Through the Karoo, over the Orange River, and onto Gariep Dam

There are few things that make me feel as free and adventurous as being out on the open road with no plans. Nowhere to be immediately, no accommodation booked and no real clue where you plan on spending the night. How often does one really have the luxury of available time to allow you to do this? We usually plan our holidays down to a tee, in an attempt to maximise on the free time and fit in as much of whatever we enjoy as possible. I think one of my new years resolutions might have to be ‘plan less but do more’.
So here we were, driving north (or at least in a northerly direction) on the N1. Straight through Beaufort West and headed to, well we were not sure yet. We passed through Three Sisters, which really was nothing more than the three Koppies known as the Three Sisters, and on through Colesburg.
The day was starting to wear on a bit now, having stopped at every farm stall in the Karoo we could find in search of Karoo Oysters. Now the Search for Karoo Oysters is an activity in itself. I assume they only became well known, to some at least, after Justin Bonello of ‘Cooked in Africa’ fame, wrote a recipe for this delicacy of the Karoo. However, as far as our search went, nobody had ever heard of Karoo Oysters and even fewer people could understand, after having found out what they were, why we would possibly want to eat them to start with. For those of you who do not know, Karoo Oysters are sheep’s balls. As far as I understand it you boil them, but we will leave that whole story for another day, when I can actually find somewhere that sells them.
We were starting to near Bloemfontein now and the decision that had to be made was: do we spend the night in a city, do we keep on pushing through to ‘who knows where’ or do we find something closer? Well, I did not want to spend a night in a big city, my idea of holidays being about getting as far away from cities as possible. So the only thing left was to drive until we found what we were looking for, or at least what we thought we were looking for. Suddenly, the answer was right in front of us. We drove over the Orange River and entered the Orange Freestate and shortly thereafter we saw a sign to Gariep Dam. I remembered seeing Gariep on the map and knew it was a very large body of water, so the split second decision was made. We shot to the left onto the turn off for Gariep, just in time not too miss it all together. A bit more driving, one more corner and the dam almost unexpectedly filled up the view in front of us. It still amazes me how some things have to be seen to be understood, and this body of water was one of them, something that could not be fairly represented on a map.
We quickly found an available campsite in the very busy Forever Resorts, right on the side of the dam and got our tents up for another night on the road. A brief swim, a good look around and it was time to get moving again the next day. However, we all left thinking: one day we’ll be back and next time we’ll bring a ski boat.