Angus Begg journeys along the N7, the highway linking South Africa and Namibia, in search of one of the world’s most dramatic natural phenomena
Look,’ says our guide, botanical expert Karin Frehse, barely concealing her enthusiasm. ‘Dimorphotheca!’
It is as if we have just spotted an exotic species of big cat in a game reserve, but the subject of our guide’s enthusiasm is nothing more than a simple daisy. Not just one, though – field after field of them, of all different species, and, adds Frehse, they are endemic to this part of the world.
My education had begun as we travelled towards the Postberg Nature Reserve in South Africa’s Western Cape. Rolling hills flushed with winter rains spread before us, the whole image capped by a herd of eland on a dune-ridge, the Atlantic Ocean behind them.
This journey along the coastal belt from Langebaan – a seaside town an hour north of Cape Town, in whose waters southern right whales take refuge before they head back to the Antarctic – to Springbok, just south of the Namibian border, goes through some of the most bio-diverse land on the planet. Between August and October, it is the site of a blooming resembling an explosion in a paint factory.
Within this large expanse, the Cape Floral Kingdom, the smallest and most diverse of earth’s six floristic kingdoms, meets the arid, rugged and grey gravel of Namaqualand, a rich desert ecoregion known as the Succulent Karoo.
The vast floral display is dependent on the sustained rains of the Western Cape winter – the longer and heavier these are, the more remarkable the show.
All manner of adjectives have been used to describe this natural phenomenon, but as a youngster set on becoming a game ranger – and obsessed with hairy, grunting wildlife – I had always associated flowers with elderly ladies with blue-rinses. Never did I consider the scale and the beauty of the floral kingdom, nor the quirkiness of the people who are involved in it.
Even in an average year, carpets of whites, yellows, blues and oranges surround the road linking Cape Town and Namibia. It is not only the landscape that comes into flower, though; for this brief period it is as if the inhabitants of the area also put themselves on show.
West coast people offer a warm and often eccentric welcome. This holds true all the way from Langebaan to Namibia, in most of the small, odd-sounding settlements – such as Nieuwoudtville – that dot the route in between and seem to comprise little more than a couple of donkeys and a pastor. Hospitality, which in Afrikaans, the most widely spoken language in the region, translates as gasvryheid, is often exhibited in the form of ginger beer or biltong, the South African staple delicacy of cured, dried meat.
An enthusiastic gardener, I nevertheless had much to learn of the world of plants when I set out for the West Coast National Park from Cape Town on an August day, accompanied by two Brazilians and an American. Our guide, Frehse, was a woman of German extraction with an encyclopaedic knowledge of all things floral and geological, and looks so Teutonic that we gave her the affectionate nickname of Brunhilde.
Yes, the fish is fresh… fresh frozen,’ says the waitress, exhibiting both a wide grin and a gap where her two front teeth should have been – the extraction of which is a common practice among Cape Flat people. The restaurant is a small-town cliché, with pan flute pop classics on the stereo and the vegetable side dishes being typically over-sweet pumpkin and creamed spinach, a diet that would follow us all the way to Springbok.
With the bulk of the country’s restaurants in Johannesburg, it is sometimes not easy getting fresh fish to the relatively unpopulated Cape Coast. A little further north in the scrubby town of Velddrif, my American colleague decides she needs to taste local foods and asks if we can stop at a café for fish ’n’ chips. Frehse expresses some irritation; time spent munching chips is time not spent observing the region’s floral explosion. At least the hake tastes fresh. Definitely not ‘fresh frozen’.
Outside Velddrif, with estate agents’ boards advertising secure, gated developments littering the wind-blown beach, Frehse spots something that sets her pulse racing. ‘Ah, yes. Babiana thunbergii,’ she says, falling to her knees in rapture to take a closer view of a red-flowered bulb named after 18th-century Swedish naturalist Carl Thunberg.
The bulbs are scattered over the dune, amid broken glass, tufts of grass and discarded cans. While we had all expressed amazement at the flowers thus far, I fear the babiana did not generate quite the same feelings of awe. What does amaze, however, is the fact that Thunberg – dubbed the father of South African botany – was scrabbling around in the dirt and naming plants, so far from home, well over 200 years ago.
