Day 81: Kimberley to Calvinia

We left Kimberley Club around 9 am. Today’s journey took us 7 hours, including a lunch stop. The road was long and straight, very straight.

The mornings drive hosted lots of beautiful African acacia trees. There was the occasional sociable weavers nest hanging from telephone poles like a giant thatch roof. We were plagued by a number of ‘stop and go’s’ due to roadworks. One particularly long stop, it turned out was due to a donkey cart coming in the opposite direction - only in Africa.

We passed through Strydenburg, we are not retiring here, on our way to Britstown, where we had lunch, rather nice venison pies at the Old Mill Coffee Shop. A really quaint little restaurant in a town that probably most people have not heard of. It sits in the Great Karoo area of the Northern Cape and is Merino sheep farming area. It’s hard to believe anything can survive in this environment. In spite of the desiccated soils and stunted vegetation starved of rain, the road leading from Britstown to Canarvon offers an austere beauty: copper earth, short golden grass, grey-green bushes and the odd ashy-barked shepherds tree, triumphant survivors of the testing elements.

Then there are the high Karoo hills, some with their tips lopes off, some pinnacles like Basotho huts, some knobbly and bumpy, one might think you are on Mars. After Canarvon, we passed through Williston. Again we will not be retiring to any of these farming dorps. 

We arrived in Calvinia, a regional town in the Northern Cape, named after the French religious reformer Jean Calvin.  (Kirst says the town sounds like an S.T.D.) It was 4 pm and a warm, sunny 22 degrees, when we booked into the Blou Nartjie Guesthouse. The cottage rooms are clean and comfortable. The guesthouse also hosts a fabulous restaurant with great home cooked food housed in an old revamped synagogue.

After checking in, Ga and I went for a walk through the scrub vegetation at the back of the house.  We came across the first of the Namaqualand flowers of the season. This is very early so it was very exciting. Our walk was cut short when we arrived at the fence and the neighbors massive Alsatian took a dislike to us.

We sat outside enjoying the surroundings till the sun set. Then the wind came up and the temperature plummeted. As this is reported to be one of the coldest areas in South Africa, I think we are in for a chilly night.