Bad neighbourhood on the road to more shame

Two weeks ago Exclusive Books had its warehouse sale.

I went there on a Saturday morning and, buying books by the kilogram, I got ever so slightly carried away. In two hours I blew the kids' inheritance, loaded up the car boot with books and went across the road for a slap-up German-type breakfast, just to calm down a bit.

I then went back to the warehouse and bought more books. I'm now not entirely sure how I'm going to afford the school fees this year but at least I have enough books (mostly non-fiction) to last me until 2016 or so.

One of the books I bought (truth be told, I bought four copies) is The Onion's Our Dumb World. Apart from the title, the book looks like a serious, Dorling Kindersley-type reference work, full of nice typography, maps and illustrations and things, with chapters on most countries of the world.

The Onion is a website that is utterly untrustworthy.

This is because it employs very clever writers to write news reports that are all completely made up - and very funny.

The section on South Africa is headlined "A bad neighbourhood". It says: "The citizens of South Africa fall victim to a serious crime every 17 seconds - a statistic that is impossible to verify as everyone in the country has his or her watch stolen every 12 seconds."

Warming to its theme, the book adds: "Criminals have been advised that it is unsafe to commit crimes on major roads after dark due to the risk of more violent criminals coming along."

This is funny, in a darkly humorous sort of way, but not quite the light in which we want the beloved country to be portrayed.

The fact that we do tend to kill each other all the time does nothing to help our tourism industry, but at least The Onion didn't cotton on to the fact that too many of our "major roads" are themselves death traps, never mind dangerous criminals.

In case you didn't know this, I do roads. I love roads so much that I write articles, even books, about the things. Much as I enjoy poking around museums and old churches, there is nothing I enjoy as much as being on the open road, especially when it is a new road, a new route pregnant with expectation and new sights.

I have seen enough of the world to know that the boast with which we were all brought up - that South Africa is a beautiful country - really is true. The landscapes are magnificent, the natives are friendly and our history is remarkable.

Apart from Cape Town, we are affordable. And we are much closer to Germany than New Zealand. In other words, every corner of our country should be awash with rich foreign tourists.

But we are not awash with rich foreign tourists because they are scared we are going to kill them. And with just the teensy weensiest bit of research, they will find out that many of our roads are not of the standard to which they have become accustomed.

This Sunday the mother newspaper cottoned on to the terrible state into which the blundering Free State had allowed the splendidly scenic R74, from Harrismith to Bergville, to decay.

If I were The Onion's correspondent, I would explain this away by quoting an incredulous senior Free State Roads Department official with a made-up name as saying that, eish, his department was very sorry but had always assumed that the road all belonged to KZN.

It is a terrible indictment on the Free State provincial "government" that tourists wanting to visit the magnificent Amphitheatre have to detour via Ladysmith and even further south.

The northern Drakensberg is home to world-class resorts like the Montusi Mountain Lodge, the wonderful old Cavern and the Alpine Heath resort. But you can't get to them directly from Gauteng because the Free State forgot to maintain its part of what used to be a pretty major route (much like they forgot to pay road-builders Sanyati, who went bust last year).

Recently I've been driving to Zeerust a lot. From Johannesburg I should take the R509 to Swartruggens via Koster, but I can't because I'm scared of the road. And I'm scared of the road because the North West government seems to think Koster is in Gauteng.

Our small towns, and the many small businesses in them, are dying because our provincial roads are going to wrack and ruin.