South Africa travel – a 6000+km educational tour taken by a homeschooling family with 5 kids under 10 to see the sights and historic places of interest of South Africa.
Footprints around South Africa
by Shirley Erwee
On 17 September 2008, we left home on a journey of over 6000km, through 7 provinces of South Africa, to show our children some of the many wonders of our fascinating country, its history and environment, as well as to visit family scattered across the land.
Since we are using Footprints On Our Land to study South Africa this year, we wanted to visit some of the places we have learned about.
Although it would have made more sense historically to go up the Garden Route from the Western Cape and tour the country in an anti-clockwise direction, I decided to do it in reverse in case we ‘ran out of steam’ as we have toured the Garden Route before. (Read about our Garden Route Tour with 11 kids and 2 moms!)
Western Cape – Sutherland & Karroo
On our first day, we drove to Sutherland, in the Karroo, so that we could visit the Astronomical Observatory. We did the night tour, where we all got turns to view various planets, stars and constellations through two huge outdoor telescopes. It was bitterly cold but we enjoyed recognizing planets we had previously learned about and seeing them in greater detail than we could with our naked eyes.
The next day, we traveled via back roads towards Kimberley, marveling at the vast open spaces of the Karroo landscape. It was good to see in real life the scrubby vegetation and the koppies on the landscape that we had read about in one of our Little Footprints stories.
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Northern Cape – Kimberley
At Kimberley we stayed on a game farm, Tarentaalrand Safari Lodge, about 20km outside of town. Due to a choir festival, we could not get accommodation in Kimberley, but this farm turned out to be one of the highlights of our trip.
As we drove up the farm road from the gate, we were greeted first by a lonely gemsbok, then a herd of waterbuck, then zebra and then to our delight we came face to face with 3 huge rhinos. We stopped and wondered how we’d fare if they decided they didn’t like our Kombi!
As the sun went down we heard an unmistakable roaring – lions. We realized that the lion picture on the sign at the gate wasn’t just for show and we wondered if there were fences between us and them! The next morning we discovered that there was a lion camp just a little way behind our chalet, where the owners breed lions.
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The Big Hole
On route to Kimberley, we had read one of our Footprints stories about a little girl and her family who moved to Kimberley in the days of New Rush and how the diamond fever affected them and others and how claim-owners had sifted the dirt in the search of ‘whoppers’.
While waiting for our tour of the Big Hole, we wandered around the historic village and then did a ‘diamond dig’ ourselves.
For R20 an attendant gave us a bucket of (fake) diamond-containing gravel, which we had to sift and sort on a sorting table. In no time we were all focused on the grit, trying to spot replica diamonds. It was great fun and made our diamond story come to life.
We were impressed with the new visitors’ centre that has recently been built. After a 20 minute movie about the history of Kimberley and the diamond mining business, a tour guide took us outside and explained how the mine head gear and shaft worked. Then we were taken underground to tour a replica mine, complete with mock-explosives. After that we could explore the museum centre and go into the vault where a display of real diamonds, cut and uncut were on view.
Finally, we walked out onto the new platform overlooking the Big Hole. It was awesome to think that such a hole was made by men with very primitive equipment by today’s standards. However, through our reading we discovered that the biggest man made hole on earth is not the Kimberley Hole but a similar diamond mine at Jagersfontein in the Free State!
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On Safari
In the afternoon, our hostess, Erika, at Tarentaalrand invited us to play with three little week-old lion cubs that they were hand-raising. This proved to be the favourite experience of the trip. We were amused by the funny grunting sounds they made and how clumsily they walked.
After about 45 minutes with the cubs, a driver arrived with a ‘safari’ tour vehicle to take us on a free game viewing drive around the farm. Once again we got fairly close to the three rhino, sable, buffalo, wildebeest, zebra, springbok and various other buck. A novel experience!
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On the morning of our departure, we joined a group of tourists that had come to watch the lions being fed huge pieces of animal carcasses, which were left in special enclosures within the lion camps. We were amazed at their size and the strength of their jaws!
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Free State – Harrismith
After two nights on the farm, the children were curious to reach Harrismith, where we were staying over at a ‘real Bed ‘n Breakfast’ as they called it. After being treated to a breakfast fit for kings in a fascinating home, we departed for Mpumalanga.
