Karoo travelling season — wool boom biz, Kalahari car drops and Sandstone steam

The travelling season

It begins, for us, with a Caltex road map we bought at a filling station many moons ago. No gentle female English voice on the smartphone – that’s for city driving. The tattered old Caltex map is scored with notes and squiggles, road trip hieroglyphics from hundreds of adventures.

Alexander Bay needs a visit. Which diamond divers are still around? From there, are we going deep into the Richtersveld or should we scoot down the N7 and do a whole series of side-swipe drives to all our other Karoo “naval bases” like Port Nolloth, McDougall’s Bay, Kleinzee and Hondeklip Bay?

Or do we hold that trip and head down to mohair country instead, stopping at Jansenville, Steytlerville, Willowmore and Aberdeen, with a detour to the Hotel Charles at Klipplaat? Better not. We might get stuck there.

Maybe we should just head west into the setting sun on the R63 and stay at Murraysburg, Victoria West and Calvinia, with a lime milkshake at the Williston Mall along the way?

So we plot and we plan and we phone friends on the routes and decide where to take ourselves. The morning of our departure comes, we’re all packed and ready. We head out of town towards Graaff-Reinet. Dr John is singing in the bakkie and the open road lies before us.

The excitement is palpable. Everything now holds new promise. It’s as if we have never been this way before. It’s all looking fresh and out of the box.

Summer on the road in the Karoo – is there any better place in the world to be?

Wealth on the wire

The wind-swept strands of fibre you see on Karoo fence lines as you pass by were once literally worth their weight in gold.

The famous Wool Boom of the early 1950s brought untold wealth to sheep farmers. Suddenly, they could send their children to university, buy what they wanted, fly overseas on shopping trips and build second homesteads to avoid paying taxes.

Fence wool, the little pieces of fleece left behind after a Merino has had himself a good back rub, now had huge value.

There is a well-known Karoo legend about a farmer who ordered his labourers to pick up his fence wool bits so he could pay off his new Mercedes-Benz with the proceeds – with 200 pounds in change!

The Karoo is full of weird mutton tales. Popular historian Lawrence Green writes about the “sheep with the golden teeth” found in the Vosburg district.

One night long ago, the local dominee sat down with a farmer to feast on what is known as a “smiley” in South African township parlance: a roasted sheep’s head.

As the farmer was about to carve out some choice bits, he noticed the teeth were gold-plated. Hysteria ensued. The meal was abandoned, word spread and soon Vosburg found itself the centre of a new gold rush.

Alas, the gold turned out to be tartar on the teeth of the sheep in question.

Kalahari skyfall

Just imagine a sunny day in the deep Kalahari on, say, a powdery dirt road leading to Noenieput, near the border of South Africa and Namibia.

You’re tootling along in the bakkie listening to Bruce Springsteen, minding your own business and enjoying the pure vastness of the Northern Cape western frontier.

Suddenly a helicopter drones overhead and hovers some distance away. Then a perfectly serviceable old Volkswagen Beetle comes hurtling down from a height of 16,000m and smashes into a dry water pan. The vehicle is now pure scrap metal.

You stop your car, drink from a flask of coffee and wonder if you’ve just lost your mind.

Just then, three camels who answer to the names of Bonty, Venter and Naomi drift up to the fence line and glare down at you through deliciously long eyelashes. Explanations are in order.

The flying car was courtesy of Jeremy Clarkson’s Top Gear television team just being curious to see what an aerodynamic VW Beetle looked like. They then drove a Porsche of a certain age the same distance that the Beetle dropped.

The Beetle landed faster than the Porsche, and Top Gear went home happy.

The lovely beasts on the fence line are the descendants of police camels that patrolled the area from their nearby base of Witdraai, long before heavy-duty helicopters and crazy Brits roamed the Kalahari.

Sandstone steam

On the fringes of the Grassy Karoo, just outside the cherry town of Ficksburg, is one of the quirkiest big-machine collections in the world.

Sandstone Estates is a massive private farming operation, but when it stages the Stars of Sandstone Week, trainspotters from all over come streaming in, complete with anoraks, cameras, binoculars, Wellingtons and wine.

The air throbs with the growl of battle tanks roaring about, swivelling gun turrets and mock-menacing the crowd. Harvards and Tiger Moths from another time swoosh over. Vintage cars putter gently past on country roads.

Like animal ghosts from a history book, a large team of Africander oxen heaves by, pulling a real Karoo pioneer kakebeen wagon.

But the star turns are the steam trains of Sandstone, many of which are veterans of the classic trans-Karoo lines. The old heroes are fired up and sent chugging around the 25km of narrow gauge track, with the magnificent Maluti Mountains in the background.

This is a dream come true for Sandstone’s Wilfred Mole, who has a surprisingly muscular way of vintage machine preservation. He loves the drama of, say, finding an ancient German war train that has ended up in the sugar cane fields of Mozambique. Then acquiring it and assembling a team of locomotive restoration experts to bring it back to gleaming, steaming, whistling life.

It’s a divine madness that will result in a great legacy. DM

For more stories on life in the South African Heartland, get the Karoo Quartet set of books (Karoo Roads I-IV with black and white photographs) for only R960, including taxes and courier costs in South Africa. For more details, contact Julie at julie@karoospace.co.za