What brings 11 people, seven cars and an endless supply of snacks together in the Northern Cape? A sense of adventure, a love for Jimnys and good road trip tunes.
‘I’m going up the country
Baby, don’t you wanna go?
I’m going up the country
Baby, don’t you wanna go?
We’re gonna go somewhere
Where we’ve never been before’
Canned Heat played through the speakers as the N14 stretched out ahead of our friendly convoy. Every second car honked their hooters or flashed their lights at us, for who can resist saying hello to six Suzuki Jimnys all cruising in a row? The best thing about driving a Jimny is the attention. The second best thing is the capability, and we intended to test just how capable these little beasts can be. Where better to put them through their paces than the varied terrain of the Northern Cape?
Photo: Chris Wall
The only brief we’d been given was to keep in mind the word “coddiwomple”; it means to travel purposefully in a vague direction. This trip would be less about destinations and more about the journey, and with that in mind, I turned up the volume as we headed – vaguely, of course – for Pofadder.
My roadtrip playlist is a little bit like the Jimny: it’s been around since the 1970s but it gets better with age, picking up some modern tunes and tricks along the way. The steering wheel audio control pleased me no end because I didn’t have to give up DJ duties to my boyfriend Jason. Since the LJ Series (first gen) came out in 1970, the Jimny has evolved a lot, but it has remained compact and full of character. We were driving a mix of manual and automatic fourth gen 1.5 GLX models, a