Here are some highlights of Karoo Keepsakes…

A TOUCH OF SCOT

Graeme Wedgwood, a small Scotsman with a big presence, was a London stockbroker on October 19, 1987 – Black Monday, to be precise. It was the most dramatic one-day percentage decline in stock market history and was described by some as a “black swan day”. That means it was rare, had a large impact and was hard to predict. And on that “day of black swans”, Graeme Wedgwood said Sod this for a lark, marched out of the London Bourse and went across the road to buy a silver goose. Well, it was actually a three-legged silver salt pot in the shape of a goose…

BOY FROM BETHULIE

One of South Africa’s most beloved actors and story tellers, the late Patrick Mynhardt, was a true son of the open plains. He grew up in the southern Free State town of Bethulie, deep in the Grassy Karoo.

Shortly before his death in London on October 25, 2007, Patrick Mynhardt performed a marathon combination of Boy From Bethulieplatteland audience in Richmond for more than four hours was nothing less than vintage Mynhardt… and selections from his portrayals of Oom Schalk Lourens, the legendary narrator in much of Herman Charles Bosman’s satirical work. For an old trouper of 75 to stand up in front of - and enthrall - a

DESERT OASIS

If you’re in the mood to buy a bit of sex or eat a plate of flattened meerkat, you might be tempted to stop over at this little spot outside Barrydale on Route 62 in the Little Karoo. After all, the sign says Ronnie’s Sex Shop and there’s a Roadkill Café on the premises.

But be warned. This is a place for genial conversation, a quick dip in a plunge pool on a stifling hot afternoon, a cold beer at the Sex Shop and excellent carrot cake at the Roadkill Café.

Ronnie’s story has become the stuff of recent Karoo legend…

LEKKERSING

Ask Koos Stoffel why his village is called Lekkersing and he’ll want to break into instant song, full of the soft raindrop clicks of the Nama tongue.

“But maybe it was named after the bubbling stream that used to sing past this place in the old days,” he’ll say. Koos Stoffel is one of the grootmense (grownups) in this little Richtersveld settlement.

“To be a Grootmens around here you have to be more than 70 years old,” he says. “People younger than that may be responsible with things like money and cars, but you know, they just don’t have the thing. The wisdom of the years.”

THE EGG MAN

Carlos Da Souza Garcez makes a deep impression way before you even meet him.

Firstly, most of the people you speak to in Aberdeen will happily bubble over with Egg Man stories. Then you stand outside his house and visually drink in the colour combinations of dark blues, cheddar yellows and the roof painted white.

Inside, the aroma of woody incense comes wafting through. Buddhas grin down from shelves, Fado music streams in from the sitting room and there are books, books and more books. This man has fashioned a wonderfully creative Karoo life for himself – and you can see this everywhere in his inner space.

A MAD RUSH

Imagine waking up in the slumbering little Karoo town of Beaufort West in 1849. All is still except for a distant rumbling that grows louder and louder until suddenly, in a crescendo of hooves and dust, the first few thousand springbok enter the town.

All day long they trudge through, and soon the streets echo with gunfire as the townsfolk shoot at this plague of gazelles from their stoeps.

The migrating springbok, the front row spread out over many kilometers, are an unstoppable force, glazed-eyed and zombie-like. They consume vegetation like locusts and trample all before them – sheep, fences, wagons and even oxen.

DONKEYS IN STRIPED PYJAMAS

In 1903, an unlikely wildlife photograph was published, showing a rather blasé baboon seated on the rump of a crestfallen mountain zebra in the town of Port Elizabeth.

Those were the days when zebras were something of a fashion accessory, even in London where some wags tried to span them in as fancy carriage horses. But a zebra has a mind of his own. Ask the zookeepers of this world, many of whom bear his bite marks.

THOSE LOVELY SPOTTED BEASTS

Ask a Bonsmara farmer to talk about a Nguni cow and he’ll have a calf.

