This was taken somewhere along the N1 highway – the section that slices through the semi-arid moonscape of the Klein Karoo like a zipper on a tan jacket. It was the first day of a week-long photographic adventure I had planned months in advance... and I was lost. I'd missed the turnoff to Laingsburg sixty or seventy kilometres back.

Frustrated, but determined not to let it derail my time-sensitive plans, I decided to at least take one photograph before turning the car around. So I loaded the camera, stepped out on to the side of the road, and exposed the first frame of my first roll of film.

I shot hundreds of photographs during that trip, but 10 years hence this is probably my favourite of all of them. In fact, I ended up selecting it as the poster image for my 'Transcendental Wayfaring' exhibition in London later that same year.