Some might consider religion and palaeontology strange bedfellows, but that’s the Karoo for you. The churches that dominate every dorp are built on the shale containing petrified evidence of Mesozoic life 300 million years ago, when the Karoo was an inland sea.
Then the area became volcanic and eroding sandstone carved out the conical and table-shaped mountains.
Driving for hours on end through the gaunt hyena-hued veld bristling with burnt stubble under a wide sky, I picture the geological ages spiralling back in time like a staircase.
Moschops, Massospondylus and Dicynodont fossils lie like forgotten toys from Earth’s lost toddlerhood on the lowest steps.
Midway is the Stone Age landing flecked with the flintheads, ostrich shell fragments and rock art of the bushmen that roamed for 120 000 years.
Further up the evolutionary ladder the sheep-herding Koi-Koi from the West Coast shared this “Place of Great Dryness” with the Bushmen 2 500 years ago, begetting generations of Koi San.
And, as we wind through Lootsberg Pass, the rungs of today’s Robo-Sapien types become all too evident in the squashed dead jackal on the roadside, the cellphone masts and giant cross dominating the outskirts of Graaff-Reinet.
Such conspicuous Calvinism with its accompanying “Welcome to Faith Carwash” and “Jesus is Lord” roof insignia reaches its zenith at the town centre’s 1886 Dutch Reformed Church, frequented on Sundays by people who still believe the Earth is 6 000 years old.
You could head north along Church Street to the Valley of Desolation where “our echoing crags resound” or south to the old library museum that offers a good assortment of pre-dinosaur fossils.
There is an even better collection at Nieu Bethesda’s Kitching Fossil Exploration Centre with life-sized models of the prehistoric Permian creatures that roamed the Karoo before grasses, flowers, mammals or birds had even been thought of.
Not even 200 years ago, huge herds of antelope, zebra and cheetah roamed the grass flats, but after the Anglo-Boer War and the advent of stock famers, sheep replaced the game and the grasses receded with the bovine grazing patterns.
A few investors began converting struggling sheep farms into tourist safari lodges. Most successful were Mark and Sarah Tompkins, owners of Samara, who bought up 11 farms, then rehabilitated and restocked 27 000ha of terrain with rhino, cheetah, Cape mountain zebra, eland, kudu, buffalo, red hartebeest and several more antelope species.
Today Samara Private Game Reserve has the highest concentration of vervet monkeys per hectare in SA and more than 200 bird species, including the once-endangered blue crane and corrie bustards, the world’s largest flying birds.
The scrubby veld gives way to a tangle of riverine forest en route to our Karoo Lodge accommodation, enabling my husband and I to spot baboon, bushbuck, a brown eagle, and a pair of black-headed herons on the 3km drive towards the restored 1800s farmhouse with corrugated iron roof and wrap-around stoep.
The area was once the sacred place of the San. Here, you can walk right up to a Bushman rock painting (Samara has the only known one of a cheetah), while beneath your feet are ghostly fossilised footprints of small dinosaurs.
Our ranger, Marnus Osche, shows us where they are. As he hands me the fossil of a Dicynodont, a semi-aquatic creature with tusks and a beak, I experience that clock-stopping frisson of holding something that lived 250 million years ago.
Apparently it had both reptilian and mammalian characteristics. Go figure. You can clearly see and feel its vertebrae though.
With Osche we get up close and personal with two of Samara’s seven cheetah and almost within patting distance around 22 giraffe. Unperturbed by our presence, these graceful ungulates continue browsing the ubiquitous sweet-horn Karoo acacia with its distinctive yellow flowers.
Life is good for the animals at Samara, which means “a joy for all who see it” in the San language. They can say a lot in a word.
“We chose not to stock Samara with lion because we’re encouraging our cheetah to breed. This means the antelope are also relaxed because there are so few predators apart from the cheetah and jackal,” says Marnus.
“To preserve our rich plant diversity, particularly the evergreen spekboom with its enormous carbon-storing capabilities, we also chose not to stock elephant.”
All this makes walking around the reserve reassuringly safe and Marnus is a mine of information. We learn the steppe buzzard is so called because it flies to the Steppe Mountains in Russia every year and that it’s best not to pick up poisonous scorpions.
While I had no intention of doing any such thing, Marmus fails to heed his own advice, turning over rocks for a decent specimen which he triumphantly holds aloft as he explains the intricacies of the arthropod’s mating rituals.
After depositing a sperm bag on the ground, the male clasps the female in a slow dance, the better to manoeuvre her cloaca over the sperm bag, which she then pulls into her body to fertilise her eggs.
Clearly, a female scorpion has the kegal muscles of a Thai ping-pong performer. At least she doesn’t bite the head off her partner post-coitus like her arachnid cousin, the spider.
When the eggs hatch, she carries the babies on her back for two weeks.
As our Land Cruiser creaks up the steep flanks of a rugged mountain, crossing grassy plains filled with mountain zebra and prancing wildebeest, there are small epiphanies to be had, revelations of a greater purpose perhaps.
We drive all the way up to Eagle’s Rock with a dizzying drop beneath us and a knee-weakening view of the green and fertile Camdeboo plains spread out as far as the eye can see.
Filigreed with shepherd trees, it’s a place of power and ritual that fills me with wonder.
“That’s exactly where Shell want to start fracking,” murmurs Marnus.
Oh no, say it ain’t so. The thought of Shell’s dark satanic drills despoiling the beauty of this sacred place gives me the creeps. – www.travelwrite.co.za
Samara’s family lodge Mountain Retreat can now be booked out on a self-catering basis at R7 500 per night for up to 10 guests.
Samara will provide a housekeeper and if you give them a list of required items when booking, they will provide your food supplies at cost price.
For more information about Samara, telephone Jenny at 049 891 0558 or e-mail her at [email protected].
Go online and see www.samara.co.za - Sunday Tribune