Cape Town → Kalahari Desert → Kruger National Park
Here are the 26 stories you’ll meet on this journey. The history, culture and nature commentary narrated by the GPS audio guide can be read here in advance.
Cape Town
Sarah Baartman — the Slave Lodge
The building you’re passing now is a museum called the Slave Lodge today, but it was originally the quarters where enslaved people lived. Inside is the story of a woman named Sarah Baartman — a story that’s hard to forget once you’ve heard it. Sarah was a Khoikhoi woman born near the Gamtoos River in the Eastern Cape. While she was working as a servant in Cape Town, an Englishman and a Cape Town merchant approached her in 1810, luring her with the promise that she could make a lot of money in London. So she crossed the Atlantic and was put on display on London’s Piccadilly under the name ‘the Hottentot Venus’. Her body shape, which looked unfamiliar to Europeans of the time, was turned into a spectacle. British abolitionists took her case to court to try to free her, but — very likely under pressure — she told the court she had come of her own free will, and so she was never released. In 1814 she was sold to France, where she was exhibited in a similar way in Paris and even became a subject of study for Georges Cuvier, the most celebrated naturalist of the day. Then in 1815, at only about twenty-five, she died in Paris — and Cuvier dissected her body and preserved her brain and genitals as specimens. Those specimens stayed on display at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris until 1974, almost 160 years after her death. She was finally brought home and buried in 2002, after Nelson Mandela’s government formally asked the French government to return her. And, strikingly, the day of her homecoming ceremony fell on South Africa’s Women’s Day — a coincidence that stays with you once you know it.
Camissa — the hidden river beneath the city
Picture this for a moment as you drive. Right now, beneath this city, a river called ‘Camissa’ is flowing. Cape Town wasn’t built here because of the stunning view of Table Mountain. The real reason was water. Fresh spring water ran down from the mountain, and the Khoikhoi called these streams ‘sweet water’ — Camissa. In 1652, when the Dutch East India Company was looking for a place to build a supply station for ships bound for Asia, it chose this spot precisely because of this water. And amazingly, more than 370 years later, the river hasn’t disappeared. It still flows through underground channels beneath the city — near Heritage Square you can even hear the water if you listen closely to the pavement. There are even walking tours that follow the river through Victorian-era tunnels. Beneath the forest of glittering buildings, the old river that gave birth to this city is still quietly flowing — the more you think about it, the more remarkable it is, isn’t it?
Van Riebeeck’s almond hedge — Kirstenbosch
Deep inside Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden you’ll come across what looks like an ordinary hedge of trees. But this hedge hides a story more than 360 years old. In 1660, Jan van Riebeeck, the first commander of the Cape settlement, planted a dense line of wild almond trees — the bitter kind — along the settlement’s boundary, saying it would stop Khoikhoi raids and cattle theft. It looked like a defensive hedge, but in reality it was the first policy of separation, meant to push the Khoikhoi outside the colony’s land. Remarkably, some of these trees have survived to this day — more than 360 years — and still stand inside Kirstenbosch. They’re preserved as South Africa’s oldest ‘living monument’. When you stroll through this beautiful garden and suddenly come across these old, gnarled trunks, knowing that they mark the very first scene of this country’s history of racial separation may make the view look a little different.
The Castle of Good Hope — a false surrender and the Grey Lady
That star-shaped fortress, the Castle of Good Hope, is the oldest surviving building in South Africa. The Dutch East India Company built it over 13 years, from 1666 to 1679. Beneath the fort there was once a dungeon where prisoners were held, and legend has it that a secret passage led from here to the harbour — perhaps used for smuggling or secret escapes. But the fort’s most famous story is something else: the ghost of the ‘Grey Lady’. Some say she was a woman executed in the dungeon; others say she was the mistress of a 19th-century commander. The interesting thing is that it doesn’t end as an old tale — there are records of night guards reporting sightings of her to this day. Inside this fortress, more than 350 years old, someone may be about to encounter the Grey Lady at this very moment.
The 1901 plague and Ndabeni
When people think of racial segregation in South Africa — apartheid — they usually think of 1948. But attempts to push people out of the city by race began much earlier. In 1901, bubonic plague broke out in Cape Town’s harbour. The real cause, as it later turned out, was rats that arrived on cargo ships — yet the authorities wrongly blamed Black dock workers as the source of infection. Using this as a pretext, they forcibly moved all the Black residents living in town to a new settlement called ‘Ndabeni’, near Maitland. This was the first case of the township segregation policy that would continue for decades. Apartheid officially began in 1948, so this happened a full 47 years earlier. A misunderstanding caused by rats brought this city’s history of racial separation forward by almost half a century.
