Simply imagine you are in the Kruger Park

There is a cure for road rage. It is dead simple, requires absolutely no medication, and works like a charm.

I am completely cured, and that is really saying something because if ever the notion of holding the Olympics for road rage caught on, I would not only captain the South African squad, but would bring home buckets of gold medals.

Road rage used to be like a drug; for the life of me, I simply could not resist getting my whimmies in a compete froth merely seeing someone breaking the law on the road, even if it did not vaguely affect me.

My blood used to boil every time I meticulously kept a three-car length following distance – and within minutes, the space was filled by four combi taxis, a brace of delivery vans, two motorcyclists and a 16-wheeler hell-bent on breaking the Cape to Cairo record.

And talking of taxis, I could not stand watching them usurp ownership of the road with such impunity and arrogance.

Although, I must admit to having a certain respect for any driver capable of doing 140km/h in the emergency lane, slap bang through the middle of a police roadblock while chatting to the passengers behind him and steering with a pair of vice-grip pliers attached to the place where the wheel once used to be and at the same time managing to keep an open bucket of petrol balanced in his lap and out of the way of the smouldering cigarette end clenched between his teeth.

I even became mad when I was at a complete standstill because, by heaven, if someone nipped into a parking place I had my eye on – well, that was the stuff of which declarations of war were made.

But, now it is all Mr Calm and Tranquillity in my car because I have seen the light. No longer do I drive around with my mouth full of ground enamel from gritting my teeth. No longer does my colon become all knotted and twisted like a python trying to free itself from a hosepipe. And that little vein that stood throbbing from the centre of my forehead has all but disappeared.

How? Here is the trick.

All I do is imagine that I am in the Kruger Park. You see, last time I was there, it suddenly dawned on me that I was perfectly happy tootling along at a snail’s pace and stopping politely every time some dumb animal wandered onto the road.

I simply stopped, stayed out of their way, and moved on. No anger and certainly no road rage, of course – they were merely stupid animals over whom I was far too superior to get upset.

Let’s face it: one would tend to feel a bit of a nana bellowing at a blesbok that simply happened to wander onto the road in front of one’s car. Not only would one’s children chastise one mercilessly, but busloads of German tourists would point their fingers at one and shout dumkopf!

Now, all I do when driving in the city is simply imagine I am in a game reserve.

Combi taxis are merely rhinos in my world – myopic, ill-tempered, with a fetish for horns and clinging tenaciously to the notion that the best way to get from A to B is a straight line. And turning the irritating habit of stopping whenever and wherever they like into an art form.

Now I simply let them get on with it and ensure I am not in the way.

Buses and big trucks are the elephants of the road. Fascinating, lumbering beasts that do not usually take any notice of me, but which have the habit every now and then of suddenly putting their ears back, trumpeting to beat the band and going completely ballistic for no apparent reason.

In the game reserve, I never get between an elephant and its young. On the road, I do not get between buses or trucks and an Armco barrier for exactly the same reason.

Then, of course, there are the monkeys, baboons, squirrels and hedgehogs, which in my book are the motorbikes and minicars. Mostly cute and innocuous in motoring terms, but which can, on occasion, make one stomp on the brakes and create some full-blown, sphincter-stretching road rage.

My pet hate, though, has always been boy racers who belt about in high-performance cars trying to get as close to your exhaust pipe as possible before flashing their lights in your rearview mirror. Or, overtaking on a blind rise because they so ardently believe that solid white lines on roads are for people with slow cars and small willies.

It is quite natural to make the mistake of thinking of these people as the lions, cheetahs and leopards of motoring because fast and sleek is what it seems to be all about.

Not in my book. These are the snakes and the crocodiles, hyenas and any animals you may wish to think of which feed their own insatiable and base appetites by chomping away at the nethers of anything living or dead that gets in their way. ▲

Chris Moerdyk