South Africa Travels Blog

About 120 km west of Upington, a town located in the Northern Cape, South Africa.
Augrabies, a Hottentot name, means ‘place of great noise’, which accurately describes the thundering roar as the falls plummet 56 m into a 20m wide ravine – the largest gorge through granite on earth. Author Lawrence Green described his impressions in his book. ‘To the Rivers End’.
It is the rock that remains vivid in the memory, the masses of black and grey granite, the steep rock walls of the canyon. Mile after mile of gigantic rock faces, washed and polished by the floods of centuries, naked slippery, steep and deadly.

Along the Augrabies Falls’s 18km length of ravine, the river drops a further 35 m in a series of spectacular rapids. the depth of the pool below the main fall is 130 m and according to legend, a fortune in diamonds lies at the bottom washed down by the river from sources inland, but the sheer weight of water cascading down the cataract prevents investigation.

Augrabies Falls in the Northern Cape, South Africa

Augrabies Falls is an outstanding example of corrosive action of water on large masses of granite; the view from the suspension bridge over the main falls provides an inkling of how this process takes place over the millennia.

There are many interesting rock formations caused by the weathering of rock by water.

The giant needle on the side of the ravine opposite the main building, is perhaps the most impressive, standing several metres high.

Rainfall is slight and occurs mainly during the first 4 months of the year; a rich variety of plants have adapted well to the arid environment. These include Camel thorn, whitekaree, wild olive, karoo boer-bean and many species of aloe.

The Northern Cape this patchwork of dramatic contrasts and extremes reflect facets of Nature at her most implacable, as alien in places as a lunar landscape – stark, arid and marked by haphazard outcroppings of crags and giant rocks piled high.Across vast expanses of space and silence, the Northern Cape antelope abound, where spartan vegetation has adapted in ingenious ways to drought and blazing summer sunshine.

Northern Cape vegetation

The Northern Cape has unpredictable thunderstorms – startling sometimes in intensity – occasionally bringing solace to a thirsty land. And when they do, as if in reparation for patience and endurance, the plains and valleys are transformed into a mosaic of ephemeral spring flowers, gold and purple, pink and white, stretching into infinity. Namaqualand (an arid region of South Africa, extending along the west coast over 600 miles (970 km) and covering a total area of 170,000 square miles) in bloom is a breathtaking spectacle – and one of the wonders of the world.
The Northern Cape as a whole is fresh and unpolluted, with skies of brilliant burning clarity, embellished frequently with banks of iridescent clouds and sunsets bright as burnished copper. Distant mirages shimmer on roads flanked by telephone poles – at times the only evidence of man’s encroachment.

A high-flying wilderness plateau named the Karoo (a Hottentot word ‘land of thirst’) covers much of the southern region of the Northern Cape, while the Orange-Namaqua region comprises the lower orange River Valley, Bushmanland, Namaqualand and part of the Kalahari Desert.

In the northern most corner of the Northern Cape Province the borders meet with the Republic of Namibia, Botswana at its apex with the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park.