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. 

Back to the future on the Mzamba Fossils and Petrified Forest Trail

The Mzamba Fossils and Petrified Forest on the northern Wild Coast has been on my "To Do" list for a long time now.  I just never had chance to visit that part of the Wild Coast yet.  That was until a road trip to Durban had me spending a night at the Wild Coast Sun on the border between the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu Natal.  The first thing I did after checking in was to enquire about going to see the fossils and I was informed that the tour goes out at 9am every morning.   

 

Nine o'clock the next morning I was there (breakfast and an early morning meeting done already) and met Benny Mbotho who does the tours.  I was joined by a couple of other visitors as well as a school group.  After having a look at the exhibit in the hotel, he took us down to the beach and we headed south. 

 

After about a kilometer we got to the headland area where the petrified forest is located.  Luck was on my side today as it was low tide which meant that we could go out on the reef to see the fossilized wood in the rocks.

 

Although called a petrified forest, the trees that formed it didn't actually grow here.  They were washed down rivers and deposited here millions of years ago.  The wood then got waterlogged and was submerged where marine worms penetrated them.  The wood became silicified (converted into silica) and formed what you see there today.

 

At first I wasn't sure what I was looking for but after Benny pointed out a few I realized that they were all over. Literally. In closer inspection you can actually see the growth rings and other lines.  Again I thanked my lucky stars for the fact that the tide was low as most of these would be covered at high tide and we would have missed out big time. 

 

A short distance further we started seeing the fossils that also form part of the Mzamba Cretaceous Deposits.  Here you really kicked a fossil out from under every second rock, behind it, in front of it and between it.  Fossils are also found in an exposed 10-metre cliff band along the beach.  The deposits consist of greyish-brown sandstone and limestone that is extremely rich in fossil material dating back 80-million years.  The deposits include masses of marine shells which include beautiful examples of tightly coiled ammonites, echinoids (sea urchins) and bivalve shells.

 

Benny even pointed out a fossilized shark tooth in one of the rocks.  In actual fact, Benny isn't just a point out guide.  He is an absolute wealth of information and knowledge, has a permanent smile and will show you as much as possible.

The giant clam shells in the rocks were huge.

One of the fossils pointed out to us even looked like it could be a fossilized sea turtle. The shell is prominent while there is a head and eye socket to the right hand side. 

I have a couple of small ammonites in my own collection, but a few of those that we saw where huge.  I can only wish to be able to add a specimen like this to my collection.  I am able to add this photo to this collection of fossil photos though.

 

At the furthest end there are a series of cliffs and overhangs known as White Man's Cave.  The interesting part of these is that you can sit inside them and look up at fossils in the cave roof.  Benny even pointed out a fossilized Strelitzia and compared it with a modern day Strelitzia.  You won't believe it if you don't see it and posting this I realize that for some reason I excluded the pictures of that.  You will have to maar go and look for yourself.

 

As we got to the furthest point and turned back I had to leave he group behind and hurry back to the hotel as I still had to drive to Durban.  I did get one of my fellow fossil "hunters" to snap a photo of myself and this ammonite in the rocks.  I have so much to say about this tour yet find myself at a loss for words when trying to describe it further than I have already.  Visiting the Mzamba Fossils may be ticked off my "To Do" list but I really think it should be on everybody else's as it is a piece of natural history that is very rare and can't just be recreated elsewhere

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.