Information About the Karoo for Your Better Understanding of the Wilderness Area That You Will Be Adventuring Into

INFORMATION ABOUT THE KAROO FOR YOUR BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF THE WILDERNESS AREA THAT YOU WILL BE ADVENTURING INTO: The Karoo ’Aukarob "Hardveld" is a semi desert natural region of South Africa. No exact definition of what constitutes the Karoo is available, so its extent is also not precisely defined. The Karoo is partly defined by its topography, geology and climate, and above all, its low rainfall, arid air, cloudless skies, and extremes of heat and cold.The Karoo also hosted a well-preserved ecosystem hundreds of million years ago which is now represented by many fossils. The xerophytic vegetation consists of aloes, mesembryanthemums, crassulas, euphorbias, stapelias, and desert ephemerals, spaced 50 cm or more apart,and becoming very sparse going northwards into Bushmanland and, from there, into the Kalahari Desert. The driest region of the Karoo, however, is its southwestern corner, between the Great Escarpment and the Cederberg-Skurweberg mountain ranges, called the Tankwa Karoo, which receives only 75 mm of rain annually. The eastern and north-eastern Karoo are often covered by large patches of grassland. The typical Karoo vegetation used to support large game, sometimes in vast herds.The Karoo is distinctively divided into the Great Karoo and the Little Karoo by the Swartberg Mountain Range, which runs east-west, parallel to the southern coastline, but is separated from the sea by another east-west range called the Outeniqua–Langeberg Mountains. The Great Karoo lies to the north of the Swartberg range; the Little Karoo is to the south of it. Great KarooThe first European settlers landed in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, and between 1659 and 1664, made several unsuccessful attempts to penetrate the Great Karoo from the south-west.The Europeans who first entered the Great Karoo did so from the south-east (traveling north from Algoa Bay), which is slightly less arid than the western Karoo These were the trekboers of the mid-1700s, who led a nomadic existence, enduring great hardships in the relentless aridity, the intense heat (such that even their dogs could not walk on the scorching ground and had to be lifted into the overcrowded wagons), and the bitter cold in winter, especially at night. Before that time, the only inhabitants were the Khoe-speaking clans migrating through the area, and !Ui-speaking peoples, who lived in small family groups and, it is believed, remained largely in their own "territories", killing their own game, and gathering bulbs and roots and drinking from a spring or other water source within their territory. Sometimes these territories were very large and the family group moved from one part to the other. Their only domestic animals were dogs.The Ntu-speaking agriculturalists to the east of the Great Karoo did not occupy this arid region due to the scarce rainfall which prevented the farming of cattle. Sunset in the Great Karoo, near Sutherland, showing a multi bladed windpump, which has made permanent settlement and farming possible in this thirsty land. These windpumps are as iconic of the Great Karoo as are the flat-topped Karoo Koppies. In 1854, Daniel Halladay invented the multi bladed windpump (windmill) in the USA. It was perfected in 1883, and soon South Africa (and elsewhere) produced them in large numbers. These windpumps transformed the Great Karoo, making permanent settlement and stock farming (predominantly sheep)possible over large parts of the Karoo for the first time.Like the Karoo Koppie, the multi bladed windpump became an iconic feature of the Great Karoo. Sheep farming and the fencing off of the land have meant that antelope numbers have dwindled significantly, and with them, the big carnivores. Leopards still occur in the mountains, but lions now only occur in nature reserves, where they have been recently reintroduced into the Great Karoo. The Lord Milner Hotel in Matjiesfontein, in the Lower Karoo, next to the Matjiesfontein railway station, on the railway line from Cape Town to Johannesburg. In 1872, construction was started to connect the Cape Colony's coastal railway system with the diamond fields in Kimberley, The new line started in Worcester and entered the Lower Karoo through the Hex River valley, where it followed a course almost midway between the Swartberg Mountains to the south and the Great Escarpment to the north. Along the way, it passed through the quaint Victorian village of Matjiesfontein, with the historic Lord Miner Hotel, which is still operational today. The railway reached this point in 1878, before proceeding to Beaufort West at the foot of the Great Escarpment. From there, it reached the top of the African Plateau near Three Sisters along a valley with such a low gradient that passengers were (and still