Walking Across the Karoo: Heat, Water, Fossils and Silence

Walking across the Karoo means covering hundreds of kilometres of semi-desert where towns can be a long day or more apart, summer heat shapes every hour, and water has to be planned rather than assumed. It is also one of the quietest, most open landscapes in southern Africa, with skies dark enough at night to show the Milky Way in full and rocks that hold one of the world's great fossil records.

For Leon McFarlane, whose solo walk from Cape Agulhas to Windsor Castle is planned to begin in December 2026, the Great Karoo is the first long, hard test of the journey. The current route crosses it along the main northbound corridor, roughly from Touws River through Beaufort West to Victoria West. This article explains what that country is like on foot, and why it rewards anyone who slows down enough to look at it.

What and where is the Karoo?

The Karoo is a vast, dry plateau covering a large part of South Africa's interior, spread across the Western, Northern and Eastern Cape. The name is usually traced to a Khoekhoe word for a dry or thirsty place, which is a fair summary. Geographers divide it into the Little Karoo, a narrower valley region to the south, and the much larger Great Karoo north of the Swartberg and other Cape fold mountains, where the land rises and opens out.

The landscape is not empty sand. It is low, aromatic shrubland, the Karoo "bossies", broken by flat-topped hills (koppies) capped with dark dolerite rock, dry riverbeds that run only after storms, windpumps, stone kraals and long, straight roads. Rain is scarce and unreliable, and much of it arrives as sudden summer thunderstorms.

Heat, distance and water: walking across the Karoo in summer

A car on the N1 crosses the Great Karoo in an afternoon. A walker experiences the same country as weeks of effort. With a start in December, the walk's Karoo stretch falls in the southern summer, when daytime temperatures commonly climb into the mid-30s Celsius and can go beyond 40 degrees. Shade can be scarce for long distances.

That changes the shape of a walking day. The sensible pattern is to start very early, cover most of the distance in the cooler hours, and avoid the worst of the afternoon. Leon's planning pace is about 175 km a week over five and a half walking days, typically 30 to 35 km a day, and the rules of the walk are clear that heat can shorten a day. He does not walk after dark, so the day is bounded at both ends: by safe light in the morning and by the need to arrive before dusk.

Water is the central planning question. The gaps between towns along this corridor can be longer than a single comfortable day's walk, which means calculating how much to carry, where it can be resupplied and what happens if a source is unavailable. The expedition treats water as part of the story as much as logistics, because it is also the daily concern of everyone who farms and lives here. You can read more about how a sustainable daily distance is worked out in how far can you walk in a day.

Sheep, small towns and the people of the interior

For well over a century the Great Karoo has been sheep country. Merino and Dorper flocks graze across enormous farms, because sparse vegetation means each animal needs a lot of land. Karoo lamb is prized across South Africa and is often said to take its flavour from the herbs and shrubs the sheep eat. Drought, predators, wool prices and the pull of the cities all shape the farming economy.

The towns strung along the old routes are small, and each has its own character. Touws River grew up as a railway town at the top of the Hex River Mountains. Beaufort West, the largest town on this stretch, is the birthplace of Christiaan Barnard, the surgeon who performed the first human-to-human heart transplant in 1967, and sits beside Karoo National Park. Victoria West lies further north on the road towards the Northern Cape. Afrikaans is the main language you hear in much of the Karoo, alongside isiXhosa, English and others, and the region's communities, many of them Coloured and Afrikaner, carry histories of farm labour, mission stations, segregation and resilience that are rarely told by people driving through.

A landscape made of deep time

The Karoo is one of the most important places on Earth for understanding the history of life on land. Its rocks belong to the Karoo Basin, layers of sediment laid down over tens of millions of years, roughly from about 300 to 180 million years ago. The Beaufort Group in particular preserves an extraordinary record of therapsids, the animals often described as mammal-like reptiles, from which mammals eventually descended.

These rocks span the end-Permian mass extinction around 252 million years ago, the largest extinction event known, when most species in the sea and many on land disappeared. Because the Karoo record covers the time before, during and after it, scientists study it to understand how ecosystems collapse and recover. Animals such as Lystrosaurus, a stocky plant-eater that survived and spread widely afterwards, are part of the story. The dolerite that caps the koppies came later, when vast volumes of molten rock forced their way through the sediments around 180 million years ago.

Silence, night skies and new energy

Low humidity, little light pollution and wide horizons make the Karoo one of the best places in the world to see the night sky. That is why the Southern African Large Telescope stands near Sutherland, and why radio telescopes such as MeerKAT, part of the international Square Kilometre Array project, sit in a protected radio-quiet zone near Carnarvon. The same qualities, steady wind and strong sunshine, have brought wind and solar projects to parts of the region, and earlier proposals to explore for shale gas sparked long debates about water and land.

On the road through the Karoo

The walk's South Africa plan gives this section a simple question: what does walking reveal that a road trip hides? On foot you notice the smell of the bossies after rain, the sound of a windpump in the wind, the state of a dam, the distance between one farm gate and the next, and the people who stop to ask what on earth you are doing. You also feel the scale of the land in your legs, which is a kind of understanding no map provides.

At the planned pace, the stretch from Touws River to Beaufort West alone is roughly two weeks of walking, and the road north to Victoria West roughly another week. Routes remain provisional and will be adjusted after local reconnaissance of road shoulders, heat and water. You can see how the Karoo fits into the whole journey on the route page and in our overview of the walk from Cape Town to London, and follow progress through the journal once walking begins. In every place he passes, Leon plans to pay for a small act of kindness and record it publicly in the kindness ledger, and in the Karoo that will be shaped by what local people say is needed. If you would like to help make it happen, you can back the walk.

Frequently asked questions

How hot does the Karoo get in summer?

Summer days in the Great Karoo commonly reach the mid-30s Celsius and can exceed 40 degrees, while nights cool down sharply. Winter brings cold nights with frost and occasional snow on higher ground.

Can you walk across the Karoo?

Yes, but it needs careful planning for water, heat, road traffic and the long gaps between towns. Early starts, daylight-only walking and local advice about road shoulders and farm access matter more than raw fitness.

Why is the Karoo famous for fossils?

Its rocks preserve a long, continuous record of land animals, especially mammal-like reptiles, spanning the end-Permian mass extinction around 252 million years ago. Few places on Earth show that transition so clearly.

Which towns are in the Great Karoo?

Well-known Great Karoo towns include Beaufort West, Laingsburg, Prince Albert, Graaff-Reinet, Victoria West and Sutherland, with Touws River near its south-western edge.