Star-gaze in Sutherland
Lucy Corne | Issue 100 | 100 dec 08-jan 09
With its barren red landscape and eerily deserted towns, the Northern Cape is a far cry from the South Africa most people know. Here the only wildlife spotting you’re likely to partake in is counting roadkill on the endless straight roads. Even South Africans tend to overlook their largest and least-populated province, using it as little more than a through route to Namibia.
Some travellers venture along the west coast in spring, when the desert-like landscape explodes into technicolour with blossoming flowers, but inland, at the junction of three dirt tracks and a deserted highway, lies my favourite place in Southern Africa.
It’s best known as the country’s coldest town, but Sutherland is also the heart of what locals like to call ‘Big Sky Country’. Off-limits to anyone without a hire car, it offers simple pleasures – silence, cloudless skies and fine home-cooking. By day it’s a lazy place where seldom-seen locals dive for shade in summer and cover in winter. But Sutherland blooms at night, boasting Africa’s clearest skies and one of the world’s largest observatories – the South African Astronomical Observatory (www.saao.ac.za – book in advance), 14km east of town. Looking through the telescopes you can make out Saturn’s rings – very cool in a nerdy kind of way.
Finish up back in the one-street town, chowing down on Karoo lamb chops in whichever restaurant is open when you visit; local eateries work on a cooperative timetable to ensure they all survive.
The only paved road to Sutherland stretches for 110km and leads off the N1 between Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Lucy Corne, freelance writer and guidebook author