This vast and barren wilderness stretches from the west coast north to the Namibian and Botswana borders and east to the Free State and North-West provinces. The southwest features spectacular carpets of wild flowers in early spring, while the south is part of the Great Karoo and the north intrudes into the Kalahari Desert.
In 1866, a boy found a shiny ‘pebble’ at Hopetown, 128km (80 miles) south of Kimberley, allowing a primitive and sparsely populated settlement to become the diamond capital of the world. Kimberley is not one of the world’s most exciting places, but it does have enough attractions to warrant a stop, chief amongst them the Big Hole, which is the largest manmade excavation in the world, and the Kimberley Mine Museum, with its replicas of 19th-century Kimberley at the height of the gold rush. The De Beers Hall Museum houses a display of cut and uncut diamonds; here can be seen the famous ‘616’ – at 616 carats, the largest uncut diamond in the world – and the ‘Eureka’ diamond, the first to be discovered in South Africa. Other interesting museums include the William Humphreys Art Gallery (fine art), Duggan-Cronin Gallery (photography) and McGregor Museum (a fine old mansion, with Kimberley’s history displayed).
Near Kimberley is the Vaalbos National Park, a small reserve containing the extremely rare Black Rhino, and the Bultfontein Mine, offering guided tours of a working diamond mine. For those with a military bent, Magersfontein lies to the south of Kimberley, site of a catastrophic defeat inflicted on the British by the Boers early in the Boer War.
Northwest of Kimberley, Kuruman was a missionary center used by Robert Moffat and David Livingstone. It has a gushing spring known as the ‘Eye of God’ and is near the Wonderwerk Cave, an archaeological site of great importance where some of the earliest evidence of the use of fire has been found.
Uppington is a pleasant town on the banks of the Orange River, on the way to the Augrabies National Park, centered on a series of dramatic waterfalls plummeting 56m (184ft) into a narrow ravine carved through the desert. The park is home to many interesting species of desert plants while local animals include baboons, vervet monkeys, rhino and antelope.
Further to the north is the vast Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, which is one of Africa’s first ‘peace parks’, administered jointly by South Africa and Botswana. It is the largest nature conservation area in southern Africa and one of the largest unspoilt ecosystems in the world, supporting fauna and flora in bewildering variety. To the west, Namaqualand is a vast area of seemingly barren semi-desert, harboring a treasure-house of floral beauty, appearing after sufficient winter rains: daisies, aloes, lilies, perennial herbs and many other flower species. The flowers are best seen from July to September, depending on when the rains fall. Calvinia and Niewoudtville are good locations for flowers.
In the far north, on the Namibian border, is the remote and rocky Richtersveld National Park, accessible only by 4-wheel drive, with an extraordinary lunar landscape and wide variety of rare desert plants. |
