It was supposed to be straightforward: Drive north from Cape Town for a few hours until, voilà, I’m engulfed by a rainbow of flowers. That’s what I envisioned when an acquaintance urged me to witness the blooming spring landscape of the Western and Northern Cape: “Never-ending carpets of wild flowers,” he promised.
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Winter begins in June in the Southern Hemisphere, and July showers bring August flowers to South Africa’s West Coast and Namaqualand. “Spring flowering in the Namaqualand area is one of the wonders of the natural world, akin to cherry trees in Japan and fall colors in parts of the U.S.,” said John Manning, a special botanist at the South African National Biodiversity Institute. He wrote a book on the topic, Field Guide to Fynbos, which is wielded like Scripture by botany devotees on annual pilgrimages. Pollination begins in the far northern reaches, near Namibia, then sweeps southward. “A reproductive orgy, that’s what we’re looking at,” he said. “It’s a very concentrated mass flowering in a four-to-six-week highlight period.”
In that slim window in August and September, otherwise arid landscapes are briefly saturated in Technicolor before ebbing back to beige. But even so, the best-laid itinerary is at the mercy of the weather. “At least it stopped raining,” said my husband, Rashaad, peering out the window last August. Moments later, while we were pulling out of our sodden Cape Town driveway, showers began anew. They graduated to driving sheets as we took the N7 out of town. Angry clouds smoldered around Table Mountain.
The drive north along the Cape-Namibia Route traverses emerald hills and thick forests, industrial plants and orange orchards. Rains came and went, sometimes persisting through sunshine.
We pulled into Clanwilliam, a dusty town in the Cederberg Mountains with a small main drag featuring a neo-Gothic church. The Cederbergs are the world’s sole producer of Rooibos tea, so we stopped to defrost at Nancy’s Tearoom. Across the street was a tourist office set in an early-19th-century theater. I popped in and emerged with maps and leaflets — and to some brilliant sunshine.
But the sun-showers resumed as we drove up to Bushmans Kloof, an elegant, colonial-style spread of white thatched-roof cottages. A patch of saffron-colored Namaqua daisies greeted us at the gates, an improbably vivid bouquet against an endless expanse of green and gray. After a lavish afternoon tea, we went on a flower safari through the 18,500-acre reserve. “The flowers are everywhere, but that doesn’t mean they’ll open for you to see them,” said David Smith, a ranger. The raindrops abated but the weather remained crisp, keeping blossoms in hibernation. Still, Smith did the best he could, pointing out lachenelias, pelargonium magenta and sugarbush. We rubbed spiny Rooibos leaves between our fingers. Looking closely I noticed the veldt was dotted with thousands of tiny yellow and purple buds, giving me a taste of what might be — weather willing.
Over a dinner, we hatched a plan for the next day: The forecasts promised sun and clear skies, so we would head northeast to the Biedouw Valley. That evening I thawed out, warmed by both an electric blanket and my optimism.
“There are 137 rock-art sites in Bushmans Kloof alone, making this the largest open-air gallery in the world,” Smith told us the next morning. The sun was not yet high enough for the flowers to wake up — peak time is after noon since, Smith reminded me, they need photosynthesis, a word I thought I would never hear again post-grade school. So we drove instead to see prehistoric rock art drawn by the San and Khoi people 2,000 to 11,000 years ago. Fascinating indeed, if I were on a quest for ancient finger painting. But I wasn’t.
The sun continued its ascent as we left Bushmans Kloof; the road we had driven the afternoon before was now flecked with gold and violet. The blooms had been there all along, shriveled, mocking me — but now the sun was out, and so were they. We turned right at the gates and soon asphalt gave way to dirt and gravel. An endless brown ribbon was carved into the mountains ahead.
After we cleared one more hill, I noticed a splotch of orange. Then another. Then another. The valley was shrouded in fireworks. I waded knee deep through the patchwork quilt of yellow, orange, pink and red blanketing the peaks and curves. The sun was at its zenith and the blooms unfurled their petals in full salute.
Our next stop was back in Clanwilliam, at the tiny Ramskop Nature Reserve. Dirt paths meander through 350 labeled species of flora, from botterblom to hyacinths. If you lack the will (or the vehicle suspension) to venture farther north, this is a pleasant, albeit manicured, alternative.
On Monday morning, the sun beckoned, stirring the flowers, and us, out of our slumber. It was an easy half-hour to Langebaan, where the West Coast National Park’s Postberg Flower Reserve, a peninsula jutting into the bay, is open during August and September. It’s a long, green drive through the park to Postberg, on a road where ostrich families have the right of way and a pair of tortoises locked in combat may instigate a traffic jam.
“Doesn’t it look like snow?” Rashaad asked. The fields we were approaching seemed dusted in frost: gleaming white flowers cascaded for miles, seeping into the ocean on the horizon.
Soon enough, we would be cruising toward Cape Town, Table Mountain looming in the distance. But for now, we faced the sun and basked, just like the daisies.
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Article source: http://www.tampabay.com/features/on-an-african-safari-chasing-wildflowers/2177290