On route, we finished reading the abridged story of Jock of the Bushveld, which is also included in our Little Footprints programme. We stayed in a chalet at the Jock of the Bushveld Huts, just outside Barberton.
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Mpumalanga – Barberton & Pligrim’s Rest
The next morning we drove into Barberton to find the statue of Jock and take some pictures of him and then headed for Pilgrim’s Rest.
At lunch time, we stopped to picnic and the children swam at the Mac-Mac Pools – a spot we’d all like to visit again.After a refreshing break, we continued our drive, enjoying the scenery and we completed the reading aloud of another Footprints story about a girl living at Pilgrim’s Rest at the time of the Gold Rush.
As we drove down the mountain pass into the town of Pilgrim’s Rest, we tried to figure out which hill it was that our heroine, Katie, must have climbed to rescue her friend, Tom!
Once we got into the village, we looked around a little and then found out at the info centre where to go to do gold panning.
We were shown the way down to the little stream by a guide, who pointed out some original claims of gold diggers from days gone by. He dug up some gravel from the bed of the stream, tipped it into our pans and showed us how to swirl the water to get rid of the gravel.
We were delighted to see some of the ‘yellow colour’ that we had read about – gold dust! Although none of us were as skilled as our guide, we managed to find a few flecks of gold, but alas, no nuggets!
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We spent the night at Graskop and the next day, we climbed up to see the panoramic view of the Blyde River Canyon from the viewpoint at God’s Window and then visited the Bourke’s Luck Potholes – which are spectacular holes eroded into the rock by the river.
After a long hot day we set off to Hazyview, near the Paul Kruger gate to the Kruger National Park, which was next on our agenda.
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Kruger National Park
We were told to get to the Park early as most animals are active just after dawn. We did and were not disappointed, but we were also amazed at how many animals we saw throughout the day, in spite of the heat.
On our drive we referred to various reference books, but the children were especially delighted to identify many of the animals we had read about in
A Bushveld Safari, especially all those described in the ‘multi-storey restaurant’ about the herbivores of the veld. We also saw a lilac-breasted roller, which is the strikingly, colourful bird depicted on the front cover of this book.
At the end of our first day, we had seen 4 of the Big 5 – only the nocturnal leopards had eluded us. We had also photographed plenty of other animals at close range and my toddler had extended her “amimal” vocabulary to include not only ‘dog’ and ‘birdie’ but also ‘raffe (giraffe), buck, monkey, buffalo, elephant and rhino.
The next day we again visited the Park, but this time we were sleeping over in the KNP at Berg-en-Dal camp. Our early start was rewarded once more with a sighting of two young male lions walking down the road one after the other. (Whoever said lions don’t walk down the street in Africa?)
After another successful day of game viewing, we checked in at our cottage and then took an early evening walk around the camp circumference. We ended up having a walk with 3 elephants! An electric fence separated us as we walked alongside them for a few kilometers towards the dam in front of the main buildings of the camp. It was awesome!
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Kwa-Zulu Natal – Ballito
Our next day was a very long drive, from Mpumalanga down to Kwa-Zulu Natal where we visited my brother in Ballito.
Unfortunately, we were pressed for time and could not sight-see along the way, but we read about the places we passed from various reference books about South Africa.
We read about how Piet Retief had left his party of Voortrekkers in the vicinity of Harrismith and how he had negotiated with Dingaan for land in Natal. We read about Blood River and about Shaka and the Mfecane as we neared Ulundi where his headquarters had been.
At Ballito, after 10 days of traveling we spent 4 days there just relaxing on the beach or watching satellite TV, which was a novelty, since we don’t have TV at home!
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Eastern Cape – Boknes
After a long drive, through the old Transkei to stay with my parents at Boknes in the Eastern Cape, we cancelled our planned educational tour of Settler country.
However, we did go and examine the remains of a Khoi-khoi midden (rubbish heap) on the dunes at Boknes. Being an ex-history teacher, my mom showed us how to identify a midden – piles of mussel shells, including bones, ash and remnants of pottery.
As I had expected before starting our trip, by the end of it we had had enough of sight seeing and just wanted to relax…so we stayed an extra day with my parents and then drove straight home without any further stops along the way.
We arrived home in Hermanus safely, thankful that our vehicle had been reliable all the way, and feeling that our lives and relationships had been enriched by wonderful experiences, precious memories and loads of photos of our trip and our amazing country!
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