Kuier a while at the Kalahari Kuierfees

Kalahari Kuierfees

September seems to be a bumper month for the Northern Cape with the Gariep Kunstefees , NWCA NDFT Daisy Marathon (already taken place at the begin­ning of the month), St. Augustine's Cultural Festival (24 September), Apollo Film Festival (25 September) and the Kalahari Kuierfees from 23–25 September 2010.

I had no idea what the Kalahari Kuierfees was all about, so I thought I find out a bit more and let you all know so if you’re in the area you can go and take part in some of the fun.  This is a three day event that takes place in Upington and last year attrac­ted more than 30 000 fest­ival goers ... Continued

The Rooi Granaat in Loxton

Die Rooi Granaat

My brother and I recently spent a Sunday night in the tiny Karoo town of Loxton.  I'd done a bit of read­ing and vaguely remembered that noth­ing was open from Saturday lunch time to Monday morn­ing (thank good­ness we'd stopped in Senekal for lamb chops) but how right I was; abso­lutely noth­ing was open for those 18 hours — it was so quiet that it was actu­ally eerie.

Apart from the beau­ti­ful church there doesn’t appear to be much in this pretty, well kept, neat town (our walk around didn’t present us with a hive of activ­ity!) but there is a gor­geous cof­fee shop called The Rooi Granaat.  I peeked through the win­dow and declared to Gareth that we would be par­tak­ing of a cof­fee here on Monday morn­ing. Continued

The Horse and Mill in Colesberg

The Horse & Mill

The Horse and Mill in Colesberg is a per­fect local pub and prob­ably one of the only pubs in the town. Dinner was served at our accom­mod­a­tion in Colesberg (the fab­ulous Kuilfontein Stable Cottages) on a recent stop in Colesberg, but my brother has driven the Cape Town to Johannesburg route numer­ous times and when doing so has overnighted in Colesberg and is now famil­iar with The Horse and Mill and wanted to intro­duce me to it ...

There is a seper­ate bar and res­taur­ant area (I pre­sume to con­form to smoking laws) and we opted to sit in the bar area where there was a bit more of a coun­try pub vibe.  There were approx­im­ately six tables in the bar area, a few of them under­neath a fairly large mill, flags of vari­ous coun­tries hang from the ceil­ing, the walls are covered in graf­fiti Continued

Sutherland, the coldest town in South Africa?

Sutherland

I spent the first few days of August in the cold­est place in South Africa; Sutherland.  I had arrived pre­pared with my warmest winter wool­ies trans­por­ted from my London days and to be per­fectly hon­est, I was dying to wear my GAP down filled jacket again.  Unluckily for me though, Sutherland did not live up to its repu­ta­tion and instead we walked around in jeans, t-shirts and slops!

We arrived via Loxton and from quite a dis­tance out one can make out the domes of SALT (Southern Africa Large Telescope) for which Sutherland is just as fam­ously known but this Northern Cape town has a few other inter­est­ing points of interest ... Continued

Perlman House Restaurant in Sutherland — a review

Perlman House

I had din­ner at Perlman House Restaurant in Sutherland when I was in the town last week and what a night that was!  A book­ing had been made for star gaz­ing (we were in the star gaz­ing cap­ital of the world after all) but we were hav­ing such a won­der­ful time that we made a unan­im­ous decision to just turn our heads to the heav­ens instead for our own ver­sion of star gazing!

Perlman’s is owned and run by Annie, Vincent and Annie’s mum!  We booked a table and although this is advis­able dur­ing the week­end we were there on a Monday even­ing and there was only one other table booked.  We had a few pre-dinner drinks in the pub — a won­der­fully cosy room where a log fire nor­mally blazes dur­ing the winter but it was unseason­ably warm and a fire was not needed.  The walls are covered in mes­sages and graf­fiti from past punters and trav­el­lers who have vis­ited the cold­est place in South Africa. Continued

Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park

Black-maned lion

Our road trip to see the sights of South Africa didn't get off to a very good start. Our mis­sion state­ment was to see as much of South Africa as we could in the three weeks we had set aside for our pur­pose. We star­ted driv­ing up the east coast of South Africa from Cape Town. After get­ting severely lost on our way to a friend's hol­i­day house in Coffee Bay we though the worst was over. But after a few bliss­ful days rest we were back onto the road with Johannesburg as our des­tin­a­tion and soon hit major car trouble, which had us stay­ing over at a small inland town while wait­ing for repairs.

