South Africa Travels Blog

Kakamas is a small town located on the R64 just forty km west of Keimoes in South Africa’s Northern Cape.
The name means ‘poor pasture’ in the Hottentot language, actually a flagrant misnomer, as the town occupies a fertile valley on the Lower Orange River, being graced with vineyards, cotton and lucerne fields.

Waterwheels are still in use along the canals.

Rose quartz, amethyst, tourmaline and feldspar are found in the vicinity.

Just outside Kakamas near a grove of date palms is a monument honouring German soldiers killed in a clash with South African troops in 1915.

A remarkable peach once cultivated here transformed the South African canned fruit industry, more than doubled its total output within two years. Though no longer commercially grown in this area, the Kakamas peach tree grows wild.

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 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.