The Karoo can be unnervingly quiet for city dwellers, particularly the hours of darkness, when unfamiliar calls carry across the kloof in the stillness. Was that a baboon calling from the crags, a nocturnal insect, or maybe even a leopard?
A quick trip to the Ceres Karoo/Tankwa found us lodged in a secluded kloof at the very edge of the Cederberg mountains,
with no other visitors in the well-spaced cottages. We were entirely alone - something to be sought eagerly during daylight hours, yet strangely fearsome once darkness descended. This is one of the truly dark sky areas of the country, with a Bortle 1 rating, even better than Sutherland, and as a result the Milky Way lives up to its name - a milky white splash across the firmament, unbroken by individual star patches as the billions that make up our home galaxy become accessible to our eyes. We should have spent hours gazing up and outwards in wonderment at the vastness of our insignificance, but those unfamiliar sounds with no way of knowing any distance kept us inside after a pathetically short time.
How marvellous it must have been for the original inhabitants of these mountains, who were intimately acquainted with every living creature, many of which were recorded for posterity in the thousands of rock paintings scattered throughout the range. They would have known which should be feared and which were merely coexisting in that harsh environment. The very fact that they stayed in the area must be evidence that water was always available, although in limited amounts, and the thick salt deposits in the waterways reveal the ancient history of this once seabed. Today's inhabitants filter the borehole water up to four times before drinking.
We scoffed when the farmer told us guests from Europe were frightened at night. Perhaps we were too quick to judge, or were just a little too far out of the comfort zone. I am sure that a longer stay would have soothed our nerves, but there are indeed leopards.