Not the ideal start to our South African road trip ... Continued

The little town of Victoria West – haven of the Karoo

The Apollo Theatre

I hadn't heard about the little dorp of Victoria West until a friend of mine men­tioned the annual film fest­ival that takes place at the town's Apollo Theatre, and her sub­sequent foray into one of only two res­taur­ants in town (there's now a new pizza joint in town, which looks set to give them a bit of com­pet­i­tion) where they became rather flum­moxed at her request for veget­arian food.

Upon closer inspec­tion it became obvi­ous that a visit was not entirely out of the ques­tion as Victoria West is but a 60 kilo­metre detour off the N1 between Cape Town and Johannesburg, where we were head­ing. The added bonus for the cent­ral Karoo town is that it lies on the N12 between the two major cit­ies, via Kimberley, so traffic is fre­quent and the little pop­u­la­tion of around 11 000 people enjoys numer­ous vis­its from trav­el­lers passing through ... Continued

Hidden smiles on a short left — a treasure of a town called Colesberg

Colesberg

Silently hid­den just off the N1 between Johannesburg and Cape Town lies a little treas­ure, one of those jew­els that has forever been wait­ing for you — and when you at last find it you can­not believe that you over­looked this little piece of magic for so long. Colesberg is such a treasure.

On the road that many oth­ers have traveled before me, I decide to take a left turn in search of some com­pany. After spend­ing so much time alone in a car one some­times needs, and hopes for, that moment that could help you for­get the unend­ing stretches of tar ... Continued

Digging for Dreams in Kimberley — stories from the road by Ruan Smit

Digging for dreams

It’s more than just a really big hole, much big­ger than a cav­ity filled with water in a region that is known for its dry heat. It is a whole that had many dream­ing about a future that could be, a future that happened for many. And the his­tory that was left by a hole that has no known end.

The road that leads to Kimberley, or the one that I choose to take is one filled with the beauty and inspir­a­tion of the Northern Cape, the biggest South African province, the province that allows one to be the self you inspire to be with people who allow you to dream to the edges of your ima­gin­a­tion. Continued

And Douglas smiles ... — stories from the road by Ruan Smit

Douglas smiles ...

When an Afrikaans man in his late forties from the ‘plat­te­land’ starts telling you about some­thing and you can hear his voice quiver ever so slightly, when his eyes almost gets hazy and he has to look away, when he catches him­self using fem­in­ine words and needs to cor­rect him­self as he real­izes. When this man is talk­ing about the town where he lives you real­ize that he truly has a soft spot for that town.

Jakes feels this way about Douglas. A little town I met not too long ago in the Northern Cape near Kimberley. Continued

A River of Life — Stories from the road by Ruan Smit

the road ...

For nearly 500km I look at the end­less Namaqualand and Boesmanland as I slowly move across towards the Orange River and the spec­tac­u­lar Augrabies Waterfall. At points it feels like the land­scape is repeat­ing itself and that I’m stuck in a loop of the same piece of road as noth­ing seems to change. For a moment I think, South Africa changes every 100km or so. How can it pos­sibly be that this part is dif­fer­ent? And as I take a closer look, as I smell the air and feel the dirt run­ning through my fin­gers I real­ize I have not been look­ing, really look­ing ... Continued

Where love grows with flowers — stories from the road by Ruan Smit

Namakwa Flowers

For a while now I’ve been won­der­ing if the land­scape or space we live in has any effect on per­son­al­ity. Obviously it has to... But in Namakwa I found proof. There is a the­ory that the big­ger the pond is, the big­ger the fish will grow. Namakwa is like this. The vast open spaces, the bossies and sin­gu­lar trees of this area that proves its beauty but once a year has surely influ­enced the col­our­ful people that live here.

The per­son­al­it­ies you find here are big, strange even, but most def­in­itely won­der­ful. Every per­son­al­ity is char­ac­ter­ized by the many flowers that find its way up the dry earth between July and September. When you meet them at first like the land­scape you’re not entirely sure what to make of what you see. But give it some time and the area flowers ... Continued

Discovering the Northern Cape

Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park

Despite being South Africa’s largest province, the Northern Cape is its most sparsely pop­u­lated and look­ing at the almost lunar land­scape, char­ac­ter­ised by dry, rocky crags and sand it’s clear that the cli­mate plays a large part in this. This is a harsh, unfor­giv­ing land­scape not given to agri­cul­ture which makes it unique in South Africa. But amongst the arid stark­ness of the Karoo and Kalahari, which make up the major­ity of the province, there are start­ling flashes of life unique to the area. Continued