We love road trips! This post features three of our favorite small town stops during our spring adventures in South Africa.

Loeriesfontein, in the Northern Cape Province, began in 1894 as a mining town, and we spent a couple of days exploring the area. A highlight of our visit was walking through the Fred Turner Windpump Museum, one of just four such museums in the world. While most of the 29 assembled structures were built in South Africa, two of them originated in Canada and the United States.

We didn’t go to Sutherland because it is a small sheep farming town in the Karoo or because it is the most southern place where diamonds were discovered in South Africa or because it’s one of the coldest places on the African continent or because it’s halfway between Chile and Australia. We went because of the large, mountaintop telescopes just outside of the town. The South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) owns and operates four major telescopes on the high plateau. This location was selected for its year-round clear skies, semi-arid setting, plus absence of light and other pollution. SAAO also collaborates with scientists from Poland, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Korea, Japan, and India who work at the other onsite telescopes. 

The best feature of our SAAO daytime tour was SALT, the South African Large Telescope. Operating fully since 2011, the giant mirror collects 25 times more light than any of the previous large telescopes on the continent. Africa’s Giant Eye on the Universe is the largest single optical telescope in the southern hemisphere and among the largest in the world. Germany, the United States, Poland, India, the United Kingdom and New Zealand helped South Africa pay for the telescope. SALT researchers have discovered distant galaxies and for the first time witnessed the colliding of neutron stars. 

Our first (and so far only) stay in a corbelled house occurred on a sheep farm about 30 kilometers south of Canarvon in the Northern Cape Province. This type of beehive-shaped stone structure was often built by the Karoo-area pioneers in the early 1800s because they didn’t have any other available building materials. They used a mixture of hay or straw, soil, and water to hold flat stones together. Interestingly, soil from tall, aboveground ant nests worked best because of its high lime content. After the walls reached about 2 meters in height, the stone dome was constructed. Early corbelled houses consisted of just one “beehive” with only one window and a natural stone exterior. Over time some of the farmers in the area added whitewashed plaster to the outer layer of stones. Our comfortable guesthouse had four “beehives” (bedroom, kitchen, eating/living area, and bathroom) each with a single window and a white exterior.