I’d think about him and his rock. John’s corner.
‘John’s Corner,’ I heard myself say one day as I reached the place. Now I’d named it, and naming it changed it for me. It wasn’t the corner where my friend John crashed his bike and died, now it was somehow the corner that killed John – John’s Corner. And it seemed to leer at me, as if I’d guessed its guilty secret. But wait, just you wait, maybe next time…
I really don’t usually think like that. I didn’t even think like that then, really, it was just an impression. But a strong one, and it left a bad taste. I don’t usually take any notice of feelings like that either – it was only a stretch of road, after all. A dangerous stretch, but no more dangerous then than it had been in all those years.Yet I also started using Silvermine Pass and the motorway, which is in way the Ultimate Ride. But the motorway was fast, and I was giving Anne, one of the girls at the house, a lift to university most days, and you don’t need a passenger much on the Peak.
I only rode the Peak once more after that touch of the Fear, and this time I got a Fear of the Fear, which is just distracting, and you don’t need distractions much up there either.
And it leered me again.
Anyway, even the Ultimate has its limitations.
- Fiction by Keith Addison, Republished from Bike magazine, UK, 1979
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