Places to stay South Africa - Eastern Cape

Eastern Cape - Mid-Karoo Route

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Author Eve Palmer’s words best describe the Great Karoo, its people and this Mid-Karoo route:

"Few people have the good fortune to be born in a desert. I was. All my life I have been conscious of my luck. Not, indeed, that we of the Karoo often think of our land as desert. It is the travellers who have crossed our plateau for two hundred years, and our visitors of today, who have called it this - and still do.

They are right - or almost so! And like other deserts and semi-deserts of the world, ours is a country of life. We have only to walk or ride into the veld to know this and be caught up in its pattern: the squat, fat, angled plants; the hunting spiders that flicker between them; the ground squirrels upright beside their burrows; the vultures; the pale wild gladioli; the cobras; the scorpions; the mantis coloured like a flower; the black beetles rolling balls of dung; the koringkrieks lurching on immense and crooked legs. Here moves a steenbok, a duiker, a springbuck, a lark clapping its wings above us; here are the tracks of an ant-bear in the soil; red dust and a mottled egg upon it; arrowheads; the smell of rain, karoo bush, wild asparagus, mountains and hills floating in a mirage of water, a white hot sky, the sound of cicadas and wings and wind.

This home of my childhood lies towards the southern tip of Africa, on the eastern fringe of a vast plateau, the Great Karoo. It is in the heart of the plains with mountains rising steeply to the north, and like a far blue rim to the east and west."

(Extract from “The Plains of Camdeboo”, The Classic book of the Karoo by Eve Palmer).

The Mid-Karoo route includes the towns of Noupoort, Middelburg, Rosmead, Steynsburg and Nieu-Bethesda, with Middelburg at its centre, including all attractions and potential points of interest along the way. This area once bustled with train tracks and roads, grew quieter over the years, and today the abandoned highways and tracks only remain as a reminder of a forgone era of wealth, where its central position and transport were its economic driver. As the tracks and roads grew quieter and later bypassed these towns, nature started claiming back the land, leaving behind a historically rich and magnificent landscape.

The route is surrounded by dramatic mountains in the ‘heart’ of the great Karoo and falls in the Nama Karoo Biome. This region is recognized for its herbal plant life, growing naturally in the fields, an exceptional variety of scarce birdlife, the Teebus and Koffiebus koppies and the Orange River Tunnel Outlet from the Orange River Water Scheme. It is also one of the few, and best, places in the world where fossils are found, as well as Rock Art in caves from the first known human inhabitants, the San Bushmen.

The Mid-Karoo Route is home to open spaces, Karoo sunsets, star gazing, fresh air, snow-capped mountains and the Owl House of the late Helen Martins, with her figurative sculptures silently facing east.

The Nama Karoo Biome

The Nama Karoo Biome occurs on the central plateau of the western half of South Africa, at altitudes between 500 and 2000m, with most of the biome failing between 1000 and 1400m. It is the second-largest biome in the region.

The geology underlying the biome is varied, as the distribution of this biome is determined primarily by rainfall. The rain falls in summer, and varies between 100 and 520 mm per year. This also determines the predominant soil type - over 80% of the area is covered by a lime-rich, weakly developed soil over rock. Although less than 5% of rain reaches the rivers, the high erodibility of soils poses a major problem where overgrazing occurs.

The dominant vegetation is a grassy, dwarf shrubland. Grasses tend to be more common in depressions and on sandy soils, and less abundant on clayey soils. Grazing rapidly increases the relative abundance of shrubs. Most of the grasses are of the C4 type and, like the shrubs, are deciduous in response to rainfall events.

The amount and nature of the fuel load is insufficient to carry fires and fires are rare within the biome. The large historical herds of Springbok and other game no longer exist. Like the many bird species in the area - mainly larks - the game was probably nomadic between patches of rainfall events within the biome. The Brown Locust and Karoo Caterpillar exhibit eruptions under similarly favourable, local rainfall events, and attract large numbers of bird and mammal predators.

Less than 1% of the biome is conserved in formal areas. The Prickly Pear Opuntia aurantiaca and Mesquite Prosopis glandulosa are the major alien invader species. Urbanization and agriculture are minimal, and irrigation is confined to the Orange River valley and some pans. Most of the land is used for grazing, by sheep (for mutton, wool and pelts) and goats, which can be commensurate with conservation. However, under conditions of overgrazing, many indigenous species may proliferate, including Threethorn Rhigozum trichotomum, Bitterbos Chrysocoma ciliata and Sweet Thorn Acacia karoo, and many grasses and other palatable species may be lost. There are very few rare or Red Data Book plant species in the Nama Karoo Biome.

Most of the research into the dynamics of the biome has been done in the east of the region, with the Grootfontein Agricultural Station at Middelburg featuring prominently.

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