I Rode Up Du Toitskloof Two Hundred Times Before I Moved to the Bottom of It

The alarm that nobody else in the house liked

For about six years my Saturday alarm went off at ten past four. I would creep down the passage in socks, carrying my cleats in one hand so they would not click on the tiles, and my wife Lindiwe would say, without opening her eyes, "Drive safe, crazy." That was our whole conversation until lunchtime.

I am a logistics manager. During the week my life is pallets and delivery windows. On Saturdays I wanted something that was only mine.

I would drive out from Bellville in the dark and park in Paarl just as the sky went grey. Then I would ride out towards the old pass road and up Du Toitskloof, the long way, the way the trucks used to go before the tunnel. It is not brutal. It is patient, and it waits for you to stop lying to yourself about how fit you are.

Coffee at the same table

The descent was my reward, but the real reward came after. There is a little coffee place on the Main Road that opens early, and I always took the same outside table, the one with the wobbly leg that I would wedge level with a folded sugar sachet. I ordered a flat white and sat there in my sweaty kit with my legs humming.

Over the years I started noticing things from that table. The same old man walked a grey Staffie past at quarter to eight every week and nodded at me like we had a standing appointment. A woman sold proteas from a bucket outside the pharmacy. People greeted each other by name. In Bellville I could not tell you the name of the man three doors down, and we have lived there eleven years.

I would finish my coffee, load the bike and drive back into the traffic, and somewhere around Klapmuts I would feel the town let go of me. That feeling started to bother me more than any climb.

The first time I said it out loud

It took me roughly two hundred rides to say it. I know the number because I log every ride on my phone,. One Saturday in winter I came home, put the kettle on, and said, "What if we lived there?"

She looked at me the way she looks at a delivery quote that is too good to be true. "Where?"

"Paarl."

"Because of a bicycle."

"Not because of the bicycle," I said, which was a lie, and we both knew it.

Lindiwe does not cycle. She owns one bicycle, a blue thing with a basket that has been leaning against the garage wall since 2019 with two flat tyres. She is a speech therapist with a practice she spent years building in Durbanville, and a firm belief that people who wear lycra in public have made questionable life decisions.

So she said no, but she said it kindly, and she said it in a way that left the door open about two centimetres.

Doing my homework like it was a work project

I handled it like a logistics problem and made a spreadsheet. Lindiwe says this is the least romantic thing a man has ever done for a dream.

I mapped her drive to the practice from a few different parts of town at the hours she actually leaves. I looked up schools for our younger son and priced the extra fuel. At night, when I could not sleep, I scrolled through homes for sale Paarl on my phone with the brightness turned all the way down so the light would not wake her.

What surprised me was that the spreadsheet did not win the argument. It just took away the excuse that it was impossible. The drive was longer, but not ridiculous. The numbers were tight, but not reckless. The real question was never on any spreadsheet. It was whether she could love a place that I loved for reasons she did not share.

The Saturday I took her with me

So I stopped arguing and did the obvious thing. I invited her along.

Not on the bike. I suggested she sleep in, drive out at nine, and meet me at my table after the ride. She agreed, mostly, I think, so she could finally see what was worth leaving the house at four in the morning for.

I was slow that day because I was nervous. When I rolled down to the coffee place she was already sitting at my table, with the sugar sachet still wedged under the leg from some earlier Saturday. The man with the grey Staffie walked past and nodded at both of us. Lindiwe raised an eyebrow at me.

"You know him?"

"Not really. We just say hello."

She ordered a cappuccino and watched the street for a long time without saying much. Then she said, "It is slower here." I kept my mouth shut, which, after nineteen years of marriage, is the most useful skill I have.

After coffee we walked a few streets, looked at gardens, and read the noticeboard outside a church hall.

What changed her mind

It was not the mountain and it was not my spreadsheet. It was something smaller.

On the way back to the cars she stopped outside a speech and language practice we had not known was there and stood reading the brass nameplate. Then she said, half to herself, "There is work here, too." That was the moment I understood she had been doing her own sums the whole time. She had never been against the idea. She had just refused to move her whole life on the strength of my legs.

Over the next few months she made her own list, and it was far more sensible than mine. She wanted to keep two days a week in Durbanville and see if she could build a client base closer to home for the rest. She wanted a proper garden, because our Bellville yard was mostly paving and a washing line. When we finally sat down together to look at what kind of house to buy in Paarl would suit us, it was her list we used, not my spreadsheet.

The bottom of the climb

We moved in March. The first Saturday in the new house, my alarm went off at half past five instead of ten past four, and I lay there for a minute just enjoying that extra hour and twenty minutes. I just rolled out of the gate and was on my way.

Lindiwe still does not ride. The blue bicycle came with us, flat tyres and all, and leans against a new wall. But she has started walking to the coffee place on Saturday mornings to meet me after the climb, and she now knows the man with the grey Staffie by name, which is more than I managed in six years. His name is Oom Gerrit. The dog is called Biscuit.

People ask me sometimes whether buying Paarl property was a good investment, and I honestly do not know how to answer in those terms. What I know is that I used to drive home from this town every Saturday feeling something close itself up inside me around Klapmuts, and now I do not have to drive home at all.

I still log every ride. I am at three hundred and twelve now. Lindiwe says that if I ever start logging her walks she will move back to Bellville by herself, and I believe her completely.