Northern Cape

The vast Northern Cape, largest of South Africa's provinces, covers over one-third of the nation's landmass - an area dominated by heat, brown aridity, empty spaces and huge travelling distances. However, while these characteristics themselves possess a surreal attraction, it is for the miracles of the desert you will come - the improbable swaths of flowers, and wild animals roaming among the dunes.

The most significant of these suprises is the Orange River, a large watercourse which flows, often with parched land stretching for hundreds of kilometres on either side, from the Drakensburg Highlands of Lesotho to the Atlantic, where it marks South Africa's northern border with Namibia. The river separates the two sparsely populated semi-desert ecosystems which fill the interior of the Northern Cape - the Kalahari and Great Karoo. It was by the Orange that diamonds were first discovered in the 1860s.

On the western side of the province, the presence of the Atlantic Ocean means that the land, while still harsh and dry, is subject to different influences. It is in this region, Namaqualand, that the brief rains of winter produce one of nature's truly glorious transformations, when in August and September the land is carpeted by a magnificent display of multicoloured wild flowers.