In the September of 2002 I found myself lying face down in the dirt of Namaqualand for the first time…

I’d been taken to a field on the outskirts of the one-horse-village of Nieuwoudtville by the local mayor to see what I think he described as something of great beauty. While that could set the scene for a dodgy storyline, the experience was the start of a beautiful relationship. It was a patch of what is for most months of the year unremarkable and vaguely stony arid farm land, but that every August and September morphs into a world of delicate colour, boasting the highest speciation of bulbs in the world. In layman’s language, there are more types of flower bulb in this field than anywhere else on the planet.

Delicate and colourful with intricate designs so perfect in execution, Latin names like romula and sporaxis lend these princes and princesses amongst flowers a seeming weightiness in the floral kingdom. Much like the malachite kingfisher, this is natural perfection, given its own floral glow by the fact that some of these plants occur in a space the size of a football field, nowhere else on earth, for such a short space of time.

This field, and many others like it found on surrounding sheep farms is on the Bokkeveld plateau, up the Vanrhynsdorp Pass, just beyond the northernmost tip of the Cerdarberg mountain range. In other words, unless you are a sales rep covering the usually dusty expanses of the northern Cape province or a sheep farmer from the nearby center of Calvinia, it is not an area you are likely to know well. Which adds to its attraction.

Throw in the characters and history of this least populated part of the country and you have one of the standout attractions on the South African tourism calendar, an experience not far behind that of following a big cat on a hunt for the first time. The difference is that while it is possible for visitors to witness a lion or leopard-kill in a number of countries – assuming that lions aren’t killed off in our lifetimes – this exceptional natural event is a South African USP, better known to marketing types as a unique selling point. And in this case it belongs (mostly) to that chunk of the Northern Cape province known as Namaqualand.

Here the spring flower season is a national happening, and the attitude of local farming families is also quite unique for the country. They throw open their farm gates to visitors for a small fee, as sharing the floral phenomenon seems almost as important as cashing in on the short-lived tourism aspect of the ‘event’.

Generations of farming families – many named van Wyk, offspring of the first Europeans (two brothers) to settle in the area some three centuries back – gather around kitchen tables in old, thatched stone houses while catching up on gossip and selling home-made ginger-beer and chutneys. As can be found on the farm Matjiesfontein – the same folk will be found there year-in and year-out.

Generally the woman run the guesthouses (there are only a handful) and feed the guests while the men do the farming. Men like Willem van Wyk, who’s not ashamed to say that he reckons it was his ancestors who shot out the Khoi bushmen in the area. ‘Farmers…have always shot first and asked questions later’, says a reflective Willem, who takes small groups of tourists on a tour around his farm in his landrover. It’s almost like this relatively new line of work, learning and sharing his knowledge of bulbs and rocks and the history of the early Khoi pastoralists and the early European farmers stealing each others’ sheep, has given him new insight, allowing him to view things with greater clarity.

At least that’s what I think in the short time spent with him. With precious little time to chat before we start on the three-hour roundabout drive to Kamieskroon down below the plateau, he shows us Oorlogskloof (battle gorge), where the early farmers defeated the bushmen in an apparent battle, probably about sheep.

Everything is about sheep in these parts.

Willem’s wife Mariette runs what could possibly be the best-value guesthouse in South Africa, on their farm, Papkuilsfontein (where they farm sheep).

The lamb as a main course is a good choice in these parts, given the herby, aromatic plants the sheep feed on, while the chef – who comes up ‘for the season’ from Darling on the west coast – creates a little buzz among the guests with her pear in butternut soup.

The veggies are local and crisp, as is the wine, a sauvignon blanc, coming from Lutzville in the dry and rocky Strandveld region near the coast. Yes, we bucked the pairing of red meat with red, but the northern Cape feels like frontier country where anything goes, and what’s more there’s a story in the 40-something former well-built Springbok heptathlete who makes the wine.
Willem’s daughter-in-law Alri bakes cakes as good as you’ll get. Carrot, cheese and Belgian chocolate, in this most remote of areas where ‘basic’ has long been acceptable. Full we were, but she insisted on a takeaway box.

And that ended up being consumed a good couple hundred kilometers away the next day by a hard-of-hearing, 70-something gentleman in a suit we picked up when we passed him walking the sixty odd lonely km’s from Springbok to the coast with a walking stick on a road that hardly sees any vehicles. And the clouds were about to unleash themselves.

www.papkuilsfontein.co.za
www.experiencenortherncape.com

Some Basics

The flower spectacle generally kicks off in late July / early August around the Richtersveld, Springbok and Kamieskroon, before heading inland to Nieuwoudtville, down the gravel-road Botterkloof Pass through the Cedarberg to Clanwilliam and the west coast beyond – by which time you’re well into the Western Cape, with Namaqualand left far behind. The closest display to Cape Town is about an hour north of the city, in the private Postberg Reserve section of the Langebaan National Park, which usually peaks in September.