Cape Travel Guides - Accommodation, Safaris, Adventure

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Province: Northern Cape
Region: Hantam Karoo

Towns: 
Brandvlei  |  Calvinia  |  Carnarvon  |  Fraserburg  |  Loeriesfontein  |  Niewoudtville  |  Sutherland  |  Van Wyksvlei | Williston


Four hours from Cape Town, the fossilised prints of dinosaurs tread a path across the sun-baked floor of a prehistoric lakebed at Gansfontein. Some 250 million years ago the Hantam Karoo was an inland sea, a great lake fringed by cycads and roamed by mammalian reptiles. Cataclysm and apocalypse visited the area and today it seems that only a moonscape of table mountains, wide open plains, pyramid-shaped koppies, boulders and rugged mountains remains. 

The same, never ending plains also reverberate with the sound of the world's first "modern war", the Anglo Boer War of 1899-1902. Three Republican Commandos, reinforced by the rebels from the Cape Colony, conducted widespread operations throughout the Hantam Karoo. Countless skirmishes took place, with the Calvinia Magisterial district contributing a significant number of fighters to the Republican cause. Fought both conventionally and as a guerilla struggle over the Hantam Karoo's vast expanses, it was a bloody war of attrition wherein both sides used developing technologies to their advantage. 

Today, far from the cities' pollution and glare on a land that is again at rest, the futuristic telescopes of the South African Astronomical Observatory at Sutherland scour the heavens for a clue to our possible futures. This is a land where ancient history, modern technology and the infinite universe join in harmonious concord. Nature reserves abound with game and birdlife, unusual vegetation blankets huge tracts of land, and the magic of spring paints the desert's canvas with a brilliant palette. The mountains, hills and valleys are criss-crossed by biking, hiking and 4x4 trails, the mystique of a unique architecture links today's modern featureless structures to a fading past, home industries thrive, delicious home-baked fare offers gastronomic delight - and much more! 

No matter whether you stay in a historic guest house, a hotel, a corbelled house built by early trekboers, a caravan park or on a farm, the Hantam Karoo's exquisite beauty and the warmhearted hospitality of its people will accompany you home.