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A warming cup of the Karoo in the land of tumbleweed and moonshots

Two decades on, our old restaurant in Sutherland, Perlman House, is still there, but changed. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

6 Jun 2025

In the cold winter sunshine, colours burst, flavours are accentuated, and the world seems a better place because the Karoo is in it.

I drove through Sutherland last weekend for the first time since we left there in May 2008. I was only there for 10 minutes this weekend, but that’s all it takes for a world of old memories to flood to front of mind. Lamb pies and slow-roasted shanks. Coffee and pétanque. Star-gazing by laser.

It wasn’t really planned. This has been the latest of my Karoo journeys, and it was only on Sunday that it dawned on me: I’m driving through Sutherland today.

Too much had been going on for me to have a moment to think about it. The trip was all about food, as is normal in my life; a small group of us going on the road, driving and talking, chopping and stirring, grilling and baking. Then tasting and — thankfully — smiling. And the people we’d cooked it for smiling too, as we all sighed happy relief. That moment when you think: this works, I’ll make this again — the punters surely seem to be enjoying it.

In between, we all took in the sights and the Karoo stillness around us. Conical koppies and snaking farm tracks, lazy sheep and the forgotten ruin of a house people once lived in; even a ragged man in a donkey cart rattling along a gravel road. A windmill against a gentle sunset sky. So obviously “Karoo” that it seems like a cliché, but then you think: hang on, would it even be the Karoo without a sunset windmill?

We’d set off from Cradock, via Graaff-Reinet to Murraysburg and then on to Victoria West, crossing the N1 somewhere between Beaufort West and Richmond. The R63 then takes you to Loxton, and, 63km further on, Carnarvon, the village everyone thought had a moonshot at becoming a boom town after the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) was situated nearby.

The R63 between Carnarvon and Williston. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

But the people of the town are still ragged in the streets, the beggars still begging, the store fronts more decrepit, as dust rises from roads that have not seen the traffic many had predicted.

Moonshots are made of pipe dreams. The hope they bring is dashed by the stark reality of cold Karoo daylight.

Sutherland knows all about moonshots. And tumbleweed. They call them rolbosse in these parts — rolling dry bushes that feel featherlight. We used to use them as garden ornaments, when we could pin them down.

Maybe moonshots are like tumbleweed — they arrive in your life, out of the blue, and then they roll away. There are promises. There are schemes, bursaries; on paper, things always look better than the view out of the window of your life.

This strange Northern Cape town was going to be transformed by the siting of the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) only a few kilometres from town on the road to Fraserburg.

There were changes, and there have been more since we left there in 2008; I could see this even in those few minutes in the town on Sunday. Some in the town have a better living today; but you wonder about all the others. The poor people who remain poor while the astronomers from far away do their strange work up on the alien hilltop out of sight of the reality only kilometres away. Returning from forays to the big city, they drift by the townsfolk like outlandish creatures from unknown constellations, and off they go up the hill to do their mysterious work.

astronomers A South African Astronomical Observatory field station in Sutherland on 28 January 2015. (Photo: Flickr)

The change is reflected in names, if little else. Businesses here are named after constellations or planets. Skitterland is my favourite, a guest house owned by Alta Coetzee of Calvinia’s Hantam Huis fame, named for the very heavens above in the Karoo Hoogland night sky.

It was in Alta’s Hantam Huis, and three of her beautiful period houses nearby, that we’d spent two days glorying in the winter Karoo light before I left for Sutherland on Sunday afternoon, while stews burbled and loaves baked in the old Calvinia kitchens. We’d sat around a snug kitchen table in Rupert Huijs with a fire blazing in the corner, drank red wine and ate saddle chops and glazed butternut.

By late Sunday morning the exhaustion of days on the road had caught up with me, and I got on the road ahead of the rest of them to spend an extra night in Matjiesfontein. And it dawned on me: to get there, I was heading to Sutherland again, the only Karoo town I had lived in until I realised that my birth town of Oranjemund is a part of another Karoo, the Succulent Karoo.

We’d driven out of Sutherland in 2008 and never gone back. Not for any reason other than life takes you.

Karoo Hoogland is the local municipality of Williston, Fraserburg and Sutherland, and it is through this terrain that you travel to reach Matjiesfontein from Calvinia. Unless you went mad and chose the shorter route from Calvinia via Middelpos to Sutherland, which would almost guarantee you a flat tyre or two.

The Boekehuis in Calvinia. April 2024. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

But I knew all about that so drove the longer route, turning right onto the Fraserburg road just as you enter Williston. The stretch to Fraserburg seems to have been tarred by somebody with no roadbuilding skills whatsoever. Tar slapped down on a gravel road with no preparation at all. Parts of it feel like you’re on a roller coaster, up, then swooping down and suddenly bending. The tar edges are haphazard, occasionally disappearing into veld. But I didn’t see a pothole.

The spire of the Dutch Reformed Church in Fraserburg appears before the town does, then there’s a road ahead and a sign pointing right to Sutherland. Suddenly you’re on gravel for 110km.

This road is not bad as gravel goes, hardly any corrugation at all, and there are some photogenic scenes en route, especially when you come to the many short, low bridges that punctuate your journey. The last of these is flanked by wheaten reeds that shone in the late afternoon sunlight. These are the sights that begin to describe to the uninitiated what it means when they ask you why you love the Karoo. Take them there, show them that, and watch their faces.

