Going home isn’t always easy, even when it’s the place you’ve known for a lifetime – as investigative journalist Anneliese Burgess explained when she travelled to her childhood home for Isuzu’s Ikhaya Lekhaya campaign
“We always had Isuzu bakkies,” investigative journalist Anneliese Burgess recalled as she sat with a pile of family albums on her lap. She’s looking at a photo of her father, who’s leaning casually against the bonnet of a blue Isuzu – a photo snapped sometime in the Eighties, perhaps. “For decades on this farm, we never drove anything else.”
It’s only fitting, then, that Anneliese’s journey to her childhood home forms the second part of Getaway and Isuzu’s Ikhaya Lekhaya campaign – a journey she made in a new 3.0-litre turbo-charged Isuzu D-Max. Hers was a trip to find missing pieces; to search through family albums for the photos that would cement the facts and fill the gaps in a new book she’s working on.
The drive home was a route Anneliese has travelled hundreds of times: from East London via Queenstown and then Dortrecht in the Stormberg mountains to a small out-of-the-way town called Indwe. The road might have been familiar, but what she felt along the way was entirely new. “It’s a very poignant trip for me,” Anneliese admitted the night before she drove to the farm. “My father passed away last week, and so this journey is almost a pilgrimage back home – not only to fill in the gaps for my book, but almost also to say goodbye to my dad.”
Anneliese drove through Indwe, past the trading store opened by her great-grandfather (her roots in this district run deep), and then turned off the tar. As she drove through the farm gate, where the new D-Max ripped up a trail of dust – luminous against a setting sun – Anneliese navigated the bumpy dirt road she’s known a lifetime. “I’m very much a journey person,” Anneliese confessed as the D-Max glided effortlessly through ruts that had formed after the last heavy rains. “I love road trips – I’m happiest when I’m on the road – but when it comes to travelling home, it’s the destination that’s important to me.”
“I think that for most people, ‘home’ is probably complicated – because we do not stay the same,” she mused. “We change; I am no longer the 16-year-old girl who went horse riding on this farm. Families aren’t static, and families are complicated. This farm, for me, is a site of complicated emotion – but at the same time it’s also not that complicated, because it’s home. It wouldn’t really be home if it was just simple and straightforward, and one didn’t have to struggle sometimes to understand how you fit into it all. ‘Home’ is complicated – and that’s a good thing.”
Follow the three journeys in the Isuzu D-Max and Getaway Ikhaya Lekhaya campaign and you stand a chance to win a spectacular five-night holiday for four people to the Indian Ocean paradise of Seychelles. For more details and to enter, please click here. The competition closes at 15h00 on 2 December 2022.
