|
The Great Karoo, to the north is divided from the Little Karoo in the south by a two hundred kilometre barrier, relic of ancient African Himalayas. Almost 150 years ago, Meiringspoort was forged through the massive Swartberg by the legendary road-builder, Andrew Geddes Bain. His son, Thomas, inherited his father's slide rule. Like the windmill, these long-dead visionaries opened the Karoo to the future, and their roads, today, provide portals to the past. The Meiringspoort Pass criss-crosses the river-bed more than twenty times on its thirteen kilometre slalom through the ravine. Sailing above the narrow road and river, the coloured waves of sandstone rise and fall above our heads. Some plant and insect species here are unique only to this area, having had to adapt to such an extent to the tumultuous environment recorded in the zig-zagging strata of the hills Bain's son, Thomas, continued the family tradition with the second passage through these mountains and outdid even his father in the undertaking. The Swartberg Pass remains a feat of daring and engineering well worthy of its declaration as a National Monument in its centenary year of 1988. The twenty-four kilometer pass begins innocuously enough, just outside Prince Albert, but soon the wagon-width road begins to climb upwards in switchback curves and knife-edge corners, past ruined reminders of the long-dead men who carved a road into these forbidding giants. The aloes give way to budding winter proteas and stony buttresses close out the declining afternoon sun. The summit is reached at 1,583m (5,000ft) above sea level - as high as Johannesburg on the highveld plateau. The wind is slicing off distant snow and my fingers are numb with the sunset cold, up here beneath the clouds. Hundred-year-old walls of stone, hold the mountains back. Down we trundle into the evening shadows bound for Oudsthoorn, the ostrich-farming centre of the Klein Karoo. The cliff faces drop dizzily downwards towards a faint pinprick of light; a car approaching from the distant bottom of the pass. It has been cloudy for days now and the air is heavy with the smell of rain. Oudsthoorn is as close as you'll come to a theme park in this part of the world. There's the Flying Ostrich restaurant in town and the huge wire ostrich egg that acts as Information Bureau for the annual Afrikaans Arts Festival held every year in March/April. | 