He would have been impressed by our next stop, a roadside stall outside Clanwilliam where we buy some dates and learn of buchu and honey rooibos tea. Rooibos – meaning red bush – is South Africa’s traditional tea, buchu is a feathery, scrub-like plant indigenous to the south-western Cape coast. It was discovered by Khoi and San pastoralists before the Dutch colonists first arrived on Africa’s southern tip and is prescribed by herbalists as a cure for gastro-intestinal ailments.
Clanwilliam is the gateway to the Cederberg mountains. The range comprises 70,000ha of spectacular landscapes and sandstone rock formations that have felt the weather for millennia. This region, with its multitude of San rock art cave-sites, is well off the beaten track.
A couple of hours deeper into the Cederberg is Wuppertal, a village so remote you need a 4×4 to get to it.
Admittedly, the shoe factory has added contemporary sandals to its range of veldskoen – hardy, leather bush shoes – and a non-governmental organisation has helped some local women start-up a boutique for rooibos products called Red Cedar, but generally little has changed since 1830, when the place was founded by German missionaries.
Back down towards the coast, in the little agricultural settlement of Lutzville, in the Knersvlakte region, we come across Hilsa van den Heever, a garrulous, tall and hospitable woman who owns a wine farm, Melkboomsdrift. It is only in recent years that wines from this remote region have been competing with the traditional, internationally known wine regions of Stellenbosch, Paarl and Franschoek – and van den Heever is now known for producing a serious merlot.
Frehse has brought us to the region specifically to see ‘leaf succulents’, and we spend a couple of hours walking the Vetplant (succulent) Trail. This is our introduction to the species in its natural environment, a hot and dry world – where neither a soul nor a structure are in sight – in which plants store water in their leaves.
The town of Garies, further north, in that hot, grey, gravel world of deep Namaqualand, is home to a couple of streets and a few donkeys. At an early 20th-century hotel called Sophia’s Place we meet Ouma (which means Granny) Grietjie, an 80-something widow in a pink bonnet who sings local favourites.
Over dinner with former town clerk Wouter Jordaan and his wife, Sonja, who runs the town information centre, I learn that 30,000 people pass through the centre in just over a month during the flower season. Apart from that, Grietjie is the main attraction in this tiny settlement.
The old copper-mining town of Nababeep, just outside Springbok, offers perhaps the most astonishing visuals in the region. Most of the year this is a grey-brown kind of place, quietly dying on its feet. For two months of the year, however, it is ablaze with astonishing colour.
At the Springbok Café, I get into conversation with the owner, a white-haired, black leather-jacketed character named Japie F Kotze. He has a habit of sitting on a podium with a microphone at hand to bark orders to dawdling waiters. He is clearly a local legend, and his establishment is packed. Today, however, he is in the mood to chat. He is also a fount of knowledge on the region and tells me about the Jewish smouse (travelling merchants) who built the town, and Springbok’s importance as the region’s commercial hub.
Then he tells me of Robey Leibbrandt, a South African boxer who represented his country at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 and later signed up as a paratrooper in the German army. Leibbrandt was recruited as a Nazi spy and was dropped by U-boat off the coast in 1941, detailed to find out about troop and shipping movements and generally stir up trouble. Captured, he was sentenced to death, but released after the war ended to dabble in politics and keep up his habit of causing friction.
Kotze is getting into his stride. Next subject is an official letter he has received from Israel thanking him for tending the graves of the Jewish community.
My colleagues have gone with Frehse to another nature reserve just outside town, but the conversation in the Springbok Café is just as intriguing as the blooms. Sometimes, it seems, the Namaqualand spring is about more than just the world-famous flowers.
How to get there
Both Virgin Atlantic and British Airways fly from London to Cape Town and Johannesburg.
www.virgin-atlantic.com
www.britishairways.com SAA flies from Washington DC to Cape Town and from New York to Johannesburg.
www.flysaa.com
What to see
Flowers bloom all along the N7, the road that runs from Cape Town to Namibia, but check with the tourist office – Cape Town Routes Unlimited (CTRU) – for information on the best spots.
www.capetownroutesunlimited.com
Lambert’s Bay. See the gannets on the edge of the harbour and eat seafood at Muisboskerm open-air restaurant, just off the beach.
www.lambertsbay.co.za
Stretch your legs on the farm outside the hamlet of Nieuwoudtville. This is a place with possibly a wider variety of bulbs than anywhere else on the planet. Enjoy homemade ginger beer and spot the Amsterdam flower-brokers at work.
www.nieuwoudtville.com
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