Bucket list adventures for your next road trip through the Karoo

Formed hundreds of millions of years ago, the Karoo of South Africa is one of the great natural wonders of the world. The huge semi-desert open plains, mostly surrounded by flat-topped hills and mountains in the distance, are South Africa’s soul spaces. – and has also become the permanent home of some of the country’s most creative people, in the form of novelists, outsider artists, crafters, musicians, eccentrics, town champions, beer brewers, chefs, sculptors, internet wizards, funky hoteliers and a new breed of dynamic young farmer

Wide horizons, starry nights, semi-arid vegetation and unique and extreme climate stretches this vast, ancient seabed straddling the midriff of the country, the Karoo (a Bushman word for “dry place”) is the size of Germany.

In the past two centuries, more than 100 towns, villages, settlements and railway sidings, each with its own ambience, have sprung up in the region, but the population has always been sparse, never topping the one-million mark. With so many options, so many activities and so much natural beauty and that warm Karoo hospitality it is difficult to choose, but for this trip, let’s focus on a few Karoo highlights.

VISIT A CACTI AND SUCCULENT NURSERY

In the heart of Graaff Reinet lies a totally unexpected surprise in the form of a nursery, which might just as well be called a garden as you will soon discover as you wander around. Obesa nursery is one of the biggest privately-owned nurseries in the world. It has started in 1970 as something of a hobby and stocks well over 7 000 species of plants.- all in the cacti, succulents, aloe and medicinal plant family. Watch out for the mother-in-law’s cushion (golden barrel cactus), you definitely don’t want to take a seat on those spikey thorns. At the heart of the nursery is a labyrinth that follows the seven chakra colours from the outside in often described as art. The nursery also raises its own 35 000 odd plants every year and stocks well over 2 million.

GAME DRIVE IN CAMDEBOO NATIONAL PARK      

Easy to get to and from Graaff-Reinet, the Camdeboo National Park provides the visitor with insights into the unique landscape and ecosystem of the Karoo, not to mention awesome scenic beauty, particularly at sunset. The unusually stacked dolerite pillars of the Valley of Desolation stand sentry over the valley, as they have for millenia. You can make your way through the park on a self-guided game drive and even though you’re not going to spot a lion, leopard or elephant at Camdeboo (which is a blessing given the hiking trails through the park) the park is fairly small and game is really accessible. You will see most of it on the plains of Nqweba – buffalo, gemsbok, black wildebeest, springbok – so pack your binoculars. A bird hide overlooks the dam and is great for water birds or any one of the 250 bird species recorded in the park                      

HELEN MARTINS OWL HOUSE IN NIEU BETHESDA

The town of Nieu Bethesdarose to fame because of a very eccentric woman called Helen Martins who was an outsider artist. Whenever anything is written about the Art Brut movement, the Owl House of Nieu Bethesda is mentioned. Back in the 1960s, Helen turned her family home and the house she grew up, and eventually passed away, into what would become the outsider art centre of the Karoo, and a great tourist attraction for Nieu Bethesda. With her craftsman-assistant, Koos Malgas, she worked in cement and glass, building an imaginarium that drew from all religions and told many stories – the Three Wise Men, something from Omar Khayyam, in the corner stands an all-seeing owl and there’s a cross-legged Buddha. Playwright Athol Fugard’s play and subsequent film, The Road to Mecca, was based on the life and work of Helen Martins. Today, the Owl House is a museum.

AFRIKABURN

The little African brother of Nevada’s Burning Man is held over a week every autumn on a private farm called Stonehenge, adjacent to the Tankwa Karoo national park. When it began in 2007, barely 1,000 people came – nowadays the attendance cap of 11,700 tickets. It’s the most vibey, peaceful mass collection of celebrating South Africans you’ll find. People go there to be creative and have fun and for a few days, it becomes a temporary city of art, theme camps, costume, music and performance. It reaches a crescendo with the night-burning of various giant artworks but really ends with the Moop (matter out of place) patrol, where hundreds of people pick up every last trace of human detritus, leaving the festival grounds as clean as they found them. Paint your toenails feels the beat of the AfrikaBurn Festival deep in the Tankwa desert as the crowds light up the night with fire, full-volume sounds and a creative passion.

KAROO NIGHTSKY in SUTHERLAND

A visit to the SAAO’s Sutherland facility in the Karoo is something that everyone should aim to do at least once in their lives. It’s got something to do with the little town’s height above sea level, 1 800 metres and the weather – generally cloudless – that makes Sutherland a prime place to stargaze – from here the milky way is very milky. Sutherland, founded in 1857, claims to be the coldest inhabited place in South Africa. After extensive research it was selected as the ideal site for an astronomical observatory - the largest of its four main telescopes has a mirror 1,9m in diameter, weighing 1 600kg! The clarity of the year-round clear atmosphere, semi-arid setting, and absence of light and other pollution make this the ideal place for scientific observations of the stellar system.

Whether you visit in the summer, when heat mirages shimmer in the distance and blend the earth and the sky together, or in the winter when temperatures plummet (remember to "dress up for the occasion".) and the ground crunches underfoot, you will not be disappointed by the unspoilt splendour of the Karoo.

KAROO FOSSILS

More than 200 million years ago, South Africa formed part of the southern hinterland of Pangaea, the great single supercontinent, which was inhabited by diverse flora and fauna. In only a few places, where conditions were conducive to their fossilisation, can palaeontologists catch a glimpse of these ancient ecosystems? The Karoo is one such place.

Why it’s such a special place?

About 265 million years ago, a group of rocks within the Karoo sequence was beginning to be deposited by rivers draining into a shrinking inland sea. As these rivers filled the basin with sediment they entombed the remains of land animals like tortoises, mammals and dinosaurs that lived around them. Today, more than 30,000 of these fossils can be found in museum collections across the world