14 Bourke Street, Graaff-Reinet, 6280
+27 82 331 9087 · stay@karooview.example
Things to Do
Guests get a hand-drawn map of our favourite Camdeboo walks.
Camdeboo National Park
Camdeboo was proclaimed in 2005 — South Africa’s twenty-second national park — and it very nearly surrounds Graaff-Reinet, running up into the southern foothills of the Sneeuberg. It is about 194 square kilometres, and the gate is a short drive from our front door.
You buy a day permit at the gate. Nadia will tell you what it costs this season and roughly how long to allow, and will phone ahead if you want to be up there for sunrise.
Columns of dolerite standing hundreds of metres over the Karoo plain, with the town laid out below. A surfaced road runs to the viewpoints, so you do not need a 4×4 or a guide — you need the last hour of light.
North of the Nqweba Dam there is a self-drive section with roughly 19 km of gravel. Buffalo, eland, black wildebeest, gemsbok, red hartebeest, blesbok and springbok — no lion, no elephant, and nothing that needs a guide.
Close to 250 species have been recorded in the park — Karoo and eastern birds meeting in one place. The dam takes flamingo some years; pale chanting goshawk, rock kestrel, Namaqua dove and ant-eating chat are the regulars on the plains.
On foot
Guests get a hand-drawn map of our favourite Camdeboo walks — where to park, where the shade is, and which turning the signboard does not mention.
A short circular walk from the Valley of Desolation car park, waymarked with a lizard. Three quarters of an hour at a stroll, and it links the viewpoints. If you only do one thing, do this one at five in the afternoon.
Three route options out of the Spandau Kop section of the park, with rest points at Eerstefontein and Agtersfontein. Take more water than you think and start before eight in summer.
Out of our gate, down Bourke Street and into the old grid. No route to describe, really — just the Cape Dutch fronts, and the church at the top of the main street as the thing to walk toward.
The town
Graaff-Reinet was laid out in 1786, which makes it the fourth-oldest European settlement in the country and the oldest in this province. It has more declared national monuments than any other town in South Africa, and the whole historic core is walkable from our gate.
The Dutch Reformed church stands at the head of the main street and is the building everyone photographs. The congregation dates to 1792; the church you see is the fourth on the site, Gothic Revival, and modelled — so the town will tell you — on Salisbury Cathedral.
A six-gabled Cape Dutch house on Murray Street, built between 1805 and 1812 as the parsonage. In the garden is a vine planted by Reverend Charles Murray in 1870 that still bears. It has been a museum since the 1950s.
South African art in a whitewashed mission church of 1821, beside the Drostdy. Small, cool, and a genuinely good hour on a hot afternoon.
A nursery and garden on Murray Street that has been going since 1970, with thousands of species over about ten hectares and a labyrinth of paths between cacti and euphorbias taller than you are. Odd, and quietly unforgettable.
The old drostdy is now a hotel, and behind it runs a lane of restored labourers’ cottages. Worth walking through even if you are not going in, and the standard stop on anyone’s architecture walk.
Karoo fossils alongside the town’s own history, in the museum group’s building near the Drostdy. Pair it with the fossil centre at Nieu-Bethesda if the deep past turns out to be your thing.
The day trip
The turnoff is 27 km north of here on the N9, and the village is about 55 km by road — tarred until Sam’s Drift, then a short stretch of gravel that any car will manage. Allow an hour each way and most of a day.
The Owl House is the reason people go: the cottage and yard that Helen Martins spent from about 1950 until 1976 filling with crushed-glass interiors and a Camel Yard of cement figures facing east. It is not charming. It is one of the strangest and most affecting things in the country.
While you are there, the Kitching Fossil Exploration Centre walks you out to fossils lying in the riverbed — Karoo animals from the Permian, a couple of hundred million years before anything with feathers.
After the sun goes
Dry air, high ground and very little light for a very long way. The winter months are the clearest — July is the driest of them — and you do not need to leave the stoep. If you want the outside lights off, ask, and they go off.
There is a micro-brewery on Church Street brewing its own, and the restaurants in the old buildings are better than a town this size has any right to. In late May the Karoo Stoep Tasting puts winemakers on the verandas of Graaff-Reinet and Nieu-Bethesda — book a room early for that weekend.
How long to stay
You have driven a long way and you are driving on tomorrow. Do not try to do the town.
Park, shower, and take a beer or a rusk onto the stoep. Do nothing for an hour. This is not filler — the Karoo roads are long and you will enjoy tomorrow more.
Drive up to the Valley of Desolation and walk the Crag Lizard loop. Back in time for dinner in town, or around the fire if you asked by noon.
Breakfast at half past seven, a walk down Bourke Street to look at the church, and you are on the road by ten with the day intact.
One full day in the middle changes the whole trip. This is the stay most people wish they had booked.
The Valley at sunset, then supper. Early night.
The Eerstefontein trail — take the 5 km if it is warm, the 11 km if it is not — or the game-viewing loop north of the dam with the windows down.
The town: Reinet House, the church, Obesa if cacti are your kind of thing. Shade, then the stoep from four.
Breakfast without hurrying, and go. Addo is about three hours; the Garden Route via the N9 is a long but beautiful day.
Three nights is when guests stop planning and start having a week. It is also when the nightly rate comes down — ask.
Arrive, stoep, the Valley for sunset.
Nieu-Bethesda: the Owl House, the fossil centre, lunch in the village, home by late afternoon. A full day, and worth all of it.
A long walk in the morning while it is cool, the town museums in the afternoon, and the braai in the werf in the evening.
The one morning nobody wants to leave. Late breakfast is fine; check-out is ten but we are not going to stand over you.
Right now, in the Karoo
The Karoo has a proper set of seasons — hot summers, cold clear winters, and autumn walking weather that is hard to beat.
Rain, when it comes, comes between late October and early April, and mostly as a thunderstorm at four in the afternoon that is over by six.