East London travels into nature and beyond.

The absolute joy of travelling in your hired car from East London Airport in South Africa is the diversity of its people and its varied landscapes. One moment you can be in Third World backwaters and the next you can be travelling through a remarkable desert. One such desert of incredulous beauty and unusual wild life is the Karoo Desert.

This region found between East London and Aliwal North holds many interesting distractions for tourists.

If you find the early South African history fascinating, you can visit Anglo-Boer War Garden of Remembrance in Aliwal North. Here you will find two sober stone memorials, the Garden of Remembrance for English soldiers, and the Concentration Camp Memorial Garden for the Boer women and children. Drive a short way into the Karoo Heartland, 60 km from Graaff-Reinet, to Nieu-Bethesda.

This is the quasi-sacred home of the Owl House of eccentric artist Helen Martin. Her 500, glass and cement statues have brought world wide acclaim for this little Karoo town a few guest houses, restaurants, a pub and a couple of art galleries art work. While this may not be the literal one horse town, it certainly does have only one way in and one way out road.

You can visit Apollo Theatre and Bushman Paintings, that are said to be some of the earliest forms of San Art found in South Africa to date. These precious stickmen and hunting murals are dated at around at 24,000+ BC. The mind boggles at the knowledge that human life was present that long ago in South Africa. There are interesting places to call on like, Beaufort West. The town, was primarily a marshland yet now lies in an area that might look semi-desert now lots of Bushmen rock engravings sites and cave art to see here.

Should you arrive in the Northern Karoo during July and September, you will be in time for a spectacular natural miracle in the Namaqualand and Hantam Karoo. This period brings about a remarkable change to, an otherwise barren desert landscape. An explosion of colour smothers the desert floor with the sudden blooming of thousands upon thousands of flowers.

Rich reds mix easily with stark yellows and every available piece of desert floor comes to life. Long swathes of a particular colour, rake across the openness, as if they had been purposely planted like that. This is one place you need to make sure that you have a camera, or else people won’t believe you, when you try explain the colours to them.

• Owl House of eccentric artist Helen Martin
  Address:
  50 km north of Graaff Reinet off the N9 to Middelburg, Nieu-Bethesda, Eastern Cape

  Telephone: +27 (0)49 841-1733

  Opening hours: Daily from 09h00 to 17h00. Closed on Christmas Day.

• NIEUWOUDTVILLE (Hantam Karoo)
  Tel: +27 (0)27 218 1046 Hotel Nieuwoudtville

Namaqualand flowers can be found 495 kilometres from Cape Town, and close to the little town of Kamieskroon, just off the N7 route to Namibia.

• For further info:
  Northern Cape Provincial Government
  Private Bag X5016,
  Kimberley,
  8300

  Monument Heights,
  Nobengula Extension,
  3 Field Street,
  Galeshewe,
  Kimberley

  Tel: (053) 802 4500
  Fax: (053) 839 8215
  Website: northern-cape.gov.za