THERE is blue sky over the Eastern Cape. And it is a peculiar blue – so much so that artists travel to the Eastern Cape from all over the world to capture that particular blueness and then bite their brushes in half because they can’t. It’s not so much a colour as a wash of luminous hues that shimmer and change as the sun travels across the sky.
I saw lots of this blue sky on my travels through the Karoo* en route to Knysna, and every time I looked up at this vaulted blue ceiling I wondered anew.
And that is just one of the remarkable things about the Karoo. There are many others. This area is classed as an arid region, which means that it could be called a desert that doesn’t take itself too seriously. TV programmes like those Living Planet-type BBC time-lapse documentaries, whilst being wonderful, are rather unfair to a place like this – they give the impression that expanses of nothing like the Karoo are wonderlands where fluffy flowers spring open into luxurious bloom in seconds, where hot-footed lizards with Elizabethan ruffs and windscreen-wiper eyelids are waiting to be viewed in close-up, where the landscape teems with just-hidden effervescent and brilliantly-coloured life. It’s not like that at all.
You can stare at the shimmering-hot landscape till your eyeballs fall out, you can poke around under stones and fossick in dry riverbeds for hours, you can build a hide and watch a rapidly-receding waterhole all day, and you will see – nothing.
I love it.
Because, when you do finally see something move, or grow, or scuttle into the shade, or stare at you unblinkingly – you get the same feeling of wondering disbelief that you would get if the newsreader on the 10 o’clock news stepped out of your TV screen during the ad-break and strolled over to the fridge for a snack. I love the Karoo and all those desolate, arid, strange and glowing multi-coloured regions that we in South Africa have so many of.
You can reach the Karoo from the eastern side via the Zuurberg Pass, which is a narrow cutting through the Zuurberg Mountains. So why should you take the Zuurberg Pass through the mountains, I hear you ask? Well, if you want to ride elephants you are going to have to. Because just over the mountain from the Addo Elephant Park (where the ornery elephants roam) are accessible ellies that will let you ride around on their backs on your way to a picnic. Addo Elephant Back Safaris are run by Celia and Peter Martin and comprise a group of peaceful pachyderms that will let you have a three-hour elephant-back walk through the veld. It’s an ideal day-trip outing from Addo, caters for school groups and sundowners – and someone even had their 25th wedding anniversary on board an elephant. The elephant’s handler is a local guy called Ute Nombula who has worked with the elephants for four years.
Just a hint – if you would like the ellies to love you rather extravagantly, bring along a bag of oranges as a tit-bit. Just put the citrus on the ground and stand back quickly. This love of oranges stems from the early days of the Addo Elephant Park when the local citrus farmers used to offload truckloads of substandard oranges for the ellies to feast on as an incentive for them to stay indoors, ie, inside the fence. An elephant-proof fence is a fallacy – if an elephant wants to go, he goes. So the cartloads of oranges were provided to give the elephants a reason to stick around and they rapidly became a favoured snack. To this day there is a sign outside the Addo Elephant Park warning people not to conceal oranges about their person if they wish to leave the park with the same number of limbs they had when they arrived.
Celia provides delicious snacks for humans as well, to add some avoirdupois so that elephants can actually feel you on their backs and don’t inadvertently rub you off against a tree. Which they might do if you haven’t brought a bag of oranges for them. No, not really - the elephants behave like gentlemen towards their visitors, although they are not above goosing you with their trunks when your back is turned. If you are interested in learning more about these elephant –back safaris, please contact Celia or Peter on 042 – 235-1400 or 083 – 375-6514 or res@addoelephantbacksafaris.coza or their website at www.addoelephantbacksafaris.co.za
*The Karoo is a catch-all description for that vast flat ancient dry inland southern region cut off from the Cape ocean by a series of coastal mountain ranges. There are lots of different Karoos: the Little Karoo, the Great Karoo, etc. with a whole lot of regional variations. Karoo, by the way, is the Hottentot word for ‘nothing’. Now you know.
