KAROO HIKE
Rise with the sun and tread along the Buffels River to where the Moordenaars Karoo bleeds into the horizon, where time is measured in footfalls and the crank of a weary windmill lulls you to sleep.
“After a while, my footsteps become the backing track to flighty, half-remembered thoughts, and my eyes constantly readjust to the landscape. What once seemed beige and barren is revealed in a myriad of colours.”
Idrop my backpack and it hits the ground with a thud. Having just climbed almost 6 km in a decidedly upwards direction, I’m finally standing on top of Komsberg, looking over the Moordenaars Karoo towards Laingsburg where we began our hike six days ago. I’m not sure who the alleged murderer was that gave this valley its name, but I’m convinced it’s the hill I just climbed… The Buffels River and her tributaries stretch out below, carving deep, dry arteries into the land. In the rare event of rain, which occurs mostly in the summer months, the river will flood. It’s mid-September now and the riverbed lies empty and waiting, much as it was almost 40 years ago on the day of the Laingsburg flood.
My sense of time is warped; the Karoo has an uncanny knack of overwhelming frivolous concerns with the immediate present. My life in Cape Town feels like a lifetime ago, although it was only last week when I locked my front door.
DAY 1/12,5 KM Swimming with the Shosholoza Ladies
I’m on my way to hike the Buffels River/ Moordenaars Karoo trail. Everything I will need over the next six days is packed into a 50 ℓ ammo box – from spare socks and plasters to my down pillow and a bottle of red wine. It is a slackpacking trail after all; 90 km of trekking up the dry bed of the Buffels River to its source on top of a mountain called Komsberg.
After four hours of driving, I turn off the N1 and park outside the Laingsburg Flood Museum. There are about 20 people in hiking gear already gathered in the parking lot – unless Laingsburg residents exclusively wear K-Way, I’m in the right place.
“Many people pass through on the N1 without considering what might lie to the left or the right of the highway,” says Franci Vosloo, the hike co-ordinator and guide. She suggests we spend some time in the museum to gain a better understanding of the flood and how it affected the landscape we’ll be walking through.
It’s a sombre place where ordinary objects like a pocket watch or a kettle recovered from a flooded house gain new meaning in the light of the tragedy. When the floodwater came on 25 January 1981, it swept away people, livestock, cars, furniture and entire houses without
discrimination. More than 100 people died, with bodies washing up as far as 200 km away in Mossel Bay. Most of the flood victims’ bodies were never recovered.
After spending the better part of an hour poring over old newspaper clippings, it’s time to drive our cars to a nearby farm where they will remain for the week.
We load our belongings onto the support vehicle driven by Dave and Sue Uberstein, who have taken on this responsibility as a favour to Franci while on holiday in the Karoo from Knysna. They will meet us at every overnight camp with the support team – all we’ll have to do is pitch our tents. Showers and sawdust toilets will be set up in advance, and food will be prepared. Dave is also the ad-hoc barman, so naturally we curry favour with him from the start.
Our shuttle to the start point is an ancient Mercedes truck driven by farmer Jacques Leftley. We arrive at a farm gate about 17 km outside Laingsburg on the gravel road to Sutherland and begin walking around noon.
The gently inclining jeep track initially cruises past rocky outcrops and shale cliffs, but the deeper we get into the Moordenaars Karoo, the more the landscape opens up.
I fall in step with a schoolteacher called Alma Janse van Rensburg from Cape Town. She’s wearing red lipstick and I like her immediately. “I came to the Karoo to reflect,” she says. “One day of hiking for each decade of my life.”
By the time we enter camp on Bloukrans farm at 4.30 pm, I’ve pieced together a rough idea of who my fellow hikers are. There’s a group of friends who travelled to Laingsburg from Johannesburg aboard the Shosholoza Meyl train, henceforth referred to as the Shosholoza Ladies: They are Sheenagh Levy, Shayleen Peeke, Sandi Husted, Anne Fraser, Janet Kennedy, Heather Barcklay and Fransa Cole. Then there are sisters Maude and Kate Badenhorst, who do a hike together every year to reconnect outside of their busy lives. Hein Groenewald is an intrepid explorer who travels through southern Africa in his Suzuki Jimny; Jaco de Wet loves the stillness of the veld and only speaks if there’s something necessary (or funny) to say; Glandy Visagie teaches maths in Calvinia and knows her plants; Anita de la Porte is the geography teacher of the group; and
Klaus and Magda von Pressentin and Kosie and Christine Smit are all members of the Stellenbosch Hiking Club, where the couples met each other.
