Oranges and Lemons

We stopped only briefly in Elands Bay and Lamberts Bay, as both are quite small places. A woman approached us looking for work so we let her wash the car. It was good to get rid of some of the crushed locust goo that was spread over the bonnet. I'd already poked the locust bodies out of the radiator.

We hooked inland to Clanwilliam, where we had lunch. Clanwilliam is a small and generally uninspiring town that is used as the gateway to the Cedeberg wilderness area. We carried on down the road toward Citrusdal and pulled in about 20km before it to the Gekko backpackers. This is another cool backpackers in the middle of nowhere, in the grounds of a citrus farm. As we were running a little bit ahead of schedule and so we didn't have to do more accomodation searching we booked in for a couple of nights. Other than the couple that run the place we were the only ones there again, although apparently they are normally quite busy with the overlanding trucks that go up to Namibia. We took a walk around the grounds through the rows of orange trees an up the hill. You get a good view of the surrounding mountains from there.

The next day we went back on ourselves to Clanwilliam and from their over the Pakhuis Pass. This was a mostly unsealed road so Gemma was quite cautious, it was nowhere near as bad as the Swartberg Pass at Prince Albert though. We were headed for the Sevilla rock art trail. This is a walk through some lovely bushland and weathered rocks (Dassies again!) to see rock art of the San people. No-one is sure exactly how old this lot is, but other places are between 25,000 and 40,000 years old. Despite the unsealed road this is one of the more accessible places to see good examples of the paintings. Some are quite weathered away, but there are very well preserved examples along the trail. Figures of men hunting, women dancing or carrying baskets, elephants, zebra and other animals including some quite devilish/monstrous looking things.