Some trips you do because the route is good. Some trips you do because the timing is right. This one happened because the country had been locked down for over a year and everyone was desperate to get out.
August 2021. First flower season since COVID. We were going.
Rondeberg Resort — The Gathering Point
Not everyone could camp that weekend, but that wasn’t going to stop anyone. Rondeberg Resort near Clanwilliam was the base — campers had been there from Friday night, and the day-trippers arrived Saturday morning as the sun came up over the Cedarberg.
The turnout was one of the best we’d had. Families, couples, experienced overlanders and people on their first proper off-road trip. All of them had been sitting at home for a year. All of them were ready to go.
We sorted ourselves out, topped up fuel, and headed into Biedouw Valley.
Biedouw Valley
The valley opens up slowly as you leave the main road behind. In August, it’s a different place from the dry summer version — everything is green at the edges, and the wildflowers have already started in the lower sections. Biedouw is always beautiful, but in flower season it’s something else.
The route here sets the tone for the whole trip. Long, open valley with mountains on both sides, a gravel road that demands attention, and views that stretch far enough to make you forget you were ever stuck in traffic.
Wupperthal
Wupperthal sits quietly in a fold of the Cederberg as it always has — a Moravian mission station established in the 1800s, unchanged in most of the ways that matter. The old church, the rooibos cooperative, the slow pace of things.
The convoy paused here long enough to walk around, take pictures and let people breathe it in. First time in Wupperthal for some in the group. It’s the kind of place that doesn’t need much explaining — you just stand in it for a few minutes and understand why people keep coming back.
Louis Leipoldt’s Grave, Englishman’s Grave & Baghdad Café
The route carries history in layers out here. Louis Leipoldt — poet, writer, doctor — is buried on a hillside in the Cederberg, looking out over the landscape he wrote about for most of his life. A quiet spot. Easy to miss if you don’t know to stop.
The Englishman’s Grave is another of those roadside moments the Western Cape backcountry is full of — a name, a date, a life reduced to a stone marker on a dirt road. Nobody rushes past. Everyone reads it.
Baghdad Café did what it always does: served coffee and food in a setting that makes no architectural sense and complete human sense. A stop that earned its place in the route well before we knew how long the day was going to be.
Van Rhyn’s Pass
Van Rhyn’s Pass is where the landscape changes completely. As you climb from the Bokkeveld plateau side toward the top, the Escarpment drops away below you and the Northern Cape stretches out flat and enormous in front. On a clear August morning with flowers visible in every direction, it’s one of the better viewpoints in the country.
We stopped at the viewpoint. Everyone got out. Nobody was in a hurry.
Crossing into the Northern Cape — Nieuwoudtville
From Van Rhyn’s Pass, you cross the boundary. Western Cape behind you, Northern Cape ahead. The landscape doesn’t change at the provincial line but the feeling does — you’re on the plateau now, the sky is bigger, the flowers are everywhere.
Nieuwoudtville in peak August is genuinely hard to describe. The town calls itself the wildflower capital of the world and in a good year — which this was — you have no reason to argue with that. Flowers across every open field, every roadside, every piece of ground that hasn’t been fenced off for something else.
Quiver Tree Forest and the Waterfall
The quiver tree forest outside Nieuwoudtville is a few hundred aloes that have been growing on a hillside for long enough that the name stuck. On a clear day the colours are spectacular — orange-brown bark, green crowns, blue sky, flowers at their feet.
The Nieuwoudtville waterfall was running properly after good winter rain. Worth the short detour off the main route. Always is.
The Group
The size of the turnout made this one of those trips where you spend as much time noticing what’s happening around you as looking at the landscape. Kids running into flowers. People discovering Nieuwoudtville for the first time. Experienced members of the group who’d done this route many times still stopping at the same viewpoints, still getting the same thing from it.
This is one of the best family trips we run. Camping or not, day trip or full weekend — the route works for all of it. Kids old enough to look out windows come back talking about the flowers for weeks.
The Return
The loop comes back south and west, crossing back into the Western Cape and winding down toward Clanwilliam. The campers returned to Rondeberg. The day-trippers turned for home.
For a first trip back after a year of nothing, it was exactly right. Big country, big flowers, big group. August 2021 delivered everything it was supposed to.