Prince Albert & Around

Isolation has left intact the traditional rural architecture of Prince Albert, an attractive little town 70 km north of Oudtshoorn, across the loops and razorbacks of the Swartberg Pass - one of the most dramatic drives and entries to a town imaginable.



Although firmly in the thirstlands of the South African interior, on the cusp between the Little and Great Karoo, Prince Albert is all the more striking for its perennial spring, whose water trickles down furrows along its streets - a gift that propagates fruit trees and gardens.



The town's essence is in the fleeting impressions that give the flavour of a Karoo dorp like nowhere else: the silver steeple of the Dutch Reformed church puncturing a deep-blue sky, and residents sauntering along or progressing slowly down the main street on squeaky bikes.



Prince Albert is known for its mohair products: rugs, socks, scarves and other garments; check out Karoo Looms at 55 Church Street, which has some funky, bright designs, or, further down Church Street, the more traditional Wolskuur Spinnerst.

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The Groenfontein Valley

A circuitous minor route diverts off the R62, just east of Calitzdorp, and drops into the highly scenic Groenfontein Valley.

The narrow dirt road twists through the Swartberg foothills, past whitewashed Karoo cottages and farms and across brooks, eventually joining the R328 to Oudtshoorn.



Winding through these back roads is also an option to reach Cango Caves and Prince Albert, one of the best drives you'll ever do in South Africa.
Many of the roads are unsealed but are perfectly navigable in an ordinary car if taken slowly.

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Cango Caves, the History (2)

In the 1960s and 1970s, the caves were made accessible to mass consumption when a tourist complex was built, the rock-strewn floor was evened out with concrete, ladders and walkways were installed and the caverns were turned into a kitsch extravaganza with coloured lights, piped music and an indecipherable commentary that drew hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.



Even apartheid put its hefty boot in: under the premiership of Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, the arch-ideologue of racial segregation, a separate non-whites entrance was acked through one wall, resulting in a disastrous through-draught that began dehydrating the caves.

Fortunately, the worst excesses have now ended: concerts are no longer allowed inside the chambers, and the coloured lights have gone.

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Cango Caves, the History (1)

San hunter-gatherers sheltered in the entrance caves for millennia before white settlers arrived, but it's unlikely that they ever made it to the lightless underground chambers.



Jacobus van Zyl, a Karoo farmer, was probably the first person to penetrate beneath the surface, when he slid down on a rope into the darkness in July 1780, armed with a lamp.

Over the next couple of centuries the caves were visited and pillaged by growing numbers of callers, some of whom were photographed cheerfully carting off wagonleads of limestone columns.

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Cango Caves (2)

The caves must be visited on a tour.
The one-hour Standard Tour takes you through the first six chambers, but if you're an adrenaline junkie the ninety-minute Adventure Tour is a must; this takes you into the deepest sections open to the public, where the openings become smaller and smaller.

Squeezing through the tight openings, with names like Lumbago Walk, Devil's Chimney and The Letterbox, is not recommended for the overweight, faint-hearted or claustrophobic, and you should wear clothes you don't mind getting dirty and shoes with a grip to negotiate the slippery floors.



The visitor's complex includes an interpretive centre with quite interesting displays about geology, people and wildlife connected with the caves, and a restaurant.

Below the complex you'll find shady picnic sites at the edhe of a river that cuts its way into the mountains and along which there are hiking trails.

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Cango Caves (1)

The Cango Caves number among South Africa's most popular attractions, drawing a quarter of a million visitors each year to gasp at their fantastic cavernous spaces, dripping rocks and rising columns of calcite.

In the two centuries since they became known to the public, the caves have been seriously battered by human intervention, but they still represents a stunning landscape growing inside the Swartberg foothills.



Don't go expecting a serene and contemplative experience, though; the only way of getting inside the caves is on a guided tour accompanied by a commentary.

Cango is a Khoi word meaning a wet place - accurate enough, given that the caves' awesome formations are the work of water constantly percolating through rock and dissolving limestone on the way.
The solution drips from the roof of the cave and down the walls, depositing calcium carbonate that gradually builds up.
Although the caves are many millions of years old, the calcite formations that you see today are geological youngsters, dating back a mere 100.000 years.

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Oudtshoorn, What to See

C.P. Nel Museum

The C.P. Nel Museum is a good place to start your explorations.
A handsome sandstone building, it was built in 1906 as a boys' school, but now houses an eccentric collection of items relating to ostriches.



Le Roux Town House

A perfectly preserved family town house, and the only way to get a glimpse inside one of the much - vaunted feather palaces.
The beautifully preserved furnishings were all imported from Europe between 1900 and 1920, and there is plenty to stroll around and admire.

Buffelsdrift Game Lodge

Though not hugely traditional for Oudtshoorn, Buffelsdrift Game Lodge offers the opportunity to feed and touch elephants.
Book ahead for a really worthwhile experience where you get to stroke elephants under the guidance of their handlers, and watch them at training and play.
From the Lodge's restaurant on the large dam you are likely to see hippos, and may be lucky to see other animals coming to drink.
It's also possible to stay here.

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Oudtshoorn, the History

Oudtshoorn started out as a small village named in honour of Geesje Ernestina Johanna van Oudtshoorn, wife of the first civil commissioner for George.
By the 1860s ostriches, which live in the wild in Africa, were being raised under the ideal conditions of the Oudtshoorn Valley.



The quirky Victorian fashion for large feathers had turned the ostriches into a source of serious wealth, and by the 1880s hundreds of thousands of kilograms of feathers were being esported.

