Busted Flat in Barrydale

Let me tell you the tale of Sophie Schutte, the Mad Woman of Willowmore, who was so meshugge that when she went to jail the warden begged the magistrate to set her free.

Let me tell you about our old bakkie on a stony mountain pass, how we lost a gearbox but found new friends in Barrydale. Let me tell you about The Kruisrivier Hat, the five-star prison, the Three Ostrich Amigos, The Curse of a Big Hat, Las Vegas in the Little Karoo, Swag the Milkshake Man and why it’s so decadently delicious to steal pelargonium slips on a roadtrip along Route 62.

Rewind to the beginning of this journey in The Old Jail in Willowmore, built back in 1880 to house stock thieves, cutthroats, bandits and drunks on what we politely call a ‘railway bender’. It has been transformed into a rather upmarket guest house by owners Karen von Loeper-Dyatshenko and her husband Oleg, who comes from Kiev and makes sad eyes when he hears I presently live in a world without wine.

We are booked into one of the awaiting-trial cells, where the old gaoler Sidney Walter Williams once spent a month himself for