Here's something you don't see anymore, from John Haycox, a 1955 Diamond Permit.... great stuff...thanks John,
That very official looking green fabricked paperboard ...
I read the posts about the Port Nolloth road.
In our day, you could only go on that road during ordinary office hours.
You had to have your permit with you.
There were two gates, which were the only places you were allowed to stop.
If you stopped anywhere else along that road, the South African Police were with you within minutes.
Why are you stopping here man?
We were not allowed to go into A'bay.
We went to the garages at Beuvalon anf got a CDM bus from there across the bridge, six months later you could visit your car again.
When the bridge was built, our cars were kept in garages on the SWA side of the river.
Although we could go near the garages we were not allowed in unless were had been through the x-ray.
So you still only saw your car every 6 months.
That must have resulted in many flat batteries surely, what a pain. In later years one could go out to one's car virtually once a month and even then I had to remove the airfilter and drop a few drops of petrol into the carburettor of my Chev Impala so that it would fire up fairly quickly at first on 3 cylinders then 5 cylinders and then she would settle down to a smooth idle on all 8 cylinders. Sounded like a Harvard plane starting up.
Leon