In the Rough

Northern Cape

In the

No, you won’t be picking up any sparklers plenty of treasures and a safari trail with Cape, South Africa’s biggest but perhaps

rough

on the Diamond Route, but it does offer a difference – taking in the arid Northern most overlooked province

text and photography

R

Ann and Steve Toon

attling shutters wake us both at the same time, the sound followed by creaking down the corridor – are those footsteps? We sit up, groping for a light switch. Within seconds everything’s eerily quiet again. It was just the wind under the worn latches and the settling of ancient floorboards… Still, a ghost tiptoeing somewhere about this spooky, old place would hardly be surprising.

Our wood and iron abode for the night is Cecil Rhodes’ former bush lodge, better known as the ‘Shooting Box’ (shipped in kit form from England in the late 1800s). A national monument, the place groans with period features, shadowy corners, rusty antiques and dusty hunting trophies. It has the prettiest of wraparound verandahs, the drawing room is splendid and the dining room, with its 18-seater table, stately. It’s a time warp, this place, a genuine museum piece – one can almost hear the clink of crystal from guests enjoying a weekend escape circa early 1900s, far from the madding crowds of frontier town Kimberley, about 50km to the east.

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Northern Cape

S t inge r s a nd w e av e r s

By anyone’s reckoning this is not the sort of accommodation one would expect to find on a trip into the bush. But then, this is not your average safari. Cecil’s pad, tucked away on Rooipoort Game Reserve, is one of many surprises on a little-known route – a chain of hidden-gem nature destinations and cultural pearls linked by an unexpected common denominator: diamonds. More specifically, the interests of the De Beers mining company and the Oppenheimer diamond dynasty.

A few years ago, De Beers created the route to open up previously ‘closed’ conservation areas, on land initially acquired for mining, to tourism and ecological research. It’s finally being marketed more widely, but it still feels like we’re being let in on a secret – getting a sneak peek into the family jewel box. There are now ten diverse Diamond Route destinations across South Africa; most recently, Orapa Makgadikgadi Game Reserve, on the edge of the salt pans in Botswana, has been added to the list, with plans to open up a second location in that country. Although the route is not necessarily designed to be done in one go, it’s quite possible to string a few of the destinations together and make a road trip of it.

We start the route in Kimberley, which seems fitting given that South Africa’s first diamonds were discovered here. De Beers’ Dronfield Nature

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Reserve, just 10km from the CBD, makes for a convenient base, allowing us to combine gentle game drives in the reserve to see rare roan and sable antelope (as well as whitebacked vultures for which the reserve is known) with short hops into town to gawp in wonder at its famous ‘Big Hole’.

Next stop: Rooipoort. Turns out this reserve is one of southern Africa’s oldest conservation areas, dating back to 1893, and has some of the richest rock art sites. More recently, its claim to fame has been supplying game to many of SA’s reserves and ranches, at the same time helping to ensure the survival of once-almost-extinct plains game such as black wildebeest and red hartebeest. Early in the day we clock up these and gemsbok, warthog, kudu and giraffe on a short game drive, before a tranquil afternoon spent at Bushman Fountains waterhole – a magnet for the reserve’s varied wildlife.

Originally marketed as a birding route, the Diamond Route lays claim to some 500 different species across its full length. We don’t class ourselves as twitchers, but we’re lucky enough to add two ‘specials’ to our life-list – the long-tailed pipit and the Kimberley pipit (the latter was only identified as a separate species in the past ten years or so). It’s all thanks to Lucas Namanyane, an enthusiastic and sharp-eyed De Beers bird guide, who takes us out on the company’s Benfontein farm, near Kimberley,

Conservation and research are a big feature on most of the Diamond Route’s reserves. At Tswalu we bump into Jonathan Leeming, a scorpion expert and self-styled ‘King of Sting’, on a mission to convince guests at the lodge that scorpions are not as nasty as their bad PR suggests. He travels with a backpack of small plastic lunchboxes containing the scorpions he’s found while out hunting the previous night.

This magic bag of tricks also contains a turkey baster for blowing sand off specimens he wants to photograph, the world’s longest tweezers for handling them, and a tuning fork for calling up spiders. When we accompany Leeming one night on a scorpion hunt in the dunes, they look like fluorescent ‘disco’ insects under the UV torchlight.

We also run into Dominic Cram, who is part of a long-running research project being carried out at Tswalu looking at white-browed sparrow-weavers. Cram and his fellow researchers wear high-vis vests in the bush on occasion, just like a road-maintenance crew. The theory is this helps the birds they’re studying distinguish between the times the researchers are actively disturbing the nests and when they’re not. The project is looking at co-operative breeding among the birds, where, unusually, a breeding pair is assisted by helpers.

