Forgotten Towns of the Karoo - a photojournalistic essay

Day 3
18 December 2005 SUNDAY

Sheep. That was the first thing I heard the next morning. But I heard it in stereo. At first I though I was hearing an echo, but then when I lift my head up, I realized we must have put up our tent in the middle of a herd of sheep. I climbed out of my sleeping bag, and as quietly as possible I pulled open the tent zip and tried not to wake Etienne. When I stuck my head out of the tent, I found myself looking at two herds of sheep talking to one another, while our tent was right in the middle of them. They were probably laughing at us, camping on their old dried up water hole! I looked up and saw the sky had a beautiful blue haze and in the horizon beautiful mountains finished off the picture to leave a stunning scene in my mind. I shook my head in amazement and sniggered at myself for having been so afraid the previous night. The sheep continued to bleat to one another. Yes, good morning to you too!

It was still slightly chilly, but the sun was slowly bringing warmth into my cold bones as I was walking around our camp. It wasn’t long before the constant bleating of the sheep woke Etienne. When he looked outside and saw the two herds of sheep on either side chatting to one another, both of us burst out laughing1 Maybe the chough he heard last night was a sheep!

We opened the Jeep and tried to organize a few things, and it wasn’t long before we had organized food and sat down to eat breakfast. We saw a number of airplanes going past leaving white trails in the sky. While we were daydreaming, very faintly but quite definite, we heard a 4x4 in the distance, and it came closer and closer, until all of a sudden a blue 4x4 came speeding past our tent. I just saw red lights through a cloud of dust and it stopped. It slowly reversed and came to a halt right next to our tent. A man stuck his head out of the window and Etienne stood up and walked over to him. He clearly was very surprised to find us where we were. It turned out that he was a farmer, and he told us that we should have driven just one kilometre further and we would have found their farm house. He laughed and said it was the oddest place to set up camp, but was glad we were alright. We told him we obviously had taken the wrong road. Eventually we figured out we had taken a parallel road to the gravel highway we should have taken. He gave us directions to take to Loxton, but also said we were more than welcome to freshen up at their farmhouse. We would be able to find taps and we could ask the workers there if we needed anything. Very friendly and very helpful, the farmer drove of with his wife to go to church in Carnarvon. Etienne and I just started laughing again as the farmer drove away.

After having freshened up, we left our old sheep-dry-waterhole-campsite. We saw the most beautiful Karoo farmhouses on our way. These farmers somehow managed to irrigate their yards and produce the most stunning gardens. During our adventures that previous night, we had never realized how far a detour we had taken, because we had to drive quite far the next morning to climb onto a main tar road which took us to Loxton. Our detour must have been about 50km extra to the initial 56km we were supposed to have taken.

On our way to the main road we stopped again to take another nap under a shady tree. But this time we stayed in the car. I think Etienne didn’t have the energy to chase insect again, I couldn’t blame him.