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Then again, it has been my experience that unorthodox expeditions usually deliver unexpected delights. But I digress.

The journey began with a full tank and the throaty roar of a V6 engine, heading west on the N2 out of East London.

My brief from the editor was vague - go and explore the military roads constructed by Andrew Geddes Bain in the mid-19th century. Research revealed these were the Queen's Road from Grahamstown, the Katberg Pass and the Pluto's Vale route to a dot on the map called Breakfast Vlei. A 1:50000 map suggested there was a lot of other exploring a person in a Colt Rodeo 4x4 could do in the area.

At Fort Hare I turned north off the highway and committed myself to a route determined a little by Bain but mostly by wherever the loneliest roads led me.

From the grassy valley of the old Ciskei, the Amatolas loomed ahead as forested green domes. The Hogsback Pass swept up into their ramparts, became a dirt road and then narrowed into a single-track tunnel through indigenous forest.

Hogsback hangs on the lip of the Amatola Escarpment. The village is elusive, tucked away behind trees and often shrouded in mist. But start exploring and you'll find walks, waterfalls, potters, artists, an eco-shrine, a tiny stone chapel and a Swiss nurseryman who bottles formidable alcoholic liqueurs with names like Hoglit Boglits.

Some towns have a speed limit; Hogsback has a dust limit - if you see dust in your rear-view mirror, you're driving too fast. So warned a sign in the Hogsback Inn.

The quaint inn dates back to the 1850s and seemed a friendly stop for the night. The pub was filled with locals and presided over by the haughty 'owner'. Simon, a slightly moth-eaten (actually peahen pecked) white cat has been at the hotel for 17 years - and he vacates his favourite bar stool for no-one.

Oxtail soup, chicken pie and a stream outside my window completed a perfect country inn experience.

One way out of Hogsback is Michel's Pass. 'Not recommended for caravans', warned a sign - or ordinary cars, I'd say, after negotiating the dongas and exposed boulders. The view was faultless. From the enclosing foliage of Hogsback, the pass emerged onto a grassy plateau, then dropped into a valley of tree euphorbias and abandoned farms.

Perched like a tightrope walker atop an acacia, a secretary bird balanced with wings splayed, as though inviting the rain which was threatening. The rain soon obliged and, as I headed up the Kat River Valley, the first drops splattered on the windscreen.

It was fast becoming a day for log fires when the autumn-cloaked driveway of the Katberg Hotel appeared as a welcome escape from muddy potholes.

The Kat Leisure Group has ploughed R3-million into upgrading this old Protea Hotel and has created a superb family destination. But right then, neither the golf course nor the swimming pool held any attraction. The Mountain Spa - another new addition at the hotel - was an entirely different matter.

Swaddled in fluffy white towels, I surrendered completely to tweaking, pummelling fingers as therapist Carol Leff soothed the jolts of a thousand washboard bumps from my body. Outside thunder and lightning raged. Inside, rhythmic drumming music and the scent of citrus oil put me to sleep. I hadn't expected to find Heaven under the Katberg. From the hotel, the Katberg Pass takes off up the mountain named after its once-prolific caracal population. Hemmed in by wattle and pines, which afford only occasional views of the valley below, you're largely unaware of the steep rise - until the summit where the Winterberg wrinkles out into eternity.

With a construction crew of 3000 convicts, Bain began work on the pass in 1860 - and it's little changed today. His original stone and yellowwood bridge still does duty near a picnic pull-in. Higher up, several switchbacks are supported by dry-stone walls, a construction method Bain turned into an art form. Sadly, he died in 1864, shortly before the completion of this, probably his most challenging project.

At the summit, the Devil's Bellows were living up to their name - funnelling the keen valley wind into a hurricane. From these aptly-named spurs the road rides the watershed all the way to Whittlesea, but instead I followed the rusty, bullet-holed sign which pointed to Post Retief. Which is where I found that cheesecake. Carl Kritzinger is a vet turning organic farmer. Waylands, his magnificent 18th-century farmstead - and now a national heritage site - was built by his great grandfather and has been in the family ever since.

A path redolent of lavender led to the kitchen. Here, among iron implements of a bygone culinary age, the scent of freshly chopped herbs fought a lingering smell of baking.

"Come on in," invited Carl, extending a hospitality to travellers that's reigned at Waylands for several centuries. The painter Thomas Baines enjoyed a similar welcome about 150 years earlier.

"I've just baked a cheesecake. Coffee?" Carl offered. The cheesecake alone was worth the drive up Katberg, but Carl's historical knowledge of the area was equally welcome. Talk turned to the Post Retief barrack ruins.

"The military post was built by Piet Retief on his farm in 1836 to protect the Winterberg farmers from marauding Xhosa," Carl filled me in. "The money he got for building the fort enabled him to join the Great Trek 10 years later."

The sandstone fort, which stands beside the road, is now crumbling and overgrown by thistle. After Retief's departure it was abandoned, but re-used in the Eighth Frontier War of 1850. Carl and several other locals have formed a trust to restore the national monument before it's too late.

