The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley, wrote Scottish poet Robbie Burns. Contributor Jim Freeman learned this hard lesson again when he took the recently launched new-generation SUV from Ford to Frontier Country.
Don’t you just hate it when things go potentially catastrophically wrong right at the start of a lengthy and carefully planned road trip? Well, a few weeks ago disaster struck for me on the first day of a nine-day jaunt to the part of the Eastern Cape around Makhanda and Grahamstown.
It happened on a short stretch of gravel road between St Francis and J-Bay that should pose no problems for a powerful 4WD SUV equipped with brand new tyres … both of which should take you to the summit of the highest mountain in the world. Nonetheless, as fate would have it the new Ford Everest Sport sprung a leak in the 20-inch tyre behind me …
No TPMS
The lack of a tyre pressure monitor system (TPMS) and no low tyre pressure warning light in this model (Ford should really look at this) meant I took the fully laden leviathan past a couple of repair and fitment shops before realising I had a problem. To cut a tortuous story short (check Backroads on page 122 for the positive aspects of the experience), I was forced to hire an insipid sedan for a couple of days.
No big deal, I agree, but those were exactly the days I had planned to put the Everest through its paces in what natives of the Eastern Cape call “Frontier Country”. Grahamstown lies 110 km Northeast of Gqeberha/Port Elizabeth and 130 km Southwest of Buffalo City/East London. To get there, I prefer to route through Addo village and my absolute favourite regional exploration base that goes by the name of Chrislin African Lodge (www.chrislin.co.za).
If I was sticking to tar roads, I would not have been disappointed by this earlier mishap but I really enjoy driving the Everest and was so looking forward to taking it over Zuurberg and some of the adjacent roads that I had explored in an earlier model iteration.
Be that as it may, I returned to Humansdorp on Valentine’s Day to pick up the Everest, return the rental, and head back to the Addo area. Sadly, though the flat tyre had been swapped for the spare and it had not been repaired, and the rest of the trip had to be ridden on tenterhooks.
When you have no spare, it makes no sense in courting the catastrophe of another puncture in the boondocks of the Eastern Cape. So, this is not so much a review of the technical abilities and potential of the 2023 Everest Sport as it is a narration of the delightful part it played in the first and final thirds of our voyage.
Moving Magazines …
The journey had its genesis almost a year ago. A close pal, formerly head guide at Kariega Private Game Reserve and now working in Zimbabwe, told me he had acquired 80 years of National Geographic magazines and asked whether I would drive them from Betty’s Bay to his home at Kenton-on-Sea.
Eight decades of National Geographic equates to nearly a ton of weight and I loaded them first into a Mercedes Vito and drove them up to Kenton … only to find his house caretaker out of town, so I drove them nearly 900 km back to my home. It was as much of a pain in the butt to reload them into the Everest (right on top of the spare tyre!) but there was infinitely more room in which to do so.
Being a seven-seater, all I had to do was flatten the rearmost row of seats of the Everest to comfortably accommodate almost the entire natural and scientific history of the Twentieth Century. Cooler-boxes, camera bags and luggage took up the rest of the space. However, when I took to the road from home, the Everest felt as light as a feather despite a total weight of about 3 500 kg … a tribute to the Ford engineers and the pulling power of the 2.0-litre twin-turbo diesel engine.
While it probably cannot be classified as a “babe magnet” the Everest Sport still drew exclamations of approval for its appearance wherever we went … (including at Jeffreys Bay Motors where it stood with a dejectedly flat tyre while we battled in vain to remove the wheel). Previous models have been decried aesthetically as a SUV cabin bolted onto a bakkie body; this time the criticism does not apply.
After handing the rental back mid-afternoon on Valentine’s Day, my lady friend and I sped back to Addo in the Everest for an intriguing dinner at a little restaurant/cooking school called Molo Lolo. It was the first time I experienced fine dining by the light of a cell phone torch, all thanks to Eskom.
The next morning, we were off to Kwandwe Private Game Reserve North of Grahamstown in absolute torrential rain. We drove through the town on the way there – carefully skirting monstrous potholes as well as a plethora of goats and donkeys – and the Everest handled the conditions with aplomb.
We entered the reserve and had a couple of kilometres of mud and slush – again, no problem whatsoever – before dropping the vehicle at the Heatherton Towers reception prior to climbing onto a game-viewing vehicle for the drive to our lodge. “Wow,” said our guide Courtney Steyn of the Everest. “What a beast!” “No,” my lady friend sweetly corrected him: “A King of Beasts.”
Text & Images: © Jim Freeman / Ford South Africa
