Karoo captures your soul Hot, harsh, unforgiving – yet uniquely beguiling -

When I hear people waxing lyrical about their unconditional love for the Karoo, I am sometimes tempted to force them to tell the whole truth… that the Karoo is a beautiful place for a few hours around sunrise in the morning and the same around sunset.

- Brendan Seery

The rest of the day can be a bleak firepit when the harsh glare from the sun accentuates the fact that it is a desert and a seemingly barren place.

We arrive at the SA National Parks’ Karoo National Park outside the Northern Cape town of Beaufort West just before 4pm, expecting that it is going to be hot but still gut-punched by the reality of 42°C under a cloudless sky.

Our one-bedroom chalet has a small patio which feels like an oven and, inside, the only sign I can see of the promised air conditioning is a ceiling fan. Just as I am about to burst a blood vessel about misleading advertising, I realise there is an aircon – and a very good one at that – in the bedroom.

I do tend to be a bit like this… so let me add at this juncture that I did get my wife’s by now familiar rolled eyes.

The heat has barely dropped when we decide to pop out for a drive before sunset. We’ve been here before but treated it as a layover on the way to Cape Town and can recall very little of the place. This time, we’ve added an extra night to take in as much as we can.

The map shows a swimming pool near the park boundary, about 10km away, so we head there. And it is beautiful – sparkling blue and with thick green grass under the shady trees. An oasis, really.

Except…

Except for the ants which swarm everywhere. Apparently, the way to deal with them is not to step on them because then everybody shows up for the funeral and they can get nasty and bite you. No wonder there are no guests lounging on the beautiful grass.