The Tankwa Padstal in the Karoo

By Roxanne Reid
We pulled up at the Tankwa Padstal in the Karoo. Officially, it’s on the R355 about 70km from Ceres, on the way to Calvinia or the Tankwa Karoo National Park. Unofficially, it’s somewhere between nothing and nowhere. Two bikers were switching off their engines and taking off their helmets. We greeted them in Afrikaans and asked how their ride had been. They looked at us as if we were from outer space.

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We discovered they spoke Portuguese, but no Afrikaans. Their English wasn’t all that hot either. Such barriers were too hard to breach on a stinking hot day in the middle of a dust bowl, there where the wide open spaces get under your skin and into your bones.

Tankwa Padstal, a popular stop between nowhere and nothing

The Tankwa Padstal (farm stall) sells anything from sweets, chips and cold drinks to matches, bug spray and airtime. There’s also a licensed bar, its décor weird in a way that stops being weird the longer you spend in the Karoo. You can order drinks and snacks and sit inside – or outside under a cover that provides shade but does little to ease the heat that radiates up at you from the ground.

You can have a dop at the bar ...

... or a snack at a table in the yard

If you come here in late spring when the Africa Burn festival is bubbling not far away, the padstal will bustle like an Ultracity on the first day of the school holidays. In the spirit of Mardi Gras, someone may be dressed in a wetsuit and flippers, others might be wearing funny hats, purple wigs or bizarre masks, but try not to judge. They’re on a fantasy trip bursting with art, music and performance, and it only happens for a few days once a year.

Then the Tankwa's R355 will go back to being unhurried and lonely, the longest stretch of gravel road in South Africa without a fuel station or Wimpy.

It takes guts and stamina to travel the Tankwa Karoo

Inside the shop, which has one of those high counters with glass display cases from the olden days, we bought a really good homemade ginger beer and some fudge, and chatted to the farmer’s wife who runs the place as if we’d known her for years. About the tiny library of Afrikaans light romances and children’s books that she runs from a corner of the shop, about the healing properties of Zambuk ointment, and about the prickly pears they grow on the farm.

My eyes lit up because I haven’t seen these in shops since I was a kid, but I was out of luck. They weren’t in season.

Sweets, bicycle spares, airtime, even a small library, it's all here at the Tankwa Padstal

We got a few pointers about how to prune prickly pears to get what she called ‘superfruit’, and advice about which shops in our suburb of Cape Town send trucks all the way to the Tankwa Karoo to buy prickly pears from the farm. 
 
Then we were back out in the glare of the sun and on our way again.

If you hate the uniform blandness of shopping in the city, as I do, take a few minutes to stop at the Tankwa Padstal; there’s always something interesting going on. Even if you just sit on the stoep hugging a cold drink, it’s like watching Karoo TV.

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