South Africa's Karoo by Campervan

The Karoo earns its name from the Hottentot for 'thirstland'. And so it may seem at first. Two hours north-west of Cape Town, the Great North Road presents the uninitiated with a vast and inhospitable dryness, the sage and khaki monotony relieved infrequently by a solitary farmhouse or windmill. Until, that is, you reach Matjiesfontein.

To leave the highway and venture into this African outback is to travel back in time. Victorian establishments, rescued from the past, line the dusty railway siding. Willowy fronds drip pink peppercorns at the foot of wrought-iron lampposts as the long-empty fountains in the courtyard of the Lord Milner Hotel recall the village's glory days as a Victorian health spa.

James Douglas Logan, a Scottish adventurer, opened his Waterworld resort in November 1889, scant years after the invention of the windmill opened up one of the driest parts of the country. While Matjiesfontein village has met with both rising and falling prosperity over the last century, today it has been resurrected anew as a popular stopping-off point on the long road north. And so we did. Only to find a 4x4 convention there before us.
No contest.

From Beaufort West, four hours down the Cape to Cairo road, we point our modern day ox-wagon east, our destination the historic frontier town of Graaff-Reinet, two hundred kilometres away. Endless vistas of acacia thorn and prickly pear and flat-top mesas ringed in rain, wrap themselves around our windscreen, many metres above the ground. It seems unusually green. For the desert.

The Karoo has not always been dry. Two hundred million years ago, when the southern hemisphere was a super-continent called Gondwana, the Karoo was a low-lying marsh in which dinosaurs and early mammals thrived. Then, the lakes dried up and became deserts and volcanic lava sealed this vast and stony record of time and tide. Today, in the museums and private collections throughout this region, fish scales, millennia old, glint from their ancient rocky graves and the skulls and bones of prehistoric monsters are forever stuck in the sands of drifting time.