Pizza, World Famous in Nieu-Bethesda

The Karoo Heartland village of Nieu-Bethesda is weird and quirky, but in a nice way.  It has a lot of interesting nooks and crannies which include a couple of fascinating attractions, authentic Nieu-Bethesdian accommodation and slightly off the regular type of mainstream restaurants and eateries.  When you pass a little restaurant with a sign saying Bruno's Alfresco Pizzeria with the added tagline of "World Famous in Nieu-Bethesda... then you know you want to check it out.  It also helps that I really love pizza.

 

So the quirkiness of Bruno's start with the fact that they are only open on a Friday evening.  At first I was surprised but then I understood why.  Nieu-Bethesda isn't the busiest of villages and there are a number of spots to eat at so they avoid being empty most nights and became the Friday night hangout.  Bruno's really is as authentic Southern Italian as you will get and with the eccentric Italian Swiss chef and owner Brunno at the wheel you, you are assured of the best thin based pizza in town.  World Famous, in Nieu-Bethesda.

As we were a decent sized group in town for a meeting the Monday morning, a special request to open on the Sunday night for us was granted and I was glad it was.  Not a lot of pizza places around where you can stand at the kitchen chatting to the cooks preparing the pizza or where you can peek into the pizza oven just before sticking your camera halfway in just to be shoo'd away because it's time to take the pizzas out.  No well drilled conveyor belt from a fast food pizza joint in the city.  No, local ladies making the pizza just the way they were trained by Bruno.  Mine was delectable.  Their special for the night, Kudu Salami Pizza.  Highly recommendable if you are in town.  

But, and this is a big but and I can't deny, that wasn't all.  Bruno had a surprise up his sleeve.  I heard rumours of a secret underground wine cellar.  Just stories or the truth?  I was told to ask Bruno himself, so I did.  He chuckled and there was a glint in his eye.  Yeah! Let's go.  The wine cellar isn't just a regular spot to store wine.  It literally is an underground space that feels like it's straight from a movie set.  Bruno had it built as a wine cellar but after a flood filled it up with water a few years ago he hasn't really kept wine down there.  He did show us a little something standing around the one corner and we got to taste the fruits of this little something afterwards.  Or rather what came from the fruits that went in there.  I can understand why he doesn't sell it.  It's a special little something for special visitors and we were special.  We got to see his wine cellar on a personal tour after all.   

Going digital at the Owl House

The last time I was at the Owl House in Nieu-Bethesda I got a nice picture of a gent standing in contemplation between the cement figures.  On this visit to the village I was at the Owl House with two friends and colleagues and I really thought there would be a good chance to catch one of them in deep contemplation at some stage.  Curse the digital age... Bwhahahahahaha.... The best I got was while one was taking a picture to post to Instagram and the other was taking a selfie. I love it!!!! They'll probably put out a hit on me when they see this post.

Why have you never visited Nieu-Bethesda?

It feels like most people I speak to about travelling in the Karoo Heartland of the Eastern Cape have been to Graaff-Reinet, yet many didn't venture much further to also visit Nieu-Bethesda.  Nieu-Bethesda truly is a very special village located barely 30 minutes from Graaff-Reinet and have a truly off the beaten track feeling to it.  I say off the beaten track because that is literally what it is.  No tar roads in the village, no street lights, no ATM, no petrol station and no night life other than crickets in the dark and the cow you have to swerve out for when it suddenly appears in your headlights.  What the village does have are tons of character (the good kind), history, interesting nooks and crannies, even more interesting people, good food and nostalgia that will stick to you like blackjacks to wool socks long after you have left.

I was going to do a long and detailed post about Nieu-Bethesda but decided that my pictures could easily do most of the talking.  For the rest you will have to visit the village yourself to discover.

Nieu-Bethesda, a town of Karoo landscapes, history, owls, dirt roads and (rusting in) piece

Not a tarred road or street light in sight where a traffic jam means two cars reaching an intersection at the same time perhaps twice a day

Nieu-Bethesda is one of the few places that still have leivore (farrows) with water flowing in them

The Owl House is what put Nieu-Bethesda on the map and well worth a visit

The late Helen Martins spent most of her life in the town and the latter part of it transforming her ordinary Karoo home into a place of colour and light.  Over the years she and her assistant Koos Malgas, used concrete and glass to create a multi-coloured house and fantasy garden.  In the Camel Yard visitors will find statues of owls, camels, wise men and much more and one can literally get lost In your own thoughts trying to take all of this in.  Shortly before her 79th birthday, Helen Martins committed suicide by drinking caustic soda.  It is said that at the time her eyesight was failing because of damage from ground glass and that depression was getting the better of her.  

