KLEIN KAROO
GUIDED
DAY TOUR

The best way to experience the Karoo is by travelling its back roads and spending time savouring the vast open spaces, the indigo blue dome of the sky and the distinctive landscapes that merge into the shimmering horizon. Stop your car anywhere in the Karoo, away from the main highways, and you will immediately be assailed by the immense silence and peace of this extraordinary place. In the silence you may notice the movement of a herd of Springbok, the croak of a Korhaan or the ever present merino or dorper sheep with their distinctive black heads.

With the first rains, the seemingly arid soil of the Karoo bursts into abundant life, its hardy succulents complementing the sweet grasses on which the region’s merino and fat-tailed sheep graze. The ever-present wind pumps testify to the countless streams flowing between fissures underlying the dry but fertile soil. Small, isolated but welcoming villages, a distinct Karoo architecture and imposing churches rest in valleys between desolate, flat-topped koppies.

The Karoo has many moods and its landscape can alter dramatically with the shifting seasons. During times of drought the earth becomes almost blackened under the relentless sunshine with the brittle Karoo bushes and plants crackling as you brush against them. Even at its driest there is the promise of rain which brings a renewal of life. There is nothing to match the smell of the earth after the first rains and a myriad shades of green bursting forth from the iron grey soil interspersed with brilliant tiny wild flowers.

The Karoo is a land of rolling mountains, often snow-capped in winter, vast plains that surround where you can almost see the curve of the earth’s surface as they merge with the distant horizon, the distinctively clean-shaped hills or Karoo koppies capped in the hard rock resulting from millions of year’s erosion and dotted here and there, the small towns and villages that service the needs of the scattered communities of the Karoo.

With the setting of the sun a dramatic view of millions of stars is fully revealed in the inky blackness of the Karoo night sky. The great wash of the Milky Way is revealed in all its splendour and the distinctive Southern Cross, Orion’s Belt and Dagger and the menacing shape of Scorpio are strewn across the sky in views to the distant galaxies almost unparalleled anywhere else on earth. Little wonder that the Karoo hosts the largest observatory in the southern hemisphere.