My children attend the kinds of schools where many of the parents drive fancy cars. When the holidays roll around, there will always be someone in their class flying to an exotic island resort, going skiing in Europe or visiting Disneyland.
For our kids, when school's out, it usually just means a lot of time entertaining themselves at home while mom and dad keep working. Or worse: we bundle them into our not-so-fancy car and take them on educational road trips. These usually involve visiting obscure corners of the country so they can receive lectures about SA landscapes, histories and cultures.
Understandably, they feared for the worst when they heard that my wife and I were planning another adventure that would involve driving more than 1,000km criss-crossing the Karoo. But this time, we promised, things would be a bit different -- because our journey would also take us deep into the bowels of the earth and soaring into the skies above.
Our kids were sceptical. This was surely exaggeration (or perhaps just excessively imaginative enthusiasm) on our part. And they weren't entirely wrong. But they took comfort in the knowledge that their parents had also made some bookings with the good folk at Cape Country Routes.
This fantastic network of accommodation and tourist activities stretches from the West Coast to the Eastern Cape, providing travellers a guarantee of natural beauty, small-town quaintness and entertaining outings. In the past, trusting Cape Country Routes has seen us e-biking to lighthouses and cruising in Cadillacs, with some memorable overnight stays: an old fisherman's cottage in Paternoster, the Karoo Art Hotel in Barrydale and the art deco gem of the Montagu Country Hotel.
Now we were pushing a little further east, to the edge of the Klein Karoo, just past Oudtshoorn. Alarm bells rang. Our kids know that this is where mom grew up. Would there be nostalgic visits to the house she grew up in and the school she attended? More tales about rearing ailing ostrich chicks in shoeboxes?
The children endured all this and more. But -- after a compulsory stop at the Spur -- we left Oudtshoorn and found, 10km south of town, De Zeekoe Guest Farm. This would be our comfortable base for two days of reading in the garden, board games by the fire, cycling around farm dams and running along dirt roads tracking the Olifants River.
One of the Cape Country Routes activities offered in the area is a visit to Safari Ostrich Farm, but we had arranged a rendezvous with a very different representative of the local fauna: the finest of the "Shy Five" (a category it shares with the bat-eared fox, the aardvark, the porcupine and the aardwolf). I'm referring, of course, to the meerkat.
Early one morning, we joined a small group who had assembled in the middle of the veld at a site designated by adventure company Five Shy Meerkats. We enjoyed a steaming cup of coffee, grabbed a folding chair and walked a few hundred metres into the chilly dawn until we reached a nondescript spot. Arranging our chairs into a semicircle, we watched and waited, entertained by our guide's meerkat anecdotes and fascinating insights into these quirky creatures.
Then, ever so slowly, ever so nervously, one by one, the meerkats emerged from their burrow. They scampered, they lazed in the now bright sunshine; mostly, they stood to attention in that iconic meerkat pose, paws over their tummies, heads turning left and right to track the slightest change in sounds and scents carried on the wind. It's extremely difficult, under such circumstances, not to slip into anthropomorphic projection. Soon we were assigning human names and roles and personalities to each member of the mob.
After a while, they tired of our company -- or they needed breakfast -- and they scampered off to forage. Later in the day they would descend into another of the burrows in their vast network. We, too, had other underground terrain to explore. And we were going a lot deeper: we were off to the Cango Caves.
Our kids had never descended into those sacred cathedrals of rock before, but we had been earnestly selling the experience to them. Would this be like a school outing without school friends, mom and dad standing in for teachers as stern chaperones? Of course, it proved the opposite. Heading into the caves was fun (even slightly scary), leaving us all with a true sense of wonder.
And time. Deep time. It's almost impossible to get your mind around the fact that some of the enormous stalactite and stalagmite formations started growing 3-million years ago. Our guide gave us a hint by showing us, instead, some of the "baby" formations -- just a few centimetres in length -- that have been 500 years in the making.
Geology helps to put things in perspective. Our collective lesson in humility and awe continued above ground as we drove north from the Cango Caves along the R328, a route that took us through the Swartberg Pass. With walls of deep red and golden-brown quartzite towering above us, we felt very small and very grateful to be able to explore this terrain.
There was time for a short lunch stop in Prince Albert. But no art or antiques for us; we had a way yet to go, into the Karoo proper, dry and unforgiving, and terribly beautiful. We were learning to look up and out, across distant vistas, training our eyes for what lay ahead in the star-gazing territory of the Roggeveld plateau.
Stretching the Cape Country Routes network to its northernmost point, we booked in at Rogge Cloof, a private nature reserve that includes an off-the-grid eco-village with various accommodation options. Visitors can go game-viewing (a chance to see the otherwise elusive cheetah), hunt for fossils or hike up the 1,760m ancient volcano Salpeterkop. I wasn't quite done with caves yet, and wandered off to find the tranquil Poet's Cave, once frequented by NP van Wyk Louw and his literary brothers.
Van Wyk Louw is listed among the famous citizens of the curious town of Sutherland. This is, to be fair, a short list; and, until a few decades ago, Sutherland wasn't known for much except icy winter temperatures. But clear desert air and dark night skies are much beloved of astronomers -- and it was this combination, with the expertise of some of our best scientists, that led to the establishment of the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) about 20km away.
Tours of SALT are open to the public. It is an inspiring, disorientating experience. Driving round the precinct feels a bit like encountering a research outpost on Mars. Our daytime visit gave us the chance to see the hi-tech operation up close, but we returned to Rogge Cloof however, for our own astronomical purposes.
There, wrapped in blankets against the biting cold, we trained a smaller telescope on a series of celestial objects. Many "Oohs" and "Aahs" ensued. Yet stepping back from the eyepiece, we all agreed, allowed for the most impressive sight of all: the vast, bright, vivid Milky Way making an arc from horizon to horizon.
"Sure beats going overseas," observed a quiet voice.