Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
16 December: Early Sunday morning and Adriaan and I (and our Jeep) were on the road for a a week of off-roading through the rugged mountains of the Karoo. Once we hit the dirt road on our way to the Witteberg Private Nature Reserve I let Adriaan do the driving. It was his first real experience driving longer distances and he thorougly enjoyed it.
Arriving at Witteberg we were besides the owner the only people - somehting I liked but scared Adriaan especially when he heard there is a resident pofadder around the camp site! We camped for two nights, doing the Diep-en-Deur Mountain trail and exploring the surroundings. The Jeep did the tough trail without missing a beat. We had fantastic views of the surrounding mountain ranges from the top of the Witteberg with peaks such as Matroosberg nearly 80kom away clearly visible.
Our next stop was Wagensdrift, a camping site on the banks of the Buffels River under huge shady thorn trees. It was a lovely campsite but with the thermometer hitting 49 Celsius and with thousands of mosquitos attacking us we cut our visit short. We did parts of the River Trail and the entire Zebra Mountain trail which offered some interesting and challenging rocky obstacles through a dry river bed.
We continued our journey and traversed the Seweweekspoort Pass, a lovely dirt road snaking underneath towering red cliffs. Once through the Poort which was also known in the old days as the "Smuggler's Route" we headed for the coast where we camped two nights at Witsand. We enjoyed lovely weather and really enjoyed the cooler sea air after the hot Karoo sun. On our way back to Cape Town we crossed the Breede River at Malgas, where an old manually operated pontoon is in use. We briefly visited Conrad at this holiday house before heading for Kleinmond.
We really had a wonderful four days together experiencing the tremendous variety of the South African landscape. We crossed rivers, trail riding mountains and traversed spectacular mountain ravines. We camped in places where one can touch the solitude and where the silence is only broken by the sound of the wind and the song of birds. We experienced a magical sense of place where our souls were refreshed. It has been a wonderful journey.
- comments