are) hardly aware that they were ascending the Great Escarpment. From there it continued through the Upper Karoo, to De Aar, and crossed the Orange River at Hopetown, where South Africa’s first diamond, the Eureka Diamond, was found. The Orange River, at this point, forms the local unofficial boundary between the Great Karoo and the Highveld. The only sharp and definite boundary of the Great Karoo is formed by the most inland ranges of Cape Fold Mountains to the south and south-west. The extent of the Karoo to the north is vague, fading gradually and almost imperceptibly into the increasingly arid Bushmanland towards the north-west. To the north and north-east, it fades into the savannah and grasslands of Griqualand West and the Highveld.The boundary to the east grades into the grasslands of the Eastern Midlands. The Great Karoo is itself divided by the Great Escarpment into the Upper Karoo (generally above 1200–1500 m) and the Lower Karoo on the plains below at 700–800 m. A great many local names, each denoting different subregions of the Great Karoo, exist, some more widely, or more generally, known than others. In the Lower Karoo, going from west to east, they are the Tankwa Karoo, the Moordenaarskaroo, the Koup, the Vlakte, and the Camdeboo Plains. The Hantam, Kareeberge, Roggeveld, and nuweveld are the better known subregions of the Upper Karoo, though most of it is simply known as the Upper Karoo, especially in the north.Turning north from the N1 between Touws River and Beaufort West, at Matjiesfontein, the road ascends the Great Escarpment through the Verlatenkloof Pass to reach Sutherland, at 1456 m above sea level, which is reputedly the coldest town in South Africa with average minimum temperatures of −6.1 °C during winter. There’s the grim story about a police officer called Van der Colf, who patrolled the area looking for stock thieves. Apparently he would tie his captives to his horse and make them walk to jail. In his book Timeless Karoo, Jonathan Deal writes: “When Van der Colf became bored, and perhaps a little drunk, he would release the prisoners to run away up a hill — and take potshots at them with his rifle, sometimes with deadly consequences. Deal also describes another series of violent events that could have given the Moordenaars Karoo its name. In the 1770s, there was a farm foreman who lived next to the Sak River (near present-day Williston), who shot Bushmen indiscriminately. When the Bushmen retaliated and murdered the foreman, a commando was sent from the Cape to punish them. Many innocent Bushmen died in the revenge attack. After the commando returned home, Bushmen across the Great Karoo started to plunder farms and murder farmers. Another punitive commando was sent out. Revenge attack upon revenge attack followed and more and more Bushmen perished. Fauna of The Great Karoo used to support a large variety of antelope (particularly the springbok), the quagga, and other large game, especially on the grassy flats in the east. Francois Le Vaillant, the famous French explorer, naturalist, and ornithologist, who traveled through the Great Karoo in the 1780s, killed a hippopotamus in the Great Fish River in the Karoo (and ate its foot for breakfast). He also recorded that he saw the spoor of a rhinoceros near Cranemere, in the Camdeboo Plains (eastern Lower Karoo). Elephant tusks have been found by farmers in the Camdeboo district, but no records exist of any having been seen alive in that region.The quagga roamed the Karoo in great numbers together with wildebeest and ostriches, which always seemed to accompany them.These quagga seemed gentle and easy to domesticate. (A pair of quagga was used to draw a horse carriage through London, more for curiosity than for any superiority the quagga might have had over a horse.) They were consequently also easy prey for hunters, who hunted them for sport rather than their meat.By the middle of the 1800s, they were almost extinct, and in 1883, the last one died in an Amsterdam zoo. Probably the strangest and most puzzling zoological phenomenon in the Great Karoo was the periodic, unpredictable appearance of massive springbok migrations.These migrations always came from the north, and could either go west towards Namaqualand and the sea, south-west through towns such as Beaufort West, or south through the Camdeboo district. These vast herds moved steadily and inexorably across the plains, trampling all before them, including their own kind. Le Vaillant gave the first eyewitness account of such a migration in 1782.He rode through the herd filling the Plains of Camdeboo, seeing neither the beginning nor end of the moving mass. In 1849, a massive herd of springbok, amongst which were intermingled wildebeest, blesbok, quagga, and eland, moved through Beaufort West. Early one morning, the town was awakened to a sound like that of a strong wind, and suddenly the town was filled with animals.

Load more