Driving up Heatherbank Road between Charlo and Lorraine, one could easily make a head move and think you are driving past a farm and not necessarily still in the middle of the city.
We decided to break away to the Tsitsikamma for the day and rather than just driving in and out on the N2, we took the scenic R102. The three biggest industries in the area are forestry, tourism and dairy so everywhere along the way you pass plantations, dairy farms and accommodation and activity establishments. What we didn't expect to encounter was a roadblock made up of cattle. As we crested a little hill I realised that there was something in…
I am way behind on my blogging. Like in "get Dr Strange in here with the Time Stone and send me back 6 months so I can try to start and catch up" behind. Life is getting in the way and life is made up of work, family, kids, sport, etc, etc, etc... That plus having a teenager in the house that occupies my laptop all evening, which have now conked out for the third time in a year. The laptop,…
Everybody knows the Winelands in the Western Cape based around Stellenbosch, Paarl and Franschhoek. Then there is the rapidly developing Plettenberg Bay Wine Route. But did you know Port Elizabeth also have a wine farm? The Theescombe Estate Wine Farm is located on a 2-hectare smallholding in the Theescombe on the western side of Port Elizabeth. It's not quite a big commercial wine operation yet, but they do make wine and sell it from the farm. But why is it…
It feels like most people I speak to about travelling in the Karoo Heartland of the Eastern Cape have been to Graaff-Reinet, yet many didn't venture much further to also visit Nieu-Bethesda. Nieu-Bethesda truly is a very special village located barely 30 minutes from Graaff-Reinet and have a truly off the beaten track feeling to it. I say off the beaten track because that is literally what it is. No tar roads in the village, no street lights, no ATM,…
I took this picture on a recent visit to Lowlands Country House in the Karoo Heartland outside Cradock. The scene just grabbed me and if I was a painter then I would have loved to paint it. It really shows the importance of water in this arid environment and how it can change things from brown to green.
Would you guess that this picture was taken in the middle of Port Elizabeth? It is the area of small holdings between Charlo, Lovemore Heights and Lorraine. Literally a farm in the middle of the city. The pic was snapped from The Pink Fig coffee shop on Heatherbank Road.
The brown stubble covered fields in the Overberg during summer isn't always perceived as the most beautiful scenery by travelers.That is until you look a little closer, especially just before sunset.
Driving through the Overberg region of the Western Cape in late winter and spring you are met with rolling hills covered in green and yellow. By the time summer comes around the grains like wheat, oats and barley as well as the canola have been harvested leaving nothing more than field after field of brown stubble and scattered hay bales.
The Overberg landscape changes with the seasons with the best time to travel through the area being August and September. That is when you will find green grain fields with wheat, oats and barley, interspersed by yellow canola fields, in splendorous full bloom.