This perfection is only scarred when you pull over at a random point halfway between Fraserburg and Sutherland and, right there, in this most arbitrary of places, is a scrunched Coke can, so that you know that some guy stopped for relief, finished his Coke, stomped on the can, and left it there.

If you had been driving the Forgotten Highway route from Tulbagh to Kuruman, you would have arrived in Sutherland from Ceres, and continued on the route from here to Fraserburg where you would have aimed for Loxton and Carnarvon. But from the Fraserburg side, I’m about to find Sutherland again.

As the cold winter sun starts its slow-motion fade into the coming night, you round a bend and there’s a massive white wall on the verge and a tree-lined road that winds up to the Sterrewag, as locals call the South African Astronomical Observatory in its otherworldly landscape where you expect big-eyed aliens to peer from behind rocks amid the strange domes jutting into the sky like faceless Humpty Dumpties.

Sutherland at Night: the South African Astronomical Observatory. (Image supplied by the SAAO)

But that remains a memory from two decades earlier when we lived in the town and visited the facility once in a while. Visitors to our restaurant at the time, Perlman House, came expecting to see Star Wars. We could only disillusion them with the dull news that what they’d see of the universe in the tour of the facility was hardly more than they might see from a telescope poking out of the window in the front room at home. It’s a working observatory, and the tourism attached to it is out of place, an intrusion for people trying to do their job.

And I’m driving into Sutherland, and there’s a Total garage as I enter — “That’s new,” I say aloud — but the old garage is still there, further along. The long drystone wall we built has weathered 17 years, so the job must have been done well, especially given the grim windstorms that plague this valley.

Eighteen years is a long time, though it flew by in a blink. That May, when we drove out of town headed for Cape Town after two years of living there and running a little restaurant that specialised in lamb, I did not expect that it would be anything like this many years before I would see its houses and empty streets again.

Little has changed, though what has altered grabs your attention immediately. Odd domes mimicking those up the hill at the observatory stand squatly on a corner in the town centre. It’s a planetarium, so now there’s a much greater chance of that Star Wars experience when you visit the town.

The huge open plot between our former restaurant and our little house is filled with a low, flat building of shops or offices or some such; I didn’t have time to investigate. The werf behind Perlman House now has guest accommodation. It was barren in our time — we’d take dinner guests out there, turn off the house lights and our friend Dave O’Hearns would draw lines between the stars with a hand-held red laser.

Two decades on, our old restaurant in Sutherland, Perlman House, is still there, but changed. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

More pertinent for me was the house that we’d bought for R25,000 — yes — and transformed into our restaurant in 2006 after returning from England and suddenly realising that we owned nothing in Cape Town but had two houses in Sutherland. The first, around the corner, had cost us R36,500 in the late nineties. Returning in 2006, we’d live in one while we turned the other into that restaurant I’d always wanted to have one day, we decided. And we did.

Casting around for a name that would suit the town, we learnt that it had once been owned by the town’s Jewish smous, a Mr Perlman, who died in 1918 during the Spanish Flu epidemic. The tiny Jewish communities in small towns of the Karoo were an important and colourful factor of the Platteland in earlier decades, though few remain today.

We thought it would be good to reintroduce the name to the town, and as I stopped across the road this week, not knowing what to expect when I turned my gaze to the old place, I saw that it is still called Perlman House (the restaurant, that is, the building has been renamed). But the Perlman name is still a part of Sutherland almost two decades later. In a world that has turned darkly antisemitic, this pleases me.

A U-turn, and then left, and I’m in front of our old house behind the restaurant, which was freshly pink when we bought it. Two decades later, there’s been no repainting at all, with what’s left of the original pink faded into the peeling, scratchy neglect. The couple we’d sold to must have moved on long ago.

Back along the main road I turn left and then right into Jubilee Street and stop in front of old friend Nathan Honey’s house. I can see in an instant that he still lives there, though Sonette left at some point — three years ago she painted the signs for our Cradock guest house, The Rose and Olive. Back then, she had painted the original Perlman House signs, now gone.

Two fierce dogs prevented me from wandering inside, which would have felt quite normal. Back then, we all just walked in and Nathan would make five-star coffee or pour us some skelm voddies straight from the freezer. We’d go out back and play boules on a pitch Nathan had scraped in the gravel, and inevitably it would end up with a braai of the super-thin lamb tjoppies that Sonette preferred. The night would proceed with vodka and wine, one of Sonette’s elaborate chilli-laden salads, and many stories.

But Nathan wasn’t there this Sunday, he was in the Tankwa somewhere but there’ll be a next time. Maybe not another 18 years, I hope.

And then, the drive out of town towards Verlatenkloof where a massive square rock has landed on the right-hand side, which means it must have narrowly missed a car. Once, one such rock landed right in front of a woman driving along and she struck it, leaving this world in an instant.

Such is life out in the sticks, where it always seems like nothing is happening while always, everywhere, something is.

Driving away from the town and its moonscape environment, it dawns on me that I am near the end of a journey that began when, one day in the nineties, we drove into Sutherland to see what it was like, and now we are soon to leave Cradock, our second Karoo home. And see what happens next. I have an idea or two about that, but let’s not tempt the fates. DM

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