Endless plains, enormous skies, and roads that vanish into the horizon — the Karoo is the soul of South Africa on two wheels.
The Karoo is not dramatic in the way the Drakensberg or the Cape Peninsula is dramatic. It’s quieter and stranger. The roads are long and dead straight, then suddenly they bend around a koppie and there are the Three Sisters, three perfect flat-topped mountains rising from the plain like a geology lesson. The sky overhead is the biggest sky you’ve ever ridden under.
We leave Cape Town and cross the Hex River Mountains into the Breede River valley, then climb the Du Toitskloof or Huguenot Tunnel to gain the first plateau. Within an hour of Cape Town the landscape changes completely and the pace of everything drops. This is part of the point.
Matjiesfontein is a Victorian railway hamlet that has barely changed since Cecil Rhodes and his contemporaries used it as a health resort in the 1890s. The Lord Milner Hotel serves proper food. We stay a night here on the longer routes.
Sutherland sits at 1,450 metres and on clear nights has the darkest skies in southern Africa. The South African Large Telescope (SALT) is here, and the star-gazing tour is extraordinary. Riding in at dusk on a winter evening, with the temperature dropping fast and the Milky Way beginning to appear, is a genuinely once-in-a-lifetime experience.
The return route brings us back through the Swartberg into the Klein Karoo and over the Meiringspoort gorge — a narrow slot through the Swartberg range, where the road crosses the river multiple times and the rock walls close overhead. Back in the Garden Route we rejoin the coast for the final run back to Cape Town.
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