It’s hot and relatively early, so I join the Shosholoza Ladies for a swim in the nearby cement dam. The water is mind-numbingly
cold. When I break through the surface, the world feels new again.
DAY 2/19 KM Where time bends
The day breaks crisp and clean. We huddle around the resurrected campfire, drinking strong coffee and enjoying a breakfast of oats, hard-boiled eggs and fruit.
Before we walk down to the dry riverbed, Franci chats to us about the day’s route. Each day she follows a GPS – the destination is fixed, but how we get there is mostly up to us and the lay of the land. The only rule is to always be aware of who’s walking behind you, in case there’s someone missing at the end of the day. We hug a line of cliffs as we make our way north and exit Bloukrans farm. The riverbed alternates between hard and soft sand. Every now and again a bit of boulder-hopping is required to get over the rockier stretches.
“This is good preparation for the Fish River Canyon in Namibia,” Hein comments.
I’m curious to know why Franci started offering this trail.
“My parents bought land in the Moordenaars Karoo 10 years ago,” she says. “Before then, this landscape was foreign to me. It’s unpredictable, ominous even, with the mountains and veld constantly waiting for rain. But when it does rain, and the Buffels runs, it takes your breath away. That’s the magic I wanted to share with hikers.”
She’s right. There is something magical about tracing the path of a river. Only on foot can you feel the presence of water that’s no longer there, and understand the formative power of relentless erosion.
Geologically speaking, the Moordenaars Karoo is part of the so-called “Lower Karoo”. About 310 million years ago, this was the ocean floor. The contours of the towering cliffs tell this story, alternating between sandstone and fossilised mud deposits.
After a while, my footsteps become the backing track to flighty, half-remembered thoughts, and my eyes constantly readjust to the landscape. What once seemed beige and barren is revealed in a myriad of colours. Deep purple shadows form in the cliff’s crags, which shelter Karoo girdled lizards. Scrub robins dart between stalks of paper-dry grass. The mountains are a hazy blue in the distance and the smell of rusty earth rises up on shimmering heatwaves. A baboon call from upriver means it’s time to break for lunch. Franci leads us to a series of overhangs where burnt orange footprints dot the rock slabs – Khoisan paintings. As unassuming as the markings are, they signify
The day passes in a silence that naturally flows into conversation and then retreats again. In the vast expanse of consistent walking, it’s easy to share parts of your life with people you’ve only just met.
a time that only the river can remember. We pass the ruins of an old farmhouse and I wonder who once made a living in this formidable place.
Overhead, a Verreaux’s eagle calls into the vast sky. “I’ve been here the whole time,” it says.
DAY 3/13 KM Life in the vastness
I wake up in the early hours to a barn owl calling. It’s freezing but I can hear tents zipping open, so I dutifully put on more layers and exit my warm cocoon. We pitched our tents in the riverbed last night to shelter from the worst of the wind; now they appear a bright and unlikely sight in the silver light of dawn.
A comforting routine ensues: drink coffee, eat, get dressed, pack up, walk. I feel light, knowing there are no deadlines here; no worries, traffic or commitments.
We walk along a jeep track for about
3 km before cutting back into the river. We sporadically encounter boundary fences between one farm and the next: Sandkraal, Leeuvlei, Middelstevlei, Boonstevlei, Kerksdrif, Spitskop, Kareedoornkraal, Ventersrivier, Welgemoed… Step by step, we cross each of them over the course of the week.
The day passes in a silence that naturally flows into conversation and then retreats again. In the vast expanse of consistent walking, it’s easy to share parts of your life with people you’ve only just met.
The day draws to a close and the smell of a lamb potjie on the fire indicates that camp is close by.
“Nowhere else in life is progress so easily measured as one footstep after the other,” Anne says, summing it up nicely.
DAY 4/14 KM The power of water
We leave camp at 8 am, walking in silence for the first hour. My feet hurt, but I can’t remember when last my body felt so alert.
