The Karoo has not always been hot. Long, long ago, it lay covered in ice for a hundred million years. Then, two hundred and fifty million years before this blog post was written, the area turned into a basin and as the millennia passed, featured various water bodies, some as vast as inland seas. Enormous coal deposits were formed. There was ferocious volcanic activity and lush forests emerged for life to thrive in. The Karoo was a happening place. Today, what remains is a 400,000 km2 semi-desert no man’s land, a gigantic and desolate damper zone between the narrow temperate belt located at the very southern tip of South Africa and the rest of the continent. The Karoo is rich in fossils and has made it into the geological Hall of Fame, having given its name to the Karoo Ice Age after providing the first clear evidence of such glaciation. While modern days began when the Cape was colonized around the mid-sixteen hundreds, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that roads were actually carved into the Karoo. The local tribes of Khoi and Bushmen began a slow but irremediable descent into oblivion and game was slowly replaced by sheep. Some nasty fighting took place between two white antagonist tribes selfishly pretending to control the land early in the twentieth century, and then, while a fierce sun shone unflinchingly in deep blue skies and slowly fried people, stock and grass, the Karoo seemed to recede away from colonialist attention. There, not really out of reach nor out of sight but isolated nonetheless, it lay dormant again, covered this time not by ice but by heat, barely surviving on difficult sheep farming. Until recently. The Karoo has now reappeared on all maps and is being conquered once more, albeit superficially, by a new breed of pioneers in high heels and air-conditioned motor vehicles. They are called tourists. For better and for worse, from time to time, I happen to be one of them.