Cattle farmers are generally very breed-loyal, and your regular Bonsmara or Tuli man will scoff at the notion of keeping Ngunis.

“They’re light-weight show ponies,” is the common consensus.

But cross the Beef Divide to the other side and you’ll see how awfully attached a Nguni farmer can become to his spotted cows – and vice versa. In the late afternoons, the soft sunlight plays on their many patterns as they graze out on the veld. Those hides – which make great throw-mats - are worth up to R6 000 apiece…

KAROO SOCK PUPPETS

As you drive sedately through the Karoo on a sunny day, don’t be surprised to find a large and rather obsessed bird keeping pace beside you. That’s Struthio camelus, the ostrich, probably male, with tell-tale pink legs and an eye for the ladies in season.

This guy was once the golden bird of the Karoo, and his best feathers fetched fortunes on the world market as everyone with an eye for fashion just had to wear those showy plumes...

KARRETJIE PEOPLE

They call it “Die lewe op die Lang Plaas” – life on the Long Farm. What they’re talking about is that narrow strip of land between a farmer’s fence and the road – the verge.

That’s where you’ll often find the Karretjie People of the Karoo. They’re a fast-dying breed of nomadic folk of Khoi and San blood, and for decades they used to go from farm to farm shearing sheep and goats in season.

BEDROCK BOYS

They call her Port Jolly. She has a rebel nature. She’s the place to go if you’re in need of a party, an exotic sea-tale or simply to blow off steam in the company of true frontier people.

Port Nolloth’s diving community of South Africa’s north-west coast has always been a gem in the rough. For four days every month men dressed like Jules Verne’s old bell divers fling themselves down to the bottom of the sea. Then they manhandle a suction pipe along the ocean bed in the hope of exposing some of those world-famous, beautifully-smoothed little Orange River diamonds that have been so long in the making…

SHEARING SEASON 

The old Karoo shearing shed has the feel of a cathedral. Built in stone and corrugated iron, letting in natural light from above so the men can see to cut, and to class.

The sounds – unforgettable. The shed is filled with the metallic clipping of the fast-moving blades, the murmur of the shearers and the constant bawling of the sheep or goats.

The beasts sink into a hypnotized chicken trance, sitting immobile on their backsides as the wool comes off nearly in one piece like a skinned pelt…

MIRACLE ON MARKET STREET

Sandra Antrobus of Cradock is dedicated to the past. Hardly a day goes by where she’s not haggling for a discarded item of Victoriana for one of her 30-odd guest houses and cottages on Market Street. And every time you book into a Tuishuis, it’s a different experience.

“We will always remain what we are”, she says in her letter of welcome to guests, “an old street in a small Karoo town with country folk only too happy to serve you, our special guest. So please relax and enjoy your stay with us, because we will enjoy meeting you…”

FIESTA TIME!

The South African festival circuit sweeps through the Karoo from autumn through to spring every year, on a merry wave of Asian toy-junk, Rastafarian smoking paraphernalia, soggy pizza slices, antique tractors and all styles of Afrikaans music. Soap opera stars, ageing entertainers, hard-travelling clowns and lounge crooners come flocking to the towns of the Karoo come festival time...

THE LITTLEST CHURCH

By 2008, the Apostelkerkie (Reformed Apostolic Church) in Durban Street, Cradock, had become an Italian restaurant, a very welcome addition to the limited night life of this river town. But back in February 2002, one of the elders of the Apostelkerkie, 58-year-old Freddie Isaacs, lay waiting to die.

His coffin had been purchased, a grave had been dug at the local cemetery and thousands of rands had been spent to rent the town hall for a mass funeral. More than 500 people from all over South Africa had gathered to bury him.

There was one slight snag, however…

MADE OF MATS

In the summertime, the women of the Richtersveld go down to their local riversides to collect sedge reeds, the basic building material for a form of traditional architecture that goes back thousands of years.

The reeds are dried in the sun, cut to length and tightly woven into mats. About three dozen mats are used as walls, dropped in winter for warmth, furled in summer to let in all available breezes. This is the matjieshuis (mat house) or, in Nama terms, the /iharu oms.