Every now and then we pass a flock of sheep looking for water in the riverbed. Some wear bells around their necks to help farmers locate the flock over large areas of land. After a lunch of roosterkoek filled with cheese and honey, we follow a sheep path out of the riverbed and walk along a ridge for a kilometre or so. The elevated vantage point gives us a new take on “our” river as she winds her way up the valley. It would be much faster to walk directly to Komsberg as the crow flies, but following the river’s unhurried, rambling bends reminds me that direct routes are seldom the most scenic.
We go back down to the river and walk for half an hour before we spot it: A cage trap against a fence and a young duiker inside, frantically trying to escape. These traps are often set by farmers to capture caracals and jackals, which prey on their lambs. It’s an ecologically fraught practice but sadly commonplace in these parts.
Seeing the animal thrash around feels like a physical blow to the stomach. Hein and Jaco hurry to set it free and it bounds off into the veld, thankfully unharmed.
For most of us, the trap is an unwelcome intruder in the sanctity of our newfound peace, but spirits lift again when we enter Neil Brink’s farm, Spitskop, where we’ll be spending the night. Neil has a fully kitted campsite with hot showers and flush toilets. Oh, what luxury! He comes down from the house to welcome us.
“What’s the story behind that old rusted Nissan we passed back there?” Kosie asks.
“It belonged to a doctor called Le Roux who lived many kilometres away,” Neil answers. “It washed up with the flood.”
“When water comes down a dry riverbed, you can hear the sound of boulders knocking against each other from kilometres away,”
Alma elaborates.
As I lie in my sleeping bag that night, I try to imagine what a river coming to life must sound like, and whether the people of Laingsburg heard it too, all those years ago.
DAY 5/21 KM This is freedom
Today is our longest day on the road, but we’re all in a jovial mood as we set off north towards Komsberg. Our route branches away from the Buffels River and we walk along one of its tributaries. This stream is smaller and still has pools of water in some places. We eat lunch beside one such pool, startling tadpoles when we plunge tender feet into the soothing water. When we start walking again, I hang back and play sweeper for the rest of the day, spotting duiker, steenbok and even a chameleon hesitating across a branch.
About 9 km from tonight’s camp, where we’ll spend the remaining two nights, we climb out of the riverbed and get our first unobstructed view of Komsberg, then we hit a jeep track for what feels like ages. The level surface makes for fast walking; soon the landscape morphs from rocky veld into a hilly landscape filled with shrubs in shades of bruised purple and green.
“It’s more like the Roggeveld here,” says Franci, referring to the shift in vegetation from dwarf and succulent shrubs like vygies and stonecrops, to the more grassy, arid expanse of the high plateau around Sutherland.
Our final campsite is among the ruins of an abandoned farmstead. The nearby dam attracts a few swimmers and soon we’re all sitting around the campfire, beer in hand. If this isn’t freedom, I don’t know what is.
DAY 6/11 KM Karoo high and mighty
Since we’ll be returning later, there’s no packing up this morning. We start the day a little later than usual, enjoying a cooked breakfast of bacon, eggs and tomato.
With full bellies we begin our ascent of Komsberg. Once we’ve spent some time on the summit, we’ll trek back to camp and head our separate ways the next morning.
The Komsberg climb is pretty steep: We’ll be ascending to 1 712 m elevation in the space of 5,5 km. Let’s just say it’s not a gradual incline… After just less than a kilometre, we cross a fence that swoops dramatically into the valley below and marks the border between the Northern and Western Cape. We cross into South Africa’s most sparsely populated province and continue our slog up Besemgoedgat Kloof. (Think Sani Pass for pedestrians…)
Just before rounding the last hairpin that will take us to the plateau, a male kudu with huge, curled horns takes flight. He moves with grace and speed, each leap so precise, it feels as if we’re watching him in slow motion. On any other day, this might have been a regular kudu sighting, but today it’s the Karoo pulling out one last stop to surprise us.
Our six-day hike comes to an end on a nondescript outcrop high on Komsberg. I look below at the eastern corner of the Roggeveld and the western edge of the Moordenaars Karoo, which ripple together in the vastness. Ten kilometres above our heads, jet streams streak across the sky; harbingers of the real world we must all sadly return to tomorrow.
But it’s comforting to know that while the world speeds up, the Karoo remains largely unchanged. In the face of so much swallowed time, only a few things continue to matter: the sounds of a footfall, the hoot of an owl, and boulders rolling against each other when the river comes to life.