When Spring began to stir in 2015 and the usual desire to visit the flowers in Namaqualand and the Northern Cape began to make us restless, my wife Fay and I decided to do it properly. Instead of just doing the flowers, we first took our trusty motorhome, named Florence, due north from our Garden Route home to revisit the Kgalagadi for the first time in more than 30 years, before we headed home via Namaqualand.
The last time we visited the Kgalagadi it was in a very basic VW Kombi and we were confident that Florence, our home-built motorhome based on a retired Mercedes ambulance (Florence is of course named in honour of Florence Nightingale), would prove a lot more comfortable.
Faced with the boring prospect of nearly 2 000km of straight, potentially uninteresting tarred road to the park, our souls rebelled. Now that we were retired there was no need to fit as many kilometres as possible into whatever days were available. So it was to boyhood memories, Google Earth and the internet that we turned to see if there was a more interesting and less direct route that could be followed to the Kgalagadi… and indeed there was!
Searching the map more or less north from our home in the Southern Cape, we decided to take in the western end of the Baviaanskloof, then the Karoo National Park, followed by the SKA (Square Kilometre Array) near Carnarvon, Verneukpan, and finally Hakskeen Pan on the borders of the Kgalagadi.
This route offered some tarred road relief but otherwise had a rich variety of dusty, minor “roads less travelled” and interesting historical stop-overs to explore.
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