Karoo road trip

[Arnolg]

Before I turned 6 years old, I vaguely remember my parents taking us on a road trip from Pretoria all the way to Cape Town and back in a white non-4x4 combi. My memory of this trip is a bit hazy as I'm in my 40s now, and my 20s were rough, so most of my pre-20s are a bit of a blur now.

The place I work at is pretty adamant about employees taking at least 10 consecutive working days off every year. I asked my wife about the idea of taking a road trip down to the Karoo for the school holidays in June/July. At first, she told me I was crazy, not because she didn't want to do a road trip (she later explained that her parents did a similar thing down from Windhoek when she was younger), but because she thought the petrol bill would kill us in the planning phases.

I dug my heels in and kept explaining that it was a non-issue, and that we should at least plan a trip like that out of curiosity.

A month before the July school holidays started, I told her I had already booked leave for three weeks, and that the trip was happening, with or without her. This gave her around a month to plan the trip. She was in charge of planning where we stay each night, and I was in charge of driving there (including which roads we take).

The rules we made were:

1. No more than 400 km per day if we can help it (except the first and last day).
2. Stay off the N1 after we're out of the cities.
3. No camping (with 17 days worth of packing, we wouldn't have enough space for camping gear).
4. I'm not towing a trailer.
5. Don't skip any mountain passes.
6. Stop often.

In order to manage everyone's expectations, I will do one post for each day of this trip.
I might not be able to post every day due to time and energy constraints, but we will get through this together.
There are a lot of pictures.
I'm absolutely by no means an experienced traveler, especially on these long road trips. So expect to read events that don't make sense, or things I should have packed that I learned are important on trips like these.

This is the Patrol we did the trip in: viewtopic.php?t=9426

Day 1 - Pretoria to Kimberley
Date: 2023/06/28

We start from home in Pretoria at 05:30. The earliness is because we didn't want to hit peak hour traffic on the N1 to Centurion. The first stretch of the trip is all tarmac, the reason being that we wanted to get out of Gauteng and to our first stop as soon as possible. I'm sure there are many sights to see in Gauteng, but we were on a Karoo trip after all.
On the road from Krugersdorp southwards, I realize that the Patrol isn't your normal tarmac going vehicle (once again, because I mostly do school runs). It feels like a ship on the long strethes, especially with trucks advancing from the front and the road being fairly narrow. There's very little margin for error and you have to explicitly WANT to stay on the road, where I think most normal vehicles like to drive themselves.

We stop at Ventersdorp for a quick bathroom break (my kids are 6 and 8) and realize quickly that we're not in Pretoria anymore, with a blistering -1 reading on the thermometer. We had to do a double-take here because we were still dressed for Pretoria weather and decided to do a wee-and-dash before the cold consumed us. This was our first encounter with what happens when you go on tour in the winter. Back in the warmth of the Patrol, we carried on until we got to Wolmaransstad for the first refuel, not because I have to refuel, I just don't like trying to see how empty I can get the tank.

A quick few stops for photos, and we're in Kimberley. My wife had to explain what a capital city was to the children and that you could have those for provinces as well and not just per country. They wouldn't believe her because it didn't look like Pretoria. They also didn't want to sleep over in Kimberley because, well, it's Kimberley, and Kimberley looks like Kimberley. Luckily, the wife booked a place inside the Kimberley museum, right inside one of the restored mining buildings. It's quite a feeling going through the museum gates onto the mining property and then checking into the building because we live there now. It would have felt quite a bit more special if it wasn't winter and there were actually people walking around to create that feeling of an old mining dorpie.

Anyways, this is where our first day ends, at Kimberley, inside of a museum.

[Arnolg]

I realized I forgot to add the map for the first day :

[Arnolg]

We started the morning early and without breakfast for the grown-ups because, already on day two, we were going to break one of the rules: the distance rule.

The drive from Kimberley to Prieska is a fairly straightforward drive in normal circumstances. However, if your wife and child have friends in the area that they don't see often, then the drive becomes a little more complex and extends to about 400kms.

