From Lesotho we entered the semi-desert area known as the Karoo. Staying "in the middle of nowhere" at a place called Good's Motel, we explored the surrounding area. This included a visit to the nice little town of Graaff-Reinet, seeing some strange sculptures at the famous "Owl House" and a visit to a sheep farm. Finally, we left the Karoo and headed for the the coast and the town of Knysna, driving through some spectacular scenery in the Prince Alfred's pass on our way.

Day 13 - June 9

We slept quite well during the night. When we woke up at 0630 it was quite cold outside, though fortunately not as cold as expected. I don't think the temperature dropped below zero during the night. After a light breakfast and packing our stuff into the car, we left at 0745 and drove more or less straight to the Lesotho border.

Not so far from the "Gates of paradise" there is a signpost with signs showing the distance to some of the world's major cities. We had seen these in other countries before, but we were quite surprised to find one in the middle of Lesotho. According to the sign we were 10205 km away from Oslo, quite some distance!

At the Lesotho border we had a funny experience. May Tina was first in line as we waited to show our passports. The woman working there had a strange look on her face as she studied May Tina's passport. "I have not seen this one before"" she finally said, and proceeded to show the passport to the other people inside the office. "Look, here's a new passport we haven't seen before!" They were all very excited about it! I guess Lesotho doesn't have visitors from Norway very often..

Back into South Africa, Kurt announced that he had a surprise for us. In itself, this was not very surprising because he always had "surprises" for us, but this turned out to be the best surprise of them all. We drove to a small town called Wepener, which looked a lot like Ficksburg, i.e. quite nice. Here we stopped at a place called Lord Frasers Guesthouse to have a proper breakfast.

According to Kurt the breakfast here was the best in the world. When somebody claims that a place has "the best food in the world", it usually means that the food is very good, but nobody seriously believes it to really be "the best in the world". However, in this case I'm inclined to believe that Kurt's claim was very accurate, because I just can't see how the food could possibly have been any better!

We both ordered a chicken mayonaisse sandwich at 9R, each receiving a large plate with two sandwiches, french fries and salad. I also had a strawberry milkshake. I am sure that this was the ultimate breakfast experience -- everything was absolutely perfect!

We ate outside in a very beautiful garden. Someone had left the water running during the night, creating a beautiful ice pattern in one of the trees. Temperature must therefore obviously have dropped below zero last night, but even so early it was quite pleasant sitting outside. We recommend Lord Fraser's Guesthouse very highly, and I think everyone in the group agreed about this.

We were now in the Free State and it was clear that Afrikaans was the main language here. All signs were in Afrikaans first and then English, and some were only in Afrikaans. In the beginning I thought the Free State looked somewhat better than Lesotho, but after having driven for a while the scenery became more and more desolate. It started resembling a desert except that there were quite a few bushes around. It was also mostly flat, except for some mountains which looked like sand heaps. We seemed to be driving for ages without seeing any houses or other kinds of civilization.

After a while we came onto the N1, which is South Africa's main road and runs through the whole country. Only stopping briefly for lunch, we drove on the N1 for a while before turning south. Just as we were really getting tired of all this driving, we suddenly stopped at a place called Good's motel. Time was now around 1600.

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that Good's motel was situated in the middle of nowhere! There was absolutely nothing else around! This area was known as the Karoo and the scenery looked pretty much the same wherever you looked, desert with some bushes and very flat.

However, this turned out to be the best accomodation so far, if thinking about space. We had a huge room with private toilet and bath. The only drawback was the lack of electric heating, but fortunately we were given lots of blankets to help us through the cold nights. Our group seemed to be the only guests at the motel. Considering the surroundings, this was not really surprising!

Checking out the area was done very quickly! Most interesting was the animals belonging to the people running the motel. They had several pigs, donkeys, and at least five dogs.

We were really getting spoilt with good food today! Breakfast had been the best ever, and dinner turned out to be the best one in Africa so far! On the menu was lots of South African specialities, but unfortunately I can't remember the names exactly. Especially good was one thing called Bobotie, which looked kind of similar to Lasagne and tasted just wonderful!

After dinner there again was plenty of time to relax. Some of us played cards while others were watching the Robin Hood movie with Kevin Costner on one of the television channels. I just realised then that this was the first television set that I'd seen for about two weeks, but I definitely hadn't had time to miss it very much!

May Tina also had the time to cuddle with some of the five dogs during the evening. In the end we went to bed at the usual time of 2200.

Day 14 - June 10

We woke up at 0730. Without electric heating the room had become very cold during the night, so it was a good thing we had those blankets to keep us warm. The day started with a typical English breakfast, after which we left for the town of Graaff-Reinet, located about 50km from our motel.

It was quite a nice little town, situated in the middle of the semi-desert of the Karoo. The architecture was very nice, and even the shacks outside the town center looked better than usual.

We were given two hours on our own for exploring Graaff-Reinet , which was enough since it was a rather small town. During this period we had time to visit three small museums, but unfortunately none of these made much of an impression on us. In fact, as I write now, I can hardly remember what they were all about, except that they had something to do with Graaff-Reinet of course. I suppose the reward would have been greater if we had been better prepared and read somewhat more about Graaff-Reinet before coming here. (None of our travel guides wrote very much about it.)

