One of the best things in travelling is to discover somewhere absolutely wonderful. Mount Camdeboo in the Karoo in the Eastern Cape is one such place. But let me go back a little. The Karoo is the vast and apparently lifeless central region of the old Cape Province, known for merino sheep and endless, rather repetitive landscapes of low scrub and strangely tortured hills.
When we were children living in Cape Town, my brother and I went to live in the Karoo; my mother had lung problems and was advised to try somewhere dry. We moved to the town of Cradock, on the eastern edge of the Karoo, and it certainly was dry. Maybe you absorb a landscape into your being very early on. Anyway I have long believed that I love the Karoo at some deep level, although I have only once been back.
Now the Karoo has a number of new game reserves and guest farms. All the animals that were once present there have been reintroduced, as well as some others which need the constant water game reserves can provide.
These offer the possibility of seeing game in a different context altogether, without travelling to the Kruger National Park or Botswana, and without having to risk malaria or take malaria pills. And Mount Camdeboo is one such place.
Once the private retreat of a Cape Town family, it’s been transformed into a glorious reserve of 14,000 hectares, home to cheetah, rhino, giraffe, buffalo, springbok, kudu and black wildebeest. Immediately I saw an opportunity to reconnect with my roots, real or imagined.
Longing to better inform my wife about my ancestral heritage,
I decide to drive the seven hours from Cape Town to Mount Camdeboo, which is near the delightful town of Graaff-Reinet, founded in the late 18th century and named after a Dutch governor and his wife Reinet.
The journey starts with an interesting ascent from the relatively green fruit and wine producing regions through the Hex River Valley and into the dry Karoo proper. The transformation is total and dramatic. After an hour or two we stop off at the old British Boer War headquarters of Matjiesfontein, with its Lord Milner Hotel, Laird’s Arms Pub and Olive Schreiner’s cottage. Schreiner was the writer of a South African classic, Story of an African Farm, and an early feminist.
As we drive relentlessly onwards, I point out meerkats, windpumps, isolated farmhouses and merinos. After a while I have the sense that we’re watching a film on a loop. My wife, inexplicably, falls asleep even as I am explaining some of the interesting Afrikaans place names to her, the way Cape Colony fractured during the Boer War, and so on. Eventually I am reduced to waving at meerkats for company.
A hundred kilometres from Graaff-Reinet we stop for petrol at a place called Aberdeen. For me this was a trip back into the past: these small towns in the Karoo speak very eloquently about a lost world and Aberdeen appears to have been caught in this timewarp. Not many of the streets are paved, the houses are virtually untouched and a kind of heavy stillness hangs over the place.
