Jewels of the Karoo

The Great Karoo is a vast and unforgiving landscape which is home to an extraordinary bounty of life. Don Pinnock went prowling its parks in midsummer and ended up fried and fascinated. There’s treasure out there among the mesas.

High overhead a Verreauxs’ eagle cirlces dark wings against the blue – cool in the rising thermals. What is it doing up there in the middle of the sky? I watch through binoculars but never see it swoop. And for good reason – there’s nothing moving down here. With the temperature 43C and climbing, most living things have retreated before the heat. In the Karoo National Park in February, the sun seems closer to the earth.

The Great Karoo is a semi-desert which desiccates to dust when the rains forget to fall, then explodes into sudden fecundity when they do. It’s a region born of ice and fire – underlain by glacial tillite of the early Karoo’s Dwyka period with a roof of dolerite lavas of the Stormberg series – characterised by flat-topped mountains. From a high point you can see these mesas, with their dragon-back dolerite cliffs and shale slopes, marching away, rank after rank, into the lavender-hued distance.

The region was once the domain of the diminutive San hunters who knew where to find perennial springs and stalked plains game such as red hartebeest, springbok and wildebeest. In the hills they hunted duiker, steenbok and feisty zebra. These days, it’s largely a sheepfarming region with ranches so huge you see a homestead only occasionally. Flocks of dozy merinos munch the scrubby but nutritious bush, and alien prickly pears signal their unwelcome presence like lollipop men desperately urging passing Boeings to park.

In several mountain keeps, however, good environmental sense has prevailed, the result being three national parks created to preserve different aspects of this vast biome: the Mountain Zebra near Cradock, the Karoo near Beaufort West and the newly-declared Camdeboo which surrounds Graaff-Reinet.Back from the brink The Mountain Zebra National Park is the oldest of the three, established in 1937 to save a species within a hair’s breath of oblivion. There were a mere six zebras in the park at the time, but a nearby farmer found 11 more and herded them over, probably saving the painted ponies from the fate of the quagga. Today there are more than 1 000 bearing the grand title of Equus zebra zebra and the 400 or so in the park look pretty chuffed about that.

With its domed dolerite hills, riverine thickets and high grass plateau, the park is a moody place with shady, cricket-sung picnic places and vast, purple views. An early visit to the plateau will reward you with bounding springboks, red hartebeests, black wildebeests and families of zebras that actually bark qua-gga! as you pass. The Karoo grasses they munch have suggestive names, such as thimble, finger, wine, cocksfoot, red oat and carrot seed – fine-sounding ungulate cuisine.

Down in the valleys are the more bowerloving types: black rhinos, eland, kudus and buffaloes. By the time you read this, there will also be some cheetahs to keep them all in check. Some 216 bird species have been recorded, including Verrauxs’ eagles, Denham’s bustards and rare blue cranes. If you’re into the unusual, the park also boasts some of the world’s biggest earthworms: up to 1,8 metres long.

Karoo’s new baby
Two hours west of Mountain Zebra is the recently proclaimed Camdeboo National Park which surrounds the town of Graaff-Reinet and the nearby Nqweba Dam. “I’ve got the biggest rest camp of all the national parks in South Africa,” chuckled park manager Peter Burdett. “I don’t need to build a camp, I’ve got the whole town.” And what a beautiful town it is. A bit of prodding elicited a slight confession from him: “Well, there’s a hiking hut in the Winterhoek section, but we haven’t really developed that side of the park yet. You’re welcome to use it.”

It turned out to be a gem: a stout rondavel with water, solar power and a boma lost among the lonely hills. As the sun sank into its purpleblack bed, I lit a fire and popped the cork from a bottle of red. The sparks from my dry wood coaxed out a razzle-dazzle of stars, but by the time I was thinking about the second bottle, most of them had been swallowed by the moon, which edged up into the desert sky and hung there like an ancient, worn coin.

On the other side of the park is the aptly named Valley of Desolation, an area of soaring, jointed pillars eroded out of the surrounding landscape. This is voodoo country, with breathtaking views of dolerite walls dropping up to 120 metres into the Camdeboo Plains. Beyond them are the Sneeuberg Mountains, occasionally blanketed in winter snow.

The mountains hereabouts have some of the richest fossil beds in the world, proof that many mammal-like reptilian creatures once roamed the area. Today there are around 40 species of mammals, including mountain zebra, red hartebeest, gemsbok, Cape buffalo, kudu and springbok.

Most abundant are grey vervet monkeys which love to array themselves over Karoo acacias stuffing their mouths with blossoms. Many had bits of their tails missing. There are a number of theories about this, the most interesting being that they forget to tuck their tails under them in winter, so the ends freeze and drop off.

Mesa country
In the Karoo National Park, further west, plants seem to upstage everything else. Like our early ancestors, plants came from the sea: first sprouting in the inter-tidal zone, then moving into rain-drenched swamps and finally conquering land and spewing gouts of useful oxygen. So, if you think about it, desert plants are furthest from the nurturing ocean waters and the most evolved travellers.

In the park, there are no less than 9 000 species of plants celebrating this evolution even more than in the much-vaunted Western Cape fynbos region. The area reputedly the richest desert flora and the largest variety of succulents in the world.

As the sun appeared at the rim of dawn, the land seemed to brace itself for the tyranny of heat. Vygies and half-buried stony lithops peeped out speculatively from beneath aloes, crassulas, euphorbias, haworthias, hoodias, othonnas and senecios.

On the high plateau above the beautifully built Klipspringer Pass and the rough, 4×4- only Pienaar’s Pass, the grass seemed to shiver beneath the sweet thorn trees (Acacia karoo). Red hartebeests, springboks, gemsboks and eland grazed fervently before heat drove them – and me – into the shade.

By noon clouds began massing, colliding in jags of lightning and thunderous artillery, piling higher and higher towards the summit of the sky in vapourish mountains – eyesearing in the sunlight. Somewhere rain fell, its only evidence being chocolate-brown soup roaring down a barren stream some time later, carrying water and gravel in equal parts.

But the heat was broken, laying the foundation for a spectacular sunset in named and unnamed hues of gold, purple, crimson, green, orange and blue. Remnants of the clouds were whipped into long, sleek, fishlike shapes and the last gasp of the sun sent rays flashing upwards like the arms of a drowning swimmer. On cue, the birdsong began, competing with the chirrup of enthusiastic crickets. In the Karoo in summer, everything loves the cool of the evening.

I tipped back my chair and toasted our choice of planet. Just imagine: we could have got Jupiter or Mars.