On the Shale Trail

Dear Readers, after a damp start to the holiday we headed off to the Karoo Desert National Botanical Garden, close to the town of Worcester where we spent the night. This is an amazing place, the only botanical garden in Africa to specialise in succulent plants, and it has a ‘Shale Trail’, where the plants are wild, and a more formal botanical garden, which includes Karoo Desert plants, but not necessarily from the immediate region.I hope you’ll forgive me for not remembering the names of all the plants that we saw on the Shale Trail, and if you know, do give me a shout in the comments – the holiday is pretty full on, with not a lot of time for consulting with my guide books. I’m learning, but gradually! However, I did want to share some of my favourite photos, which I hope show the sheer variety of desert-adapted plants that thrive in the harsh conditions of the Karoo.

The more formal garden had some truly astonishing plants too…

I did really like the Quiver trees, with their leathery bark. Each one is so individual.

And this was a Chinese Lantern bush, such a pretty shrub!

And, of course, we saw some animals….this Angulate Tortoise, heading off back into the Karoo…

A Cape Bunting…

And how about this beauty – I think it’s a Malachite Sunbird.

And then, we headed off to the restaurant to have something to eat. This was a quirky place – it had an old Canadian organ, and the owner belted out a few tunes for us…

Plus there were a few outsized insects hanging around…

But excitingly, we saw a yellow mongoose…

Well, that was quite enough for one day, and we then headed off to Clanwilliam. Tomorrow we’re off to the Cedarberg Mountains, a UNESCO heritage site because of its extraordinary wind-carved rocks. We hope to have a look at the rock carvings of the San people, and, this being a botanical tour, to find a few more plants to look at. Let’s see how we get on!