On the back on this boom, the labourers drew the shortest straw of all - mostly coloured descendants of the Outeniqua and Attaqua Khoikhoi and trekboers, who received derisory wages supplemented by rations of food, wine, spirits and tobacco.

In the early twentieth century, the most successful farmers and traders built themselves feather palaces, ostentatious sandstone Edwardian buildings that have become the defining feature of Oudtshoorn.

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Oudtshoorn

Oudtshoort, 420 km from Cape Town and an arid, mountainous 180 km from Barrydale, styles itself as the ostrich capital of the world; the town's surrounds are indeed crammed with ostrich farms, several of which you can visit, and the local souvenir shops keep busy dreaming up 1001 tacky ways to recycle ostrich parts as comestibles and souvenirs.



The town's main interest visually lies in its Victorian and Edwardian sandstone buildings, some of which are unusually grand ed elegant for a karoo dorp; Oudtshoorn's primary draw is as the base for visiting the nearby Cango Caves.

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Barrydale, Warmwaterberg SPA

Thirty kilometres east of Barrydale is Warmwaterberg SPA, a Karoo farm blessed with natural hot water siphoned into two unchlorinated hot pools and surrounded by lush green lawns and lofty palms.



Primarily aimed at South Africans, it gets rather crowded and noisy during school holidays and over weekends.


Indeed, the best time of day to enjoy the baths is after dark, when the steam rises into the cold, starry Karoo sky.

Accomodation is basic, reasonably priced and all self-catering - in wooden cabins or rooms in the main farmhouse, each of which has an indoor spa bath.

There are also some campsites, a bar and a restaurant serving dinners and breakfasts.

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Sanbona Wildlife Reserve

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Twenty kilometres west of Barrydale, Sanbona
Wildlife Reserve is the 
amalgamation of 21 farms that together create a massive wilderness area.

The landscape is gorgeous  - rocky outcrops, mountains and semi-desert vegetation with luxurious all-inclusive lodges, Dwyka Tented Lodge and Gondwana Family Lodge.

Dwynka is closer to where most of the game is to be found and has the more spectacular setting, while Gondwana is great if you are travelling with kids.


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The price includes two game drives a day, but, owing to the vegetation, the game is far sparser here than in the major game-viewing areas such as the Kruger National Park.

Having said that, it is the only place in the Western Cape with free-roaming lions and cheethas and there's a herd of elephants.


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Sanbona is worth considering only if you are set on seeing some big game and don't have time for Kruger.
A two-night stay is recommended and day visitors are not allowed.


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Montagu Springs Resort

Montagu's main draw is the Montagu Springs Resort; several chlorinated open-air pools of different temperatures and a couple of jacuzzis are spectacularly situated at the foot of cliffs - an effect spoilt by the neon lights of a hotel complex and fast-food restaurant.



It's a fabulous place to take kids, but the weekends become a mass of splashing bodies.

If you want a quiet time, go first thing in the morning or last thing at night.

The temperatures in winter are not hot enough to be entirely comfortable, when you're better off heading to the springs at Caledon or Warmwaterberg, which are much hotter and quieter.

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Montagu for Rock Climbers !

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Montagu is best known by serious rock climbers that come for its cliff faces, which are regarded as among the country's most challenging.

One of South Africa's top climbers runs De Bos Guest Farm, which you could use as a base for climbing.


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You can also explore the mountains on a couple of trails or, easiest of all, on a tractor ride onto one of the peaks.

Montagu is also conveniently positioned for excursions along both the Robertson and Little Karoo wine routes.


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On Saturday mornings, don't miss the local farmer's market at the church, where you can get local olives and olive oil, bread, cheese, almonds and dried fruit from the surrounding farms - all exceptionally well priced.


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Montagu

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As you approach Montagu, soaring mountains rise up in vast arches of twisted strata that display reds and ochres; in spring, the town, known for its fruit growing, is full of peach and apricot blossoms.

Montagu is certainly very pleasing, with sufficient Victorian architecture to create an historic character, and worth a night at least.


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The town was named in 1851 after John Montagu, the visionary British Secretary of the Cape, who realized that the colony would never develop without decent communications and was responsible for commissioning the first mountain passes connecting remote areas to Cape Town.

The grateful farmers of Agter Cogman's Kloof - literally: "behind Cogman's Kloof" - leapt at the chance of a snappier moniker for their village and named it after him.


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McGregor

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McGregor is an attractive place, with thatched, whitewashed cottages glaring in the summer daylight amid the low, rusty steel-wool scrub, vines and olive trees, and a quiet, relaxed atmosphere that has attracted a small population of spiritual seekers and artists.


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It makes a great weekend break from Cape Town, with a couple of good restaurants, plenty of well-priced accomodation, and a beautiful retreat centre with reasonably priced massage.

Spending a day wine tasting around McGregor and Robertson is another drawcard, as long as it's not a Sunday when almost everything is closed.


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McGregor gained modest prosperity in the nineteenth century by becoming a centre of the whipstock industry, supplying wagoners and transport riders with long bamboo sticks for goading oxen.

There aren't too many ox-drawn wagons today, and tourism, though developing, is still quite limited.

A great draw is to walk the Boesmanskloof
Traverse, which starts 14 km from McGregor and crosses to Greyton on the other side of the mountain.

From McGregor you can walk a section of trail, hiking to the main waterfall and back to the trailhead, which is a three- to four - hour round hike of exceeding beauty through the river gorge (kloof in Afrikaans).



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