Johannesburg to Ladybrand

Roadtrip: call it 800 miles, most of it heading south from Johannesburg to the tiny town of Clarens, then turning west and skirting Lesotho for a hundred miles. Pretty country, with lots of Dutch Evangelical churches, houses of stone, and that entrenched racial gulf.

If the condition of signs is indicative, there's economic trouble ahead.

The Evangelical Reformed Church or Evangelies-Gereformeerde Kerk. What kind of church needs this kind of security? It's a rhetorical question, unfortunately.

Main street, caught in a time warp from fifty years ago.

What was stylish in the 1950s remains as it was. No preservationists have had to fight for their heritage.

Call it multicultural. The interesting thing is the combination of land-uses, by no means foreign to traditional Islam but startling in these modern clothes.

Mosque entrance.

Supermarket with no parking problems.

An older church in the heart of Vereeniging.

A house that presents an electrified wall to the street. The house itself does a fair imitation of a bunker.

South of town, the road crosses the Vaal River. The headworks on the other side divert water to Johannesburg.

There's a reservoir upstream, which means second homes. Tempted?

Plenty to do!

The town of Oranjeville almost gets its feet wet between two arms of the reservoir.

Pride of "The Cliffs."

Less brash, an Oranjeville church.

Continuing south, with world-scale fields of corn.

A hint of farmsteads lost as farms grew larger.

The road drops toward Frankfort, a huge grain elevator in the distance.

Entering the town. The palms are startling, no?

The street is as wide as Mormons would make it. Very low key. Quiet, too.

The local church rises to greater heights.

The town was established in the 1860s, so why is the church so much more recent? Thank the British, who during the Boer War burned down the old one. Odd that the architect here should be English, but that pattern—English architect, Boer contractor—is a common one.