Word: karoo
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...deserts. South Africa has three: Namaqualand, the Kalahari and the Karoo. Namaqualand and the Kalahari both extend into neighboring countries, but the vast Karoo - hundreds of miles of dusty plains, barren mountains and rocky canyons stretching across the central hinterland - is South Africa's alone. As a former frontier for European colonists, it is a place thick with history and bloody legend...
...start of any Karoo tour is the south coast. Hire a good car, check the spare tire (roads are good but service stations can be hours apart), and head inland. Once you breach the mountains that line the coastline - the Outeniqua, the Baviaanskloofbeit or the Swartrugreng - you're in the Karoo. Roads run straight to the horizon, the sky is cloudless and the mountains are a sequence of blues and ambers...
...good base is Graaff Reinet, the Karoo's prettiest town and the fourth oldest European town in South Africa; 220 of its buildings are national monuments. To stroll down Parsonage Street or Parliament Street is to walk through another era. The buildings' styles vary from the thatch, whitewash and green shutters of the Cape Dutch to ornate Victorian villas hugged by luminous bougainvillea - even the pharmacy is unchanged since the turn of the last century. Many houses have been converted into hotels. Best is the six-room Andries Stockenstrom Guesthouse on Craddock Street. In her high-ceilinged, 1819 manor house...
Many of the bigger houses are now museums where you can study the Karoo's harsh history: the Great Trek, when the Boers left Cape Town for the interior in 1835-40; wars between Europeans and Africans, particularly Zulus; wars among Europeans (the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902); the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and Boer mythology. Not all the area's troubles are past. There's more than a hint of enduring apartheid in the town's layout: colonial mansions for whites in the center, tin shacks for coloreds and blacks on the outskirts. And there's a lingering...
...also here for the landscapes. Just outside Graaff Reinet is the Karoo at its most awesome: the Valley of Desolation. Formed by millions of years of wind erosion, the valley is a spectacular collection of rock towers and plunging precipes that evoke the Wild West. Though there are few people, it's far from empty. Eagles soar over the cliffs, and in the valleys you can see springboks, buffaloes, tortoises and mountain zebras...