Doesn't matter how many times I visit the Owl House, there is always something different to discover or some new angle to photograph 

One can't simply visit Nieu-Bethesda and not buy one of the hand made cement owls being sold outside the Owl House.  I still have the owl I bought on my first visit to the village in my garden.

The Nieu-Bethesda cemetery has graves dating back to the early days of the village with the one of Helen Martins with its cement owl headstone standing out 

The Karoo is famous for the fossils found there and Nieu-Bethesda seems to be right in the thick of things when it comes to fossil records.  The Kitching Fossil Centre in the village is well worth a visit.  The guide shows visitors how they clean the rock off the fossils and do a walking tour to the river bed to show you fossils in the rocks.

If you really want to learn more about fossils, Khoi San artifacts and rock paintings then you have to visit Ganora Guest Farm a little outside the village.  Ganora has one of the biggest private fossil collections in the country in their fossil museum and if they ever established a Jurassic Park in the Karoo then I would want to be with owner JP Steynberg as he knows everything there is to know about the prehistoric animals found in that area. 

Yes, that is the fossilised skull of a very small dinosaur

Don't think that a tour through the Ganora Fossil Museum would be a boring affair

The Karoo Heartland is known for it's amazing hospitality and farm stays are becoming more and more popular.  At Ganora our little group were just in time to help bottle feed the hanslammers (hand reared lambs).  Not the kind of experience that us city slickers are used to or get to do every day.  

My visit to Nieu-Bethesda was way too short, taking up only a Sunday afternoon and Monday morning before the meeting I had to attend.  Way too little to explore and experience properly.  One needs at least a weekend, arriving on the Friday afternoon and leaving on Sunday after lunch, to have a chance to get to know the town properly and visit at least a few places.  If you do want to know more, do check out this very comprehensive list of things to do in Nieu-Bethesda on the ECTOUR website. 

When it rains in Nieu-Bethesda

A couple of weeks ago I headed up to Nieu-Bethesda in the Karoo Heartland with a colleague for a tourism meeting.  En route we encountered the Fish River in full flow at Jansenville, puddles and pools next to the road approaching Graaff-Reinet and a very wet village at our destination.  The word Karoo comes from the Khoi language and means Place of Thirst, very appropriate for this arid region.  So it's not often that you see puddles of water in the road throughout the village.  Something I photographed with pleasure.

But puddles in the road wasn't what drew the oohhhh's and aaahhhh's from us though.  It was the Gats River that runs through the village.  It wasn't just running strong, it was running very high as well.  So high in fact that it was over the low water bridge.  Seeing all this water in this arid region totally made up for the fact that there wasn't any sunshine and blue skies to take nice pictures, which was part of the mission for the two days we were in town for.  Tourism meeting and nice pictures to use to promote Nieu-Bethesda and the Karoo Heartland.  

My companion on the trip, who is also a part-time mermaid, just couldn't get enough off all the water.  Luckily she didn't let her legs get wet, otherwise we could still be looking for her somewhere downstream.

Ganora Fossil Museum

When I grew up I wanted to be an archaeologist.  Somebody like Indiana Jones who discover lost cities and artifacts, dig up dinosaurs and made remarkable finds that would wow the world.  That dream kinda shattered when I found it it wasn't all quite as adventurous and glamorous.  Instead I went into tourism although the interest for archaeology is still there.  This interest truly got fed when I spent a night at Ganora Guestfarm out Nieu-Bethesda recently. 

 

In prehistoric times the Karoo was a huge inland swamp (and not a sea as some people claim) and 253 million years ago, during the Permian Period, the area around the present day Nieu-Bethesda was covered by big meandering rivers which flowed in a northerly direction.  The floodplains around these rivers teemed with prehistoric animals which died along the banks of the rivers, was covered with mud and got preserved as fossils.  This period was 50 million years before the first dinosaurs so the fossils in the Karoo pre-dates things like the famous T-Rex, Triceratops and Brachiosaurus.  One of the best places to go and see and learn about these fossils is Ganora Guestfarm and there is no better person to show you around than owner JP Steynberg.

When the Steybergs bought the farm in the 1990's they had no idea it contained a treasure trove of fossils and San (Bushmen) artifacts.  This they only discovered on a picnic in a riverbed on the farm a few months later.  That was the start of it and the rest, as they say, is history.  In 1998 they registered their private museum and today has one of the biggest private fossil and artifact collections in South Africa.  JP showed me around the museum and I literally didn't know where to look.  The collection truly is magnificent.  The fossils in the exhibit are on average about 280 million years old and comes from a time when mammal-like-reptiles roamed the earth.  As I said, from a pre-dinosaur time.  The collection also includes small models to give an indication of what these animals looked like, fossilised leaves from the Glossopteris trees and the Compasia dela Harpi fish fossil  of which they have the only complete example of in the world.  JP's passion for and knowledge of fossils comes through as soon as he starts talking and I was immediately sorry that I wouldn't have time to go out onto the farm with him to see fossils in their "natural" environment.