Cram shows us a 12-day-old chick and tiny eggs in a nest that look exactly like mini chocolate eggs.

r o o i p o o rt h a s b e e n h e l p i ng t o e nsu r e t h e s u rv i va l o f o nc e - a l m o s t- e x t i nc t pla in s g a m e s u c h a s b l a c k w i l d e b e e s t a nd r e d h a rt eb Ees t clockwise from opposite page

Historic Dronfield Nature Reserve is still dotted with traces of wagon wheels; the African yellow-legged (or robust burrowing) scorpion; Cecil John Rhodes died before he could make use of his hunting retreat, The Shooting Box, at Rooipoort; the mighty sable antelope spotted at Dronfield; the remnants of the Piratiny, a Brazilian cargo ship that ran aground in 1943, looms out of the fog on the Diamond Coast (also pictured on previous spread)

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Northern Cape

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Meerkats survey the arid Kalahari plains at Tswalu – they only come out of their burrows when the sun’s high in the sky; the divers huts at Noup are still decorated with former residents’ knick-knacks and bleached flotsam; the perfectly named Sunset Boulevard at Noup

to look for endemic species. The flat grassland and salt-pan terrain is dotted with large herds of black wildebeest and blesbok.

Our next stop is Tswalu Game Reserve and its 100,000 hectares of unspoilt wilderness, easily the most polished gem in the collection (and the Oppenheimer family’s private bolt-hole). Red dunes and golden grasslands, home to sable, gemsbok, springbok, eland, cheetahs and black-maned desert lions, stretch as far as the eye can see – what better way to ‘get’ the Kalahari’s vast beauty? On our first game drive we enjoy sundowners at a dam in the company of a black rhino and her calf. We also catch up with a group of meerkats busy getting ready for bed, hyperactively digging and rearranging sand around their burrow. It’s a highlight of our visit, although the sunset picnic in the red dunes the next evening is also up there.

Our journey ends all too soon on the foggy Namaqualand coast. Its once-booming mining towns, rusting shipwrecks, seal colonies and alien-looking desert-adapted plants are a replica of Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, but in miniature. Bleak, but breathtakingly photogenic, the rugged shore and crashing waves are in complete contrast to the dreamlike Kalahari landscapes and sleepy Northern Cape dorps we’ve travelled through to get here.

We stay in a stone hut, one of several custom-built at Noup by the prospectors who came to this forbidding coast, risking their lives diving up to 30 metres in the ocean for diamonds beyond De Beers’ heavily guarded mining operations. De Beers recently sold their mining business here, but this accommodation – a captivating bohemia by the sea – while no longer on the official Diamond Route, is a good base for exploring this wild coast. De Beers have shifted their Diamond Route signage to the developing Namaqualand National Park, where there are big ambitions for conserving the area’s important, if wind-scoured, ecology.

A makeshift wooden sign in front of the divers’ huts reads ‘Sunset Boulevard’. It will soon be time to leave. Sitting on our homemade driftwood deckchairs with a beer at dusk, we gaze out to sea thinking about the pioneering spirit of the diamond rush days. They’re long gone now, of course, but at least the Diamond Route is re-cutting some of the nation’s cultural and ecological gems; polishing and resetting a few treasures for future generations to enjoy.

get going DESTINATION: northern cape For more info on the route and to book accommodation, visit diamondroute.com. Noup Divers Huts, noup.co.za.

Kimberley is 480km south-west of Johannesburg.

British Airways flies to Jo’burg from multiple destinations in southern Africa. Visit ba.com.

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s i tti n g o n o u r h o me ma d e d r i f tw o o d d e c k c h a i r s at d u s k , we g a z e o u t t o s e a th i n k i n g a b o u t th e p i o n e e r i ng s p i r i t o f th e d i a mo n d r u s h d ay s

Mo r e ge ms on t he R o u t e Brenthurst Garden In Parktown, Johannesburg, one of the SA’s top gardens, 70 per cent indigenous and filled with birds and creatures. The first trees were planted here in 1890.

Venetia Limpopo Ancient baobabs, mopane trees, 400 bird species and herds of elephant, this game reserve also has fantastic rock art. 80km from Musina in the far north and close to Mapungubwe World Heritage Site.

the big hole experience Kimberley’s most famous tourist attraction; the story of diamond mining in SA, with period buildings and an underground tour.

Ezemvelo Nature Reserve Grassland, gorges, valleys, red cliffs, game and spring flowers. North-east of Jo’burg. orapa makgadikgadi Known especially for its bird species, desert lions and reintroduced white rhino.