Day 2 map

The first stop from Kimberley is a little town called Jacobsdal. The significance of this town is that there's a cemetery that has the burial sites of people who fought in the Anglo-Boer War. This is the reason we stopped there: to have a look at some of the graves. I assume that many towns in this area would have cemeteries like this one, but we're only two days in, so I wasn't going to make a noise about it. The children did though, because they are children, and this is a cemetery without a pool, play area or supertubes.

Grave

more graves

Next on the list is the Old Wagon bridge. This one actually excited me because it meant we were about to drive the Patrol over a thing that we usually don't drive over. I wasn't sure that this was a drivable bridge, firstly due to all the recent rains and secondly, as the wife tells me: "This bridge was blown up and rebuilt a few times. First, the Boere would build the bridge and then blow it up if the English advanced too far. Then the English would rebuild the bridge and blow it up again if the Boere advanced back too close. This happened a few times." So this too seemed like it was a monument of some sort. Going on how they let us live inside a literal museum the previous night, I had my hopes up that we could, in reality, cross the bridge in a vehicle.

The bridge

Old Wagon bridge

We could and we did. This is a fairly narrow bridge but somehow seemed much safer than the narrow road to Kimberley two mornings back, what with the trucks barreling towards you.

Next up is Orania. Now, there are two reasons we went to Orania. A friend of my wife lives here, and a friend of my daughter lives here. We stopped over and had some breakfast in one of the restaurants with my wife's friends. We also went to their smallholding to have a look around. I started explaining how far we still had to drive and after about the fifth time, they got the message. Instead of making our way to Prieska, we rather went to "say hello" to a friend of my daughter that lives on the other side of the town. This would only take 5 minutes. Then we got offered a 2-minute tour of "just the school".

What felt like 2 hours later, after a tour of the whole town and its people, we were off to our final destination of the day, Prieska. We took the road through Kraankuil and Strydenburg, which became the first long stretch of gravel road of the trip.
In Strydenburg, we filled up again: 87.14 liters with a distance of 517.7km (5.7km/l). The previous fill-up in Wolmaransstad was 59.125 liters at 386.7km (6.5km/l).

Patrol in the mist from Jacobsdal

This road showed us how much rain the area had recently, with splash-pool sized water dams in the middle of the road every few hundred meters. At this stage, I was still a little skittish around mud and water on gravel roads and tried my best not to stupidly get stuck in the middle of what seemed like nowhere. There were a few times I had no choice but to go through the water, and to my surprise, the mud was only a problem right around the pools of water. Inside the little splash-pool, the ground was firmer. I guess that's why the water collected in these little pools: the ground was too dense for the water to infiltrate into the ground. Also, no one drove through the pools, so the ground was still fairly undisturbed.

Rambo, first mud.

This road passes by a fancy-pants lodge called Karreekloof Safari Lodge. The lodge looked very fancy-pants from the road, and I later (when I had to get images of the map we drove) saw that it was indeed fancy-pants from the inside as well. I guess people that stay here drive Y62's and not Y61's.

We arrived in Prieska at nightfall and spent the evening at a cousin on my wife's side.

[Arnolg]

I realize that in my first post, I mentioned how driving the patrol on the tarmac is more involved than with a normal car.

As soon as we started hitting the gravel the Patrol felt WAY more at home.
The little extra effort needed on the tarmac was offset by the absolute ease the vehicle could take on the non-tarred roads.
80km/h feels like a breeze compared to any other vehicle I've ever taken to gravel and I have to keep myself from driving highway speeds here.
It's fully planted and feels like the Patrol WANTS to go forward without much input from the throttle.

[Peter Connan]

Yip. You will never "get" the Patrol untill you drive it on dirt.
The worse the road gets, the more at home a Patrol gets.

[Arnolg]

Day three has me very excited! It's the first day that, according to the Mountain Passes website, we will be going through our first set of passes/poorts. We decided to take the shortest route to the Corbelled House just outside Carnarvon. This is the R386 and the route for the day is only 218km.

Day 3 route

Annotation 2023-08-12 190158.png (227 KiB) Viewed 8556 times

Of this 218km, approximately 158km will be gravel road. The thing about gravel roads this far south is that the scenery is very beautiful. You don't have to constantly concentrate on the road, and the driver has the chance to also have a look to the left and right to take in the sights.
The R386 feels like a very long straight road with few twists and turns. For the first time really, it feels like the more we drive away from Prieska (and the north), the more I can feel my spirit relax, and my mind starts focusing on the nature we're experiencing, rather than the deadlines looming at the end of next month.

