An on-road journey through South Africa’s Great Karoo
‘Silence is golden’, as the saying goes. Everyone says it, but few ever get the chance to experience it — the immediacy of being found in the here and the now, with nothing other than simply what is.
If you’ve ever found yourself longing for the elusive stuff of silence, you’ll find it soon enough, along the N1 in South Africa — the national route that snakes its way over the hillocks and hinterlands of the Great Karoo.
Whoever penned the classic metaphor, the ‘freedom of the open road’, was probably inspired by the N1. It stretches on; for kilometre after kilometre, inescapably straight with hardly a bend to remind you that you are indeed heading somewhere. Wherever that ‘somewhere’ is, soon becomes less of a concern, more of a mirage, a mere perfunctory detail.
What strikes you first is the vastness of it all. Thankfully, the open car window provides a welcomed lens through which to gaze upon the expanse without fear of being engulfed by it.
Stretches of arid earth are dotted everywhere by low, scrubby bushes and shrubs, interrupted by wild-spouting grasslands that stretch onwards to a renegade horizon and then seem to tumble off the ends of the earth. Along the way, you’re greeted by the stark ruggedness of a koppie (hill), emerging like a sentinel against the flatness of the plains as it gently reminds you whose territory you’re in.
Wherever that ‘Somewhere’ is, soon becomes less of a concern, more of a mirage, a mere perfunctory detail.
Onwards the road ahead stretches until everything starts to look the same, save for the odd windmill, spinning slowly into the caverns of perpetuity. Looming large above the shrubs, are towering quiver trees whose lean, hollowed-out branches served as trusty sheaths for the swift arrows of the indigenous San.
There’s something liminal about being on the road through the Karoo — a feeling of being somewhere and yet nowhere at all. Perhaps it’s the sound of silence, the gritty grunt of tyres on the tarmac spitting through the odd mound of gravel amongst the concave call of the endless landscape, beckoning you closer, and onwards evermore.
Perhaps the canopy is to blame, the halcyon splendour that weighs down on the horizon like a blanketed fringe, scooping you up in its warm embrace. There’s sunlight. And then there’s sunlight in the Karoo.
Every few kilometres, signboards dare a diversion. Laingsburg, one of the Great Karoo’s Gateways, is a cornucopia of nature’s yields, a heartland of agricultural abundance, thriving at the confluence of the mighty Buffels River and its tributaries, the Wilgehout and the Baviaans.
Prince Albert, an ode to the Cape’s colonial heritage, with its pristinely-preserved gables and weathered water mill stands resolute on the threshold of the Swartberg foothills. Beaufort West, the Capital of the Karoo — a town in a timewarp will lull you to the philosophies of Olive Schreiner, placing your feet firmly on South African soil.
If by chance, your wheels should take you further along the now-abandoned loop of the old N1 highway you’ll find yourself in Nelspoort, with its crumbling old railway station, the wail of a long-forgotten steam engine echoing into oblivion. A town whose tales are painted liberally along its rocky outcrops which once danced in the firelight to the hypnotic rhythms of the San’s ancestral songs.
Here, the sky is numinous. The breeze, only slight. And up above the obsidian void of the night sky frames the scene, shrinking you to a dot on an endless expanse of glittering bulbs. There are no city lights to dull the diamond-esque sparkle of the stars. It is clear. It is beautiful.
The silence is a constant. And day or night, it is always golden. If indeed — as one writer said — “the Karoo is where you go to hear God think,” then the silence here is His hymn.
Header image: @redcharlie