District Six — demolished, and never rebuilt
That wide empty lot you can see out the window may look like land where construction simply stopped, but this was once Cape Town’s liveliest neighbourhood. It was called District Six — the most diverse place in the city, where Black, Coloured, Indian and Jewish residents all lived side by side. But in 1966 the government declared this land a ‘whites-only area’. Over the next 16 years, until 1982, some 60,000 residents were forcibly removed to the Cape Flats on the city’s outskirts, and every one of their homes and buildings was demolished. Here’s the twist: the forced removals drew such strong international condemnation that even the government didn’t dare announce the white housing it had planned for the empty land. So for decades the land has remained mostly empty. The bare landscape we’re looking at is itself a scar of that violence — and, at the same time, proof that the violence never fully succeeded. Today the District Six Museum keeps the story of that neighbourhood alive.
The convict ship ‘Neptune’ affair
In 1849, the British Empire planned to use the Cape Colony as a penal colony, just as it had done with Australia. So it sent convicts to Table Bay aboard the convict ship ‘Neptune’. But the plan ran into unexpected resistance from the people of Cape Town. Merchants refused as one to supply the ship, and workers blocked the convicts from even coming ashore. For five whole months, the Neptune sat stuck in the harbour, unable to unload. In the end the British government gave in, and the convicts on board were sent on to Australia. Historians regard this as the first mass civil resistance in the city’s history — the Empire’s plan was defeated without a single shot fired, simply by refusing to cooperate.
The Noon Gun on Signal Hill
Every day at noon, a single cannon shot rings out from this hill. It startles people hearing it for the first time, but this cannon isn’t a show for tourists. When it was first installed in 1806, it had just one purpose: to let every ship anchored in the harbour set its navigation clock precisely. Today we have GPS and smartphones, but back then there was nothing of the sort. So for the whole city and every ship in port, the sound of this cannon was the official time. And amazingly, the tradition has continued for more than 200 years without missing a single day. Even now, when noon comes, the cannon will fire from that hill without fail. One of the world’s oldest time-signal traditions is carrying on right before our eyes.
Springbok
The miners who came from Cornwall
Take a look at this dry desert area you’re passing through, around Springbok and Okiep. Today it looks like nothing but barren plains, but in the 19th century, when a copper-mining boom hit the area, it was a completely different scene. Skilled miners from Cornwall in England, whose families had mined for generations, came all the way to this desert on the other side of the world, nicknamed ‘Cousin Jacks’. After months at sea, they transplanted the mining techniques they knew straight into this unfamiliar land. And curiously, traces of them remain. Even today, some local family surnames reveal Cornish ancestry. The culture of an English country village was transplanted into the middle of an African desert. Quite a strange and fascinating combination when you think about it, isn’t it?
The vanished springbok migration
The name of this town, Springbok, actually comes from an antelope. Until the 19th century, a spectacle known as ‘trekbokking’ often unfolded in this area: herds of springbok hundreds of thousands strong crossing these plains over several days. The scale was said to be almost unimaginable. But you can’t see such migrations any more. As fences dividing farms went up everywhere and uncontrolled hunting continued, the spectacle vanished completely. All that’s left to us is a town named after the antelope. The tide of life that once filled the land now survives only in a place name.
Augrabies Falls National Park
A name born from a sound
The name of these falls, ‘Augrabies’, means ‘place of great noise’ in the Khoi language. The Orange River narrows through an 18-kilometre granite gorge and plunges over a 56-metre cliff, and its roar could reportedly be heard kilometres away. The very fact that such a mighty sound of water could be heard in the middle of the dry Kalahari must have been an astonishing experience for people long ago. Right — once we’re back in Joburg, this epic journey comes to an end.
Upington
Vineyards grown from river water in the middle of the desert
The land around us here is actually the Kalahari Desert. But in the 19th century, settlers began large-scale irrigated farming with water drawn from the Orange River, and vineyards appeared. A single river created a farming settlement in the middle of the desert, and today the area remains the heart of South Africa’s raisin production. Don’t forget to do your last big shop here before entering the park.
Kgalagadi National Park
The first park to erase a national border
The park you’re entering was originally two parks managed separately by South Africa and Botswana: South Africa’s Kalahari Gemsbok National Park and Botswana’s Gemsbok National Park. In 2000 the two were merged into Africa’s first official transfrontier park. The animals had always roamed the desert without caring about borders — people simply acknowledged that reality at last and merged the two countries’ park management into one.
