Boock's blog: Refuge among the olives

BEAUFORT WEST - We holed up for a couple of nights on the edge of the Great Karoo, Jerry and I.

A quick online search had revealed a little hide-out called Olive Grove Guest Farm, 15km out of Beaufort West, and it was there we headed after leaving Centurion - a drive that would take about ten hours.

Unlike the previous bucket of bolts, Jerry (the car) made all the right moves at all the right times as he negotiated Johannesburg's ring road, and soon the familiar place names began peeling off in a deeply relieving pattern: Kroonstad, Winburg, the Verkeerddevlei Toll Plaza.

By the time we'd crossed the Orange and negotiated Colesburg it was late afternoon, the vast plains were competing with an assortment of conical and flat-topped koppies, and the place was looking quite perfectly African.

There's a certain sense of spirituality to this region; it's hard to define it in any other way. You can be left spellbound by the endless scope and faraway horizons, well - as much as anyone can when they're hurtling down the N1 at 120kph plus.

That in itself is no big deal over here because the N1 has to be the straightest piece of tarmac in the Southern Hemisphere.

It's not so much speed that worries people travelling on this road as it is driver fatigue, and loss of concentration.

Consequently, every so often you're likely to be subjected to a "Driver Alertness Test", effectively a series of coarse strips of tarmac, apparently designed to wake up the sleepyheads amongst us.

As useful as they might be, they shouldn't prove necessary for the first-time traveller, because this ever-changing vista is such that only the sensory-challenged could avoid feeling fascinated and enthralled throughout. I've never seen the planet looking so big, not even from the air.

Beaufort West, the junction town that links the N1, N12 and the R61, was established in 1818 to bring law and order to the region, an archetypal badlands previously populated by outlaws, ivory-traders and gun-runners.

A drive through its main street gives the impression it's now made up solely of budget accommodation houses and eateries, which isn't altogether surprising. It apparently services 10,000 motorists a day during the peak season.

It's the oldest settlement in the Great Karoo, an ancient plateau basin once the domain of swamp and Dinosaur, now a semi-desert that's home to a specialist sheep industry, as well as springbok, wildebeest, and kudu - a large type of antelope.

For those itching to one day visit another planet, this may be your next best chance. The entire terrain - about 30,000 square miles - is covered in broken granite and rock, much of which bears fossils from the earliest swamp creatures. Small, ground-hugging plants battle for survival, creek beds are invariably dry.

It is the most soulful, lonely place, a rubble-strewn wonderland flanked by mountains so perfectly flat that you'd swear some giant device had cleaved off their conicals with the assistance of a sprit-level. Here, it seems, you are supposed to be alone with yourself.

About 15 minutes out of town lies Lombardskraal Farm, incorporating the Olive Grove Guest Farm and its seven identical two-bedroom chalets, each named after a variety of olive and equipped with, amongst other things, satellite television.

The place is a genuine refuge, so far away from the road that the silence is complete, and so free and uncontained that - at night - it's easy to imagine that you might be just alone in the middle of nowhere, with only the stars for company.

Like all sensible farmers, Ian and Sonia Taylor recognised the need for variety when they purchased the 7000ha property three years ago. Apart from the accommodation business they also run about 360 dorper breeding ewes, 420 dohne merino, 300 springbok and an assortment of wildebeest and blesbok. If that doesn't sound like much for the size of the farm, it's worth noting that the land is rocky, barren and unforgiving, and capable of supporting just one small stock unit for every six hectares. Rainfall is low, about 230mm a year.

There's also the 7,100 olive trees, mostly made up of the Mission variety for table and oil production, with the balance from a strain named Frantoio, which teems with pollen and aids the fertilisation process. A rare river dam stores water for emergency irrigation, but hasn't been needed lately because of unseasonal rains.

From a guest's point of view, you won't want for something to do at Olive Grove. The star-field at night is a mind-blowing attraction in its own right; you can hunt for 250 million year old fossils (they're all over the place), walk a trail that takes you to a dam and a custom-made bird-hide, or opt for some horse-riding or quad-bike action.

I did none of these things of course, it seemed there was just as much to be gained from hanging around the homestead, and being indulged by some of the most magnificent Afrikaner hospitality you could imagine.

It seemed these marvellous people simply weren't happy unless you were tucking into some of their delicious springbok or karoo lamb, or quaffing extravagant amounts of their equally delectable house wines. Once or twice I thought about drawing the line and crying 'enough'...but one doesn't like to offend.