We stop a few times for no apparent reason, just to take the scenery in.

Just stop and look

This road also has some of the larger splash pool type mud dams. They are larger because the road is considerably wider than the one from the previous day.
I ask my wife if her parents used to go through the water pools or on the sides. Her parents did the same as mine - always the safer option along the edge of the pool, not through the middle.
I decide to break the cycle of being safe and I dash through the middle of one of the pools.
As a kid, I've always wanted us to rather sprint through the water just to see what it looks like. Both children scream with delight.
My wife utters a few words that make me realize that maybe breaking the cycle of going around the water should have been a mutual decision.
The water sprays up the front and along the side of the car, similar to the ocean waves crashing against the rocks in a spectacular display of fluid dynamics.

Everyone is giddy with excitement because we can see another five or six of these pools in short succession.

Pool party

My 5-year-old son decides to start asking if he could also drive a little. This would be the first of a thousand times this trip where he would ask this question.
There are no cars as far as the eye can see, and I decide to give them each a chance to drive through one of their very own pools.
Only steering, of course - their legs are still a little too short to reach the pedals, and I'm not THAT irresponsible.

Possible addiction starting

I even let my wife take a turn driving.
She's tall enough to reach the pedals, so I sit in the passenger seat.
To my demise and her utter amusement, she gets to drive the Meketaanspoort. I think to myself, I'll let her have this one because technically this is a poort and not a pass.

Very irresponsible

What is this?

We also slowly pass by a dead fox on the road.
It is a significant event because this is what my daughter talks about for the next few days when we ask her about what she remembers the most from the trip.

We get near Carnarvon, and I decide it's safer if I drive again.
Carnarvon is empty; it looks like everyone locks their doors and windows during the day, except for the very few people hanging out at the local filling station.
We stop for some wood for the night. The place where we're staying tonight isn't equipped with electricity, and it would be a shame to sit around without a fire.

Closed

The Corbelled House is a fantastic little piece of history that the owners very neatly restored.
There's rosemary hanging from everywhere, and the koppies completely surround the area.
We spend the night dressed very warmly around the fire, playing cards and making animal noises into the darkness.

Corbeled house

Smaller corbeled house

House of cards

My son utters his last words for the day, saying he wants to drive a little again tomorrow, and we all go to sleep.

[Arnolg]

I wish I knew why some photos are upside down.

[Peter Connan]

Just a quick note. Firstly, thanks.

Secondly, on some types of ground (clay specifically and maybe others too) driving straight through the puddles actually is the safer option.
In clay, the exact tracks where everyone drives most of the time are packed the hardest, and remain hardest when wet. Drive on those and you get through easily, miss them even by just one foot and you can sink down to the chassis in seconds. This is especially relevant on "twee spoor" roads.

[iandvl]

I wish I knew why some photos are upside down.

I presume the photographs were taken by cell-phone.

Cell-phone photos are strange as the image includes the orientation in the "EXIF data". EXIF data being meta data associated with the image. The forum creates a thumbnail when viewing the page which does not include the EXIF information - hence the orientation gets lost. If you click on the image, it will render correctly.

I'll edit the photos for you when I get a chance, but super busy at work and also busy arranging a trip which commences in one and a bit weeks, so I'll probably only get around to that on the weekend.

[Arnolg]

I wish I knew why some photos are upside down.

I presume the photographs were taken by cell-phone.

Cell-phone photos are strange as the image includes the orientation in the "EXIF data". EXIF data being meta data associated with the image. The forum creates a thumbnail when viewing the page which does not include the EXIF information - hence the orientation gets lost. If you click on the image, it will render correctly.

I'll edit the photos for you when I get a chance, but super busy at work and also busy arranging a trip which commences in one and a bit weeks, so I'll probably only get around to that on the weekend.

Thank you Ian. Yeah, I also noticed when you click on the image, it renders the correct way up.
I'm not in a super hurry to have this corrected. I still have a whole bunch of days to add to this report still

Enjoy your trip!