Greg has recently become very interested in photography, and wanted to go and see the flowers up in the Namaqualand and Karoo areas. He dragged me out of bed at 4 in the morning- grumpy and fairly incoherent, looking like the oros/ tyre man in greg's down jacket, I was stuffed into the car where I promptly passed out for the next 2 hours or so while Greg drove the four and a half hour drive to Nieuwoudtville. Why Nieuwoudtville you may well ask? Well according to the Getaway magazine that is the place to go to see the best flowers of the season, and the accompanying pictures in the magazine convinced my aspiring photographer boyfriend that it was simply the place we had to go to. As we neared Nieuwoudtville about four hours later we began to get increasingly worried as there were no flowers to be seen, the bare patchwork landscape of the Karoo greeted us at every turn, and the most exciting thing we saw were sheep on the side of the road. Grumpy and carsick, I began to despair I had been woken for nothing, and my poor boy started to look increasingly anxious as his thundercloud of a girlfriend began to rather unfairly blame him for the lack of flowers. We drove over the pass, where Greg's uncle had assured him "you look down over the surrounding countryside and all you can see are carpets of different coloured flowers." Well, not so for us! The bleak grey and brown landscape boasted a few yellow flowered bushes, if you looked closely enough, but nothing like we had read about in Getaway. Then as we got to the top of the pass, and approached the thriving metropolis (haha) of Nieuwoudtville, more and more flowers began to emerge, with a field of orange daisies greeting us on the side of the road. We had read the flowers only really emerge at noon, but Greg wanted to get there early to catch the sunrise at the waterfall. The waterfall was beautiful, although we arrived too late for the sunrise, we stayed there for quite a while, as Greg was trying to capture the motion of the water. The shadow of the cascading water on the rocks behind it looked like flames, and rainbows formed where the water hit the pool at the bottom. When we left the first flowers were starting to emerge and beautiful purple and pink daisies peeked out at us. We brought a koeksister from the people on the side of the road, which was sickly sweet and delicious, and then headed off to Loeriesfontein, as Gregory was set on seeing the Windpomp museum- why? Don't ask. Loeriesfontein turned out to be the place with the best flowers, the town itself is rundown and everything has a feeling of being part of a bygone era, and against the crumbling, dissolving houses the flowers seemed surprising and even more beautiful. Everywhere we looked fields of yellow, white, and orange daisies erupted in the midday sun, and even the poorest of homes boasted a garden unlike any to be found anywhere else in the world. We stopped at a rugby field and I fulfilled my dream of lying in a field of flowers- I'm such a loser, I blame Disney channel! However, as I lay down, I jumped up again in anguish, with a bottom full of prickles, which kind of served me right, but I was obviously unimpressed. I was then dragged to the Fred Turner Windpomp museum. Now, I still have no idea why Gregory was so set on seeing this place! It boasted a picture of Doris the sheep, supposedly the biggest sheep in the Karoo, discarded clothes and furniture from old Afrikaans families, glass and pottery, a dentist's chair, a beautifully ornate till, boxes and letters, and medicines. It was a bizarre collection, brief fragments of time long gone, and yet you could still imagine people living like that in Loeriesfontein, the whole town seemed to be an uncared- for memorial. We went outside and looked at the museum's impressive collection of thirty or so windmills from all over the world. Greg took a few photos, and then we headed back to Nieuwoudtville. Along the way we stopped at the Kokerboom Forest which was spectacular. Hills covered in the Kokerboom trees and flowers of every species and colour, greeted us, and we parked the car and walked among them, Greg taking pictures while I made a daisy chain. Eventually the sun got too hot for us, and we had to leave to find something to drink- on our way back we were amazed to see all the flowers that had emerged, that we didn't see when we arrived that morning. Stopping in the quaint town of Nieuwoudtville before we left, we brought drinks and Gregzi lamented the fact that the biltong shop was closed, and then we began the four and a half hour trek home. Worth it? I think so, although perhaps we should have waited and gone later, as apparently the flowers were not yet at their peak. It was also a long way to go for a day, so if I went again I think I would try to find somewhere to overnight- the guest farms have amazing accomodation although it can be quite pricey.
