Coast to Coast...

South Africa reveals itself not only in its wildlife reserves and mountain passes but in the spaces between - in the conversation at a bar in Langebaan that nobody planned, in a lunch in a valley below the Bainskloof Pass that made the road feel less urgent than the table, in a table at Sedgefield that kept growing through an afternoon until nobody could remember why they had planned to leave.

Coast to Coast... Visiting Old Friends is a road memoir built around the people who make South Africa feel like a country rather than a destination. At every stop on this three-thousand-kilometre journey - from Langebaan on the Atlantic coast to East London on the Indian Ocean - there is someone whose name is already known and whose face is worth driving for.

Angelo in Wellington, who understands that angel hair aglio olio and the Dark Lady of the Labyrinth is a complete philosophy of hospitality. Jürgen and Karen in Sedgefield, where Africa's first Slow Town earned its designation one Saturday market at a time. Jeffrey at The Bell Tavern in Knysna, who has been waiting tables long enough to be considered part of the furniture and who begins talking before you have sat down. Ri-Han at the Rexford Inn, who went out of his way and made sure the beer never ran short.

This is the second book in the South Africa series by Oloi Shorua - following 220 Days and Counting... There Is Always a Reason to Go Back - and the one in which South Africa reveals itself as something more than a wildlife destination. It is a country of people, of roads, of rituals, of old friendships renewed at the next stop on the road east.

The Indian Ocean was doing what it does - arriving with total commitment, spending itself completely on the shore, withdrawing, arriving again.

The next journey was already being planned. It always is.