At 1130 we all gathered at the car, and drove back where we had come from. However, before reaching Good's motel, we left the highway and drove on an extremely dusty road for quite a while. We ended up in a very small town called Nieuw Bethesda, which was definitely right in the middle of nowhere. The main (and probably only) attraction here is the Owl House.

The Owl House used to be the private home of a woman called Helen Martins. Apparently she developed some mental problems and decided to devote her life to building various sculptures in her back yard. She spent the last 25 years of her life and all her resources working on this. When she committed suicide in 1978 by drinking caustic soda, the whole back yard was full of statues. After this tragic ending, her property was recognised as a work of art and turned into a museum.

We were very impressed with the sculptures and thought the whole place looked really nice in a weird sort of way. All the statues are of grey cement and they are grouped very closely together. There wasn't much space left for walking around in. The reason the place is called the Owl House is that many of the sculptures were of owls. She also seemed to have a fascination for old Egypt and biblical figures.

Now it was time for lunch, so Kurt drove us to a "nice" place that he had discovered where we could eat. Unfortunately, his definition of "nice" did not seem to match the definition of most other people, as we stopped in a horrible area right next to a graveyard(!). Though, I suspect there weren't too many better places around...

After having eaten our Tuna sandwiches, we left the graveyard at 1430 and drove to a sheep farm not very far away. The couple who ran the sheep farm gave us a guided tour and explained everything about wool production to us. There are lots of sheep in Norway, so this wasn't really the most exotic and exciting part of our trip. More interesting was their exhibition of several fossils and other geological things that had been found in this area.

Several old bushman paintings had been discovered on the farm, so we walked a few hundred meters from the farm house to take a look at them. They were quite simple drawings, but apparently it was possible to extract a whole lot of information from them. The woman from the farm gave us an in-depth explanation of the meaning of the various symbols.

Finally, we drove back to Good's motel, arriving at 1700. This gave us just enough time to relax and take a shower before dinner. After having driven on dust roads the whole day we were really dirty now!

Dinner was good today as well, though not quite as exceptional as yesterday. We had pork chops and lamb meat. The rest of the evening was spent relaxing. The next day we were leaving so May Tina had to say goodbye to the dogs. This took quite a while because one of them was very overweight and it kept sitting on her lap, refusing to move...

I played cards with Claire, Lone and Sandra for much of the evening, and didn't get to get to bed before 2330 because our last game took ages to finish. Amazingly, this was the latest I'd gone to bed so far(!)

Day 15 - July 11

We got up at 0700 and had another English breakfast. While eating we were informed that temperature outside was -5.9C, which was definitely the coldest so far. However, as the sun came up it didn't take long for the temperature to rise to a pleasant level.

We packed all our stuff into the car, and after some hours of driving, only stopping in a small town for a toilet break, we finally left the Karoo behind us. Now came one of the most scenic drives of the whole tour as we started descending Prince Alfred's pass through the Outeniqua Mountains. This place forms the barrier between the dry Karoo and the socalled Garden Route area. We drove on a very narrow dust road for almost two hours, and the scenery around was magnificent with steep mountains, huge drops and lots of trees.

About halfway through the mountains, we stopped in a nice location to have lunch, the usual sandwiches. Finally, we arrived in Knysna at around 1430. Knysna is a city on the coast of the Indian Ocean, right in the middle of the socalled Garden Route , an area which would remind us quite a bit of Norway. It was very green, even now in the winter time, with lots of trees everywhere.

Our first stop was at another African market where lots of handmade souvenirs were sold. However, it was neither as big nor as good as the market we had visited in Swaziland. Besides there weren't any space left in the car for more large souvenirs, so most people were content with just browsing.

Then we drove into the center of Knysna for a light meal at a place called the Belgian Coffee House. I ordered a Chicken Mayonaisse sandwich and a milkshake, which was the same meal we had eaten at Lord Fraser's in Wepener a few days ago. Normally I would have said that the food at the Belgian Coffee House was pretty good, but now it became a huge disappointment because I kept comparing it with that wonderful meal at Lord Fraser's.

We now left the center of Knysna behind us and drove for about 25 minutes to the Drifters Knysna Inn, which was located deep inside the forest. Looking around, one could easily be fooled into thinking that we were back in Norway, because the surroundings really looked like a typical Norwegian forest. However, according to a sign on the the way here, there were elephants roaming around in the area, which we don't have in Norway! Accomodation here was in lovely wooden huts, each with two rooms and two persons in each room, and sharing a bathroom with the other room.

After unpacking, May Tina, Lisa and myself went for a very short walk in the forest. There wasn't time for much more because it was May Tina's, Julie's and my turn to help preparing dinner today. Kurt told me to supervise the work, which turned out to be a very wise decision.

Supervision included the important tasks of making a fire and playing some rugby. Having not had much experience with Rugby before, I however started out pretty good by "scoring a try" within a few seconds, which apparently was a good thing to do. The euphoria didn't last long though, and soon I was almost injured due to a ruthless tackle from behind by Kurt. In real football (soccer), this would have been an instant sending off, but in Rugby this apparently was a good thing to do. I really prefer football.

According to May Tina, she and Julie were left with most of the work with preparing dinner. Anyway, thanks to my supervision, dinner turned out to be excellent and consisted of chicken with rice and cabbage salad.

After dinner we relaxed for the rest of the evening. Some of us played cards, while others stayed up doing their part in supporting the alcohol industry. As usual, we went to bed around 2200.