South Africa holidays: Desert delights in the Great Karoo

By
Nigel Tisdall

PUBLISHED:

06:32 EST, 11 July 2012

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UPDATED:

06:32 EST, 11 July 2012

This is a most unlikely tourist attraction. In a sunny cemetery on the outskirts of Cradock, 145 miles north of Port Elizabeth in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, there stands a tombstone erected in memory of a man who just happened to be called Harry Potter.

He died in 1910 at the age of 46, oblivious to a future fame that now brings a smile to any Hogwarts fan who passes through this dusty frontier town.

Rocks and hard places: The Great Karoo covers around one third of South Africa in splendidly rugged fashion

Cradock lies at the gateway to the Great Karoo – the vast, elemental semi-desert that covers a third of South Africa. The name comes from the Khoi word for ‘dry’, and it is a soul-soothing world of big skies, parched mountains and empty roads that seem purpose-built for a fly-drive holiday.

The original Harry Potter was most likely a descendant of the 1820s settlers, shipped in from Britain to colonise the land west of the Great Fish River, from where 60 per cent of the world’s mohair is produced.

This rich pioneer history is one reason to visit the oasis-like settlements of the Karoo, where the past is boxed up in absorbing museums and heritage buildings.

In Cradock, the streets are wide enough to turn a huge ox-cart. It was from such towns that the Boers set off on their Great Treks of the late 1830s. The centrepiece is a magnificent Dutch Reformed Church, completed in 1868 and modelled on St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square – the story goes that the Reverend John Taylor commissioned it to console his homesick wife.

The nearby Victoria Manor Hotel, where Harry Potter would have no doubt sunk a beer, dates from the 1840s and is now a delightfully restored Victorian-era hotel with pressed-tin ceilings, antique beds and haddock in hollandaise sauce for breakfast.

Alongside it runs Die Tuishuise, a
run of single-storey wagon-builders’ cottages now converted into cosy
guesthouses with gardens filled with citrus trees. With BB costing
from £90 a night for two, these are a choice spot in which to sit and
read some of the great books the Karoo has inspired.

One of its most famous authors is Olive Schreiner, who wrote the The Story Of An African Farm. The simple house where she lived in the 1860s is now a charming literary museum.

Camera call: This sparse landscape offers majesty and mystery in equal measure

Life was much harder then, a time when kitchen floors were made of dung and the best way to clean your chimney was to drop a fluttering chicken down it.

Today, checking into Ganora, a 4000 hectares farm near Nieu Bethesda, I’m impressed to find white-washed outbuildings that now hold designer bedrooms – £80 a night with breakfast. Dinner is served in a restored barn where my host, Hester, likes to use old LPs as table mats. I plump for a warming glass of South African red and some delicious Karoo lamb served on ‘Vocal Gems from the Mikado’.

Outside, the night sky is filled with stars. My only other companions are 2,500 sheep, a few Dutch tourists, and a perky Jack Russell called Lulu.

She joins me on a walk to see some Bushmen paintings in a nearby river gorge. They are 7,000 years old and in two styles – neatly-edged images patiently drawn by the San using porcupine quill pens, then the more hasty finger daubs of later Khoi artists. Even then, life was speeding up.

For men like JP, who farms Ganora, the true joy of the Karoo is fossil-hunting. Palaeontology might seem a dry old subject, but it isn’t here. Some 253 million years ago, this area was covered with rivers filled with strange beasts – one creature with a fearful grin was christened the ‘smilesaurus’.

The fossils of the Karoo have given us a
complete record of the evolutionary sequence from reptile to mammal. JP
shows me some fine examples in his farm museum, along with a haunting
collection of Stone Age tools. When I pick up a stone hand-axe that was
in use 100,000 years ago it fits my palm perfectly – sparking an
electric shock of time travel that feels like a hotline to my inner
Neanderthal.

Just two centuries ago the Karoo teemed
with wildlife, including herds of migrating springbok so vast they took
days to pass. You can still have enchanting animal encounters here –
most notably in the Mountain Zebra National Park near Cradock, and on
the vast private game reserve of Samara where wild cheetah have been
successfully re-introduced.

Ragged glory: Nigel watched the sun set over the Valley of Desolation at Graaff-Reinet

For me, though, the real draw of the Karoo is its immense, heartlifting landscape.

This is a place, as Cecil Rhodes put it, ‘to be alone with the alone’. Nowhere bears this out better than watching the sun set over the Valley of Desolation at Graaff-Reinet. You can drive right up to the summit of this mini-Grand Canyon and watch our planet turn apricot.

Frankly, you haven’t seen South Africa until you’ve enjoyed a view over the Great Karoo.

Travel Facts

Africa Travel (020 7843 3583, www.africatravel.co.uk ) offers tailor-made holidays to the Great Karoo.

A seven-day package spending two nights in Cradock at Die Tuishuise, three at Ganora, and two in Graaff-Reinet at The Andries Stockenstrom Guesthouse, costs from £1,495 pp including BA flights, car hire and breakfast.

For more information on the Eastern Cape see www.ectourism.co.za.