A STEAMY AFFAIR

In days gone by, when De Aar was a “full-steam-ahead” kind of town, the locomotive drivers would yank their whistles late at night as they approached the Karoo settlement. Each driver would have his own signature tune, and his family living in the town would know it well. They would set out the supper dishes the minute that whistle went off.

To the general public of De Aar, the particular lilt of a loco whistle would indicate the way the Karoo wind was blowing that night – and what kind of weather they could expect the next day...

STONE BONES

About 250 million years ago, the Karoo was a vast inland basin, a lush Okavango of unimaginable size.

But the creatures waddling around through the pristine Triassic Park waterways, giant ferns, and bizarre insects were not nearly so lovely.

Take the gorgonopsian, for example. Even the most flattering artist’s impression shows a stubby beast with ungainly posture and fearsome long eye teeth. It resembles the scary love-child of a Nile crocodile and a Staffordshire terrier.

THE DOCTOR IS IN THE BAR

Doc se Hok is a farm shed bar on a spread outside Steytlerville that celebrates the life of the late rugby genius, Dr Danie Craven.

The bust of Dr Craven reposes on the counter as a constant reminder to drinkers inside to pass the ball with dignity and speed...

 
RIDING THE WIND

Ask any long-time trans-Karoo trucker what his favourite road fantasy is and – if he’s a red-blooded sort – it will have something to do with a hot day, two lusty ladies swimming in a farm dam and a windpump whirring lazily overhead.

You think lamb chops, Victorian houses, craggy mountain ridges, dirt roads and donkey carts – and there’s always a snaggy-toothed old windpump holding the landscape together…

THE QUIET HEART

The Karoo, scientists say, is one of the most silent places on Earth.

With the right equipment in the right place, you can actually record the faint sounds of the atmosphere scratching against the planet here.

The space and stillness of the Karoo either unnerves or enthrals. This peaceful semi-desert with its pared down elements, clean air, bright stars and timeless space is the spiritual heart of the country.

STANDING FLAMES

In mid-winter, when the Karoo bossies fade to grey and the dry grass stands stiff and blonde, there is nothing that enlivens the horizons more than bitter aloes in full crimson flower.

Hectares of these Aloe feroxes stand like still flames across the hillsides, birds fussing over their nectar, bees carrying away their red pollen.

It’s at this time that those fleshy leaves, all lined with vicious thorns and plump with healing gel, lose their bitterness.

These fierce survivors of the eastern Karoo and coast have been used as centuries as part of a medicinal arsenal…

THE WINDING ROAD

Grainy old stock pictures of Thomas Bain show a tall man with a spade-like, grey beard and a flinty expression in his eye.

By the 1880s, he was famous, a genius road engineer known as the “Man with Theodolite Eyes”. By then, he had built sixteen of the country’s most challenging mountain passes. He had learnt from a man he would eventually surpass – his father Andrew Geddes Bain, who was a brilliant road builder, palaeontologist, geologist and explorer.

STARRY NIGHTS

The first thing strangers notice most nights in the Karoo is the sheer sparkling quality of starlight. The Milky Way arches above you like a spray of diamonds on velvet.

This elaborately sequined sky-ceiling is thanks to two things. One is that the Karoo is fairly high up (with Sutherland being near the tip-top), so the atmosphere is thinner.

Second, you’re far away from the bright lights that light up the sky for in a two hundred kilometer radius around a city like an ongoing apocalypse.

CATHEDRAL OF THE MOUNTAINS

High up in the Sneeuberg mountains overlooking Graaff-Reinet is a strange and wondrous rock formation called the Valley of Desolation.

Tourists and townsfolk used to walk to the arid valley back in the early 1900s. Tired and dusty once they arrived, they named it the Valley of Desolation. However, the more sedentary modern visitor prefers to drive up into the mountains, stop at one of the viewsites and admire the Valley of Desolation from above.