No Big Five, but plenty of lions
The Kgalagadi has no elephants, rhinos or buffalo, so it doesn’t count as a ‘Big Five’ park. Yet for sightings of black-maned Kalahari lions and cheetahs, its reputation is higher than Kruger’s. If, on the Nossob riverbed we’re passing, you see a black-maned male lion standing atop a red dune, that’s the scene that defines this park.
Kuruman
A spring gushing 20 million litres a day in the middle of the desert
In contrast to the dry landscape at the edge of the Kalahari, Kuruman has a natural spring that gushes about 20 million litres of water a day. Nicknamed ‘the Eye’, this spring has long served as a lifeline in the middle of the desert for people and animals alike.
The missionary who came to the desert to translate the Bible
In the 19th century the Scottish missionary Robert Moffat settled in this remote desert town and worked on translating the Bible into Setswana. Few missionaries from Europe came to such a remote place and devoted their whole lives to it, and his work is later regarded as a key turning point in the history of missions in southern Africa.
Graskop
The town that planted trees when the gold ran out
The forest surrounding this town isn’t actually natural. Graskop, born of the gold rush in the 1880s, took a completely different path when the gold soon ran out. The townspeople planted pine and eucalyptus on a massive scale on the surrounding hills and built up a timber industry. Thanks to that, unlike most mining towns that vanished, this one has survived to this day.
The sheer cliffs that brought people back
Having survived a century on timber, Graskop reinvented itself again in the late 20th century. The steep gorge landscape around the town became the stage for adventure tourism such as ziplines and the gorge lift. Not mines, not sawmills — the cliffs themselves became the town’s new resource.
God’s Window
An endless view called the window through which God looks down
This viewpoint is called ‘God’s Window’. It got the name from the view from the top of the Drakensberg escarpment, where the Lowveld stretches endlessly beyond the mist. On a clear day, they say, you can see beyond the lowlands all the way to the edge of Kruger National Park.
A window with a different face every time
This window shows a different landscape every time, even from the same spot. Mist and cloud rising from below the cliffs block or open the view from moment to moment, so depending on the time and the weather it gives a completely different impression. That’s why local guides recommend visiting early in the morning — as the afternoon goes on, mist often wraps around the cliffs.
Bourke’s Luck Potholes
A landmark named after a man who found almost no gold
The name of this formation means ‘Bourke’s Luck’, but in fact the man named Bourke found almost no gold here. It was named after the 19th-century prospector Tom Bourke, and the story goes that his fellow miners gave the place its name as a tease about his bad luck. The cylindrical pools you see now actually have nothing to do with gold — they’re simply a natural formation carved into the rock by thousands of years of swirling river water.
Pilgrim’s Rest
A gold-rush town that became a living museum
This entire town you’re passing through is a museum. Pilgrim’s Rest, founded when gold was discovered in 1873, was a gold-rush town that drew thousands at its peak. But even after the gold ran out, its buildings weren’t demolished — and today the whole town is a declared national heritage site, preserving its 1870s appearance just as it was.
Blyde River Canyon
‘River of Sorrow’ and ‘River of Joy’ — the companions feared dead
The two rivers flowing through this canyon are named ‘Sorrow’ and ‘Joy’. In the 19th century, as a group of Voortrekkers passed through the area, some companions who went out scouting didn’t return for a long time. Those left behind believed they had died and named a nearby river the ‘Treur’ — sorrow. But some time later the scouts came back alive, and the river where they reunited was called the ‘Blyde’ — joy. The joy and grief of that moment remain in the names of the two rivers that cross this canyon.
Three Rondavels
Three giant rock peaks shaped like thatched huts
Those three peaks are called the Three Rondavels because they resemble ‘rondavels’, traditional African round thatched huts. They were carved by river erosion over some 200 million years, yet look so precise it’s as if someone made them on purpose. They’re considered the most iconic view of the Blyde River Canyon, the third largest canyon in the world.
Kruger National Park
A park named after the president who tried to stop the hunting
The park’s name comes from Paul Kruger, president of the Transvaal Republic. It began in 1898, when he declared the ‘Sabie Game Reserve’ to protect wildlife that was declining sharply because of uncontrolled hunting. When it was formally upgraded to a national park in 1926, it was named ‘Kruger’ in his honour. Kruger himself led a conservative farming society, yet this decision, carried forward for over 100 years, created what is now Africa’s finest wildlife sanctuary.
The Sabie River — the area with the highest wildlife density
The Sabie River we’re passing doesn’t dry up even in the dry season, making this an area where wildlife gathers constantly. It’s known for such high density that just sitting on a camp restaurant terrace, you can watch elephants, hippos and buffalo gathering along the riverbank.
Drive this road yourself
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