After the wine country it was off to a few days in the little karoo. The weather was a little better for the drive and so I was able to see more of the countryside. Stopped along the way at the karoo botanical gardens, but there wasn't too much to see; I think it was too late in the year.
By the end of the day, I had made it to my hotel in Oudtshoorn, ostrich capital of the world. Again, I like this town a lot and notice that it has more restaurants per capita that anyplace else I can think of. However, when I got out of the car at the hotel, I saw the the one tire looked really low. I went to a gas station and pumped it full, but I could hear air hissing out. Just my luck. Called the rental car company and they tried to find a replacenent tire here in town. They failed, but just afterwards, the tire store called me up directly and offered me a used tire at a good price. Very shady. To make things easier, I put the spare on and drove 45min to then rental car office and picked a new wheel up from them. It was a good decision, because the drive down to it was quite nice. From there, I went to Mosselbaai to see a reconstruction of the ship that Dias used when he sailed around the cape. Next, I took the scenic way back to the hotel.
It turned out to be more scenic than I was bargaining for, about 100 miles on gravel roads. You'll notice a lot of the roads I'm taking on this trip are gravel. Along the way I passed through Calitzdorp. Another small town, but it seemed like a cool place. There were signs advertising a port festival in town, so I followed them to check it out. When I got to it, I had to pay to get in. They gave me a plastic bag, which I figured was to carry stuff, and a zip tie, which I could not understand what it was supposed to be for. I walked around and saw what there was to see and listened to the afrikaans country music performances for a bit. The very strange thing though, was that everyone had glasses or bottles of wine, but I couldn't find any place actually selling it. I was expecting tastings. Maybe I am really bad at finding stuff, or maybe it was a byob festival. Finally, I detoured through Seweweekspoort on the way back to the hotel. That was the start of my little karoo mountain passes adventures.
The next day I spent driving a loop around several of the mountain passes in the area. Most of these were on gravel roads, but for the most part they were in good condition. The drive was really great and the scenery spectacular.
One pass, however, I did not reach. It was on a road to no place and I ran out of time before I could reach it. The road sign said it was 40km and that it would take 2 hours to reach. (Plus another two hours to come back). I figured it was worth a try and hoped that I would make better time than the sign suggested. It turned out to be one of the roughest roads I have ever driven. In fact, it was probably a little crazy to try alone. Even though I had an SUV, I was forced to drive at a crawl because of the holes, rocks, bumps, etc. In the first hour, I managed 20km, so the prediction of 2 hours was looking pretty accurate. But, had I continued, it would have been dark before I made it back, and I did not want to try those roads in the dark. So, reluctantly, I turned around and crawled back the way I came. In addition to the passes, I stopped at Rust en Vrede waterfall (also on a nasty road), and at Cango caves.
The caves were very nice, and they are much more extensive than you can see on the tour, but the ones you can see have been over touristed. There was a lot of damage from earlier visitors and I'm pretty sure that none of the features are growing anymore, too bad.
