BREAKING #314 | TRAVEL DIARY

Column

April 2026

Het portret dat Sanja Marusic maakte voor de achterflap van

Nicole Ex-De titel is een zinnetje-

is a writer, art historian, and founder of See All This art magazine. Since 2020, she writes a weekly column for the BREAKING-the-week art newsletter.

Column

April 2026

Fig 1. Dr. Sue Milton-Dean and Nicole Ex, Swartberge, South Africa | photo: Anke Riesenkamp

From the unforgettable hotel Dorp in Cape Town, through the brightly coloured streets of Bo-Kaap, and then onto the N1 for a six-hour drive to the Karoo. Four hundred kilometres straight ahead, then left, across the unguarded railway line, another fifty kilometres straight on until the main road of the village of Prince Albert. Turn left there, and after two hundred metres take the track leading to hotel Dennehof.

The N1: once beyond the city ring, it is mostly freight traffic thundering along the motorway, with oncoming vehicles in the right-hand lane. We drive into immense emptiness, taking in a landscape on such an unbounded scale, and a country so old that we can picture the world of the dinosaurs. It is April, the beginning of the colder months in South Africa. Forget the cloudless blue sky advertised in travel guides.

Mists hang between the mountain ranges as if in the Highlands. Dramatic skies that make Turner’s seem almost pale by comparison. Clouds cast shadows across the sunlit slopes of the ridges, and in the afternoon light the rocks seem to dissolve into a molten orange glow. Behind every mountain lies a new hallucination, and it fills us with exhilaration.

After the emptiness, there is, on arrival, the fullness of silence. A day later, we head into the Swartberg with the unrivalled expert on this region, Dr Sue Milton-Dean. Her knowledge stretches back some seven hundred million years. She reads the specific geological layers. Of every plant, she knows why it grows where it does. In her nursery, five hundred native plant species are being raised for conservation projects.

The Swartberg is a mountain range within the Cape Fold Belt, which runs from east to west across South Africa. Land that was once sea. Under pressure, the earth was thrust upwards by hundreds of metres: melted earth, crust fused like glass, with rippling and zigzagging patterns in relief. What is now above was once below. You feel the body of Mother Earth, enclosed like a womb, with the sound of running water inside.

Watch videos, see photos, and read more stories about Nicole Ex and Anke Riesenkamp’s trip in the travel diary.