 

Next JP took me into the next room where the Bushman artifacts are on display.  Like the fossil museum this part of the museum is a registered museum as well and they keep careful record of where the artifacts were found and have cataloged them according to the law.  JP pointed out tools to grind seed and grain, arrow heads used to hunt and sharpened rock used to cut.  Also of interest is the ostrich egg shell beads.  Most of these came from caves and areas used as "workshops" on the farm and surrounding areas.  Again I cursed the fact that I had no extra time to go on a tour of the farm as I would have loved to see some of the rock paintings and natural shelters the San would have lived in.

 

It does mean that I have an excuse to return to Ganora for a weekend and give myself enough time to see all of it for myself.  Something I will seriously make work of.

Concrete, glass and colours at the Owl House

The Karoo Town of Nieu Bethesda is the kind of place everybody needs to try and visit at some stage in their lives.  Its not a big tourist orientated city but rather a small village that embrace their visitors.  The most famous attraction in Nieu Bethesda is the world renown Owl House.

 

The late Helen Martins spent most of her life in the town and the latter part of it transforming her ordinary Karoo home into a place of colour and light.  Over the years she and her assistant Koos Malgas, used concrete and glass to create a multi-coloured house and fantasy garden.  In the Camel Yard visitors will find statues of owls, camels, wise men and much more and one can literally get lost In your own thoughts trying to take all of this in.  Shortly before her 79th birthday, Helen Martins committed suicide by drinking caustic soda.  It is said that at the time her eyesight was failing because of damage from ground glass and that depression was getting the better of her.  

At present the Owl House is open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily in summer and from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. during winter. Entry is R50 per person for both adults and kids and R65 for a combo ticket for the Owl House and the nearby Kitching Fossil Centre.

Karoo Riverbed

A couple of months ago I spent a night at Ganora Guest Farm outside Nieu Bethesda.  What an amazing place!  Although I didn't have a lot of time but did get to do a tour of JP's Fossil Museum.  Unfortunately I didn't get to go and see the rock drawings on the farm.  Before heading into the village for the meeting I was there for I took a walk down to the river just below the homestead.  If it wasn't for my appointment I probably would have just plonked myself down on a rock and drank in the environment for an hour or two.   Being late winter there were no leaves on the trees and the grass was brown from severe frost they had during a particular cold snap but that still couldn't detract away from the true beauty of this part of the Karoo.

Karoo Heartland Churches

Looking through everything I have that still needs to be posted I decided to take three Karoo churches and make up one Random... Karoo churches post.  Just about every small town in the Karoo Heartland of the Eastern Cape has a remarkable church of some sort.

 

Cradock must have one of the most memorable Karoo Heartland churches there are.  It stands at the top of Church Street and is known as the ``Mother" Church.  The church was completed in 1868 on the same site as the first Dutch Reformed church in the town.  This church community was also the first in Cradock and was established in 1824, 10 years after the town received it's name.  The design of the church was based on the ``St Martins-in-the-Fields" church in Trafalgar Square in London. and the great South African statesman and first President, Paul Kruger, was christened here in 1826.  During the Anglo-Boer War, the roof of the church was used as a look-out post by the British soldiers who occupied the town.

On the other end of the spectrum you will also find churches that is a lot less imposing yet still has historical value to the area its located in.  In the village if Middleton you will find a Methodist church that is probably smaller than most houses.  The church was built in 1903 and only has 5 rows of seats.  It has services in it every Sunday for the residents of the village which is run by the Noupoort Christian Care Centre who owns the village and uses it as part of their rehabilitation process for drug and alcohol addicts.

 

A little further to the north west is the village of Nieu-Bethesda.  Built in 1905, the Dutch Reformed Church is the grandest edifice in the village, with its long gothic spire reaching to the sky.  A decline in the town resulted in a dwindling of the numbers of the congregation and the church has not had a permanent minister since 1961 with the Sunday service being performed by a minister from Graaff-Reinet.  There is some fine wooden carvings on the old church pews and the original chandeliers are quite unique. 

Roesemaat

Nieu-Bethesda in the Karoo is one of those interesting little towns that one just can't afford to miss.  Home to the Owl House, Kitching Fossil Centre, guesthouses, restaurants, a micro brewery and so much more yet the town (or should I perhaps call it a village?) doesn't have a petrol station, atm or even a tar road.  Every corner offers something new or interesting or, in this case, old and interesting.