A peaceful farm below the fort seemed the obvious place to find Retief's old farmhouse. "In fact his house was on my neighbour's farm," said Fairview farmer Richard Bennett, coming out to greet me. "The house is gone now, but there is a plaque showing where it stood."

Unlike Carl, Richard's no baker, but his hospitably was equally generous. Over tea he described his latest venture - growing blueberries for export. And doing nicely too.

First cheesecake, now blueberries. What next high in the Winterberg? How about giraffe?

Mpofu Game Reserve straddles the good dirt road which descends through farmland and spectacular valley-bushveld. Mpofu offers plains game and overnight accommodation in restored Settler houses. But I wasn't ready to stop just yet.

Gradually the Winterberg and Katberg shrunk to runty hills in the wide mirrors of the Colt as I headed south to tar for the first time in two days. Between 1779 and 1878, the Eastern Cape Frontier was ravaged by nine wars between white colonists and Xhosa chiefdoms. Old forts adorn the landscape almost as prolifically as prickly pear trees. Over time, several became derelict while Fort Hare became a university, Fort Fordyce became a nature reserve, Fort Brown became a police station and Fort Beaufort grew into a town.

The task of linking the various military outposts by road fell to the robust and adventure-loving Andrew Geddes Bain and his Royal Engineers. Despite his absence of formal training as an engineer, Bain was a natural road builder. Blasting rock, cutting roads and examining soils on a daily basis eventually led him to geology - and a passionate search for fossils.

He made his most remarkable fossil find at Blinkwater which is, today, an ignominious railway siding and smattering of turquoise mud dwellings. His journals describe events in 1844:

"Leaving Fort Beaufort we enter the gorge of the Kat River Settlement . . . and turning to the left in a northerly direction, we reach the new road to the Great Winterberg, passing though a beautiful spot called the Blinkwater. Here it was I perceived on the scarp of a steep hill, a bone protruding from the rock. With the aid of three men, I excavated to discover the Blinkwater Monster."

Bain's reptilian find with its "56 fluted and serrated teeth" caused a stir at the London Geological Society. It was one of the earliest vertebrates to walk upright.

Bain's first military commission was cutting a troop highway from Grahamstown to Fort Beaufort. Named the Queen's Road, in honour of Queen Victoria (who was crowned in the year work started), it was the first major South African highway to be properly constructed.

The R67 follows Bain's original route through the woven scrub of the Fish River Valley. Stone route markers, still annotated in Roman numerals, must have indicated to marching regiments the distance to Fort Beaufort or Grahamstown. Bain's stone bridge over the Fish River is no longer used but is still intact. And the Ecca Pass outside Grahamstown was his handiwork. At the top of the pass, a monument commemorates his several contributions.

From near Bain's monument a dirt road winds invitingly eastward through wooded hills dotted with flowering aloes. This is the Pluto's Vale road which was Bain's last military commission. After this he was dismissed from the army with barely a handshake. But, fortunately for him, there were civil projects afoot in the Cape in need of an out-of-work road builder of Bain's calibre.

During his years in the Eastern Cape, Andrew Bain had been a busy man. Between building roads he assembled a vast fossil collection which included the previously unknown Dicynodon bainii. It earned him world recognition as a geologist and elevated him into the kind of society circles where eminent scientists rubbed shoulders with the Prince of Wales.

He also found time to compile the first geological map of South Africa and fathered seven daughters and three sons (his second son, Thomas, became South Africa's most prolific road builder). Not bad for a man whose only formal training was as a saddler. The Pluto's Vale road from Ecca Heights snakes inef- ficiently round and over hills of dense valley bushveld, before dropping into the Great Fish River Valley. It's a lonely route where a kudu was a more likely companion than a car.

The road meets the Fish at a community of prosperous farms called Committees Drift. Its police station was once a military fortification. An ornate iron bridge smacked of Bain's handiwork (although a date in the ironwork, 1877, made it post-Bain by 13 years). I waited my turn behind two cows and their minder who stood no taller than the Colt's window.

Ahead, an elderly man was walking to only he knew where. My heart ached to give him a lift; my head told me a woman alone can't pick up strangers. I slowed to diminish the dust and cursed a world in which a kind deed for a fellow human can have dire consequences.

Further, the road enters a hillscape of tribal dwellings in bright, traditional colours. Breakfast Vlei was a dilapidated hotel turned spaza shop which offered little clue to the origins of its name. After a brief scout around, neither breakfast nor a vlei materialised.

Peddie - another fort turned town - was a bustle of Friday-afternoon commerce. Here ended my five-day, back-road ramble as I joined a wide ribbon of black tar which whisked me with boring efficiency to East London.

I shifted the Colt into fifth gear and slipped my brain into neutral. On the R72 there'd be no stops to admire dry-stone walls or swoon over cheesecake baked in the oven of an 18th-century farmstead.

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