Die Uilhuis in Nieu-Bethesda

Suid-Afrika is vol van klein dorpies met interessante verhale en plekke om te ontdek, maar een van die wat baie hoog op enige iemand se lys behoort te wees is die Uilhuis in die Karoodorp Nieu-Bethesda.  Nieu-Bethesda lê so 50km noord van Graaff-Reinet en is in 1838 deur Charles Murray, 'n Nederduitse Gereformeerde dominee van Graaff-Reinet, gestig.  Met die stigting van die dorp het hy gesê, "En laten wy deze plaats nu Bethesda noemen" vanwee die vrugbaarheid van die plek en die aanwesigheid van voldoende water.
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Nieu-Bethesda was die tuiste van Helen Martins (1897-1976) wat haar ouers se huis op die dorp geêrf het na hulle dood.  Miss Helen het verveeld geraak met haar lewe en omgewing en begin om die huis en tuin te versier met sement, glas en draad.  Sy het later standbeelde in die tuin begin bou en is geinspireer deur tekverse uit die bybel, die poësie van Omar Khayyam en verskeie kunswerke deur William Blake.  Koos Malgas het in 1964 vir haar begin werk en haar gehelp om standbeelde van uile, kamele en mense op te tower.  Die meeste van die mense in die tuin kyk en wys oos omdat Miss Helen so 'n fasinasie met die Ooste gehad het.
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Al die jare se werk in en om die huis met gebreekte glas het Helen Martin se oê aangetas en sy het begin blind word.  As gevolg van dit het sy in 1976 op die ouderdom van 78 selfmoord gepleeg deur bytsoda (caustic soda) te drink. Haar wens was dat die huis behoue sou bly as 'n museum en dit is hoe dit vandag nog is.  Die Uilhuis is regtig 'n plek waar jy jouself in jou eie gedagtes kan verloor.  In my eie tuin het ek 'n uil wat ek oorkant die pad van die Uilhuis gekoop het en dit herhinder my daagliks aan my besoek aan hierdie spesiale plek.

Windpomp and church tower

Two of the most typical things that you would associate small towns in the platteland (countryside) with are churches and windpompe (windpumps). They are to small towns as Aston Martins and girls are to James Bond. In this scene in Nieu Bethesda in the Karoo I got them both in one shot. James Bond driving with the top down and a beautiful girl next to him.

Nieu Bethesda Fossil Centre

I love Indiana Jones and when I was younger I wanted to be an archaeologist discovering lost civilisations and crawling through jungles looking for artifacts. I still have an great interest in archaeology and have a small collection of fossils and other interesting bits which I hope to still add to in future. So on a visit to Nieu Bethesda in the Karoo I reveled in the knowledge that I would be able to visit the Kitching Fossil Exploration Centre next to the world famous Owl House.

The Karoo is one of the richest fossil treasure chests in the world. Going through the centre visitors can see some of these fossils as well as models of what some of the prehistoric animals from the area would have looked at.

A guide then takes you to a nearby river bed and point out some of the fossils visible and embedded in the rock. How I wish I could get my hands on one or two of the specimens from that area. They would truly be great additions to my collection.

The Owl House

Very few people would have heard of the little dusty Karoo village of Nieu-Bethesda if it wasn't for The Owl House. Nieu-Bethesda is situated about 3 1/2 hours north of Port Elizabeth close to the town of Graaff Reinet.

The house belonged to a woman named Helen Martins. Martins became bored with her "dull" life and resolved to transform the environment around her. She began an obsessive project around 1945 to decorate her home and garden and used cement, glass and wire to decorate the interior of her home and later build sculptures in her garden. Almost all the walls of the interior of the house were covered in decorative and colourful crushed glass.

In 1964, she was joined in her work by a Coloured man named Koos Malgas, who helped her build the sculptures in her garden.Martins drew on inspiration from Christian biblical texts, the poetry of Omar Khayyam and various works by William Blake.

The sculptures were predominantly owls, camels and people, mostly pointing toward the east as a tribute to Martins' fascination with The Orient. Her work was a source of suspicion and derision within the village and during her time, Helen Martins received very little support or enthusiasm about her work.
Her lifelong exposure to the fine crushed glass she used to decorate her walls and ceilings caused her eyesight to start failing in 1976. She committed suicide in 1976 by ingesting caustic soda, aged 78.

The Owl House has since been kept intact as a museum per Helen Martins' wishes and is now managed by the Owl House Foundation (founded 1996). Athol Fugard published a play in 1985 about the house called The Road to Mecca which was later made into a film of the same name. I've only had the pleasure to visit here once, but would go back again if I get the opportunity. As you can see in the last picture, it truly is a spot where you can just stand quietly and contemplate.

Most of the above information I got off Wikipedia.