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 and Nicole Ex, Swartberge, Zuid-Afrika | 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 urban ring, it is mostly freight traffic thundering along the motorway, with oncoming cars in the right-hand lane. We drive into immense emptiness, surrendering to a landscape on such an unbounded scale, in a country so old we can almost imagine the world as the dinosaurs knew it. It is April, the beginning of the colder months in South Africa. Gone is the crisp blue sky.

Mists hanging between the mountain ridges as if in the Highlands. Dramatic skies that make Turner’s seem almost pale by comparison. Clouds casting shadows across sunlit slopes, and an extraordinary afternoon light in which the rocks seem to dissolve into an orange mirage. Behind every mountain lies another hallucination, and it fills us with delight.

After the emptiness, there is the happiness of silence on arrival. The next day we go to the Swartberg with the absolute authority on this region, Dr Sue Milton-Dean. Her knowledge reaches back five hundred million years. She reads every geological layer. Of every plant, she knows why it grows where it does. In her nursery, five hundred native plant species are being raised in the shade of old trees.

The Swartberg is a mountain range in the Cape Fold Belt, which runs from east to west across South Africa. That is the official explanation of where we are. But on the spot itself, you are completely surrounded by strata of earth thrust hundreds of metres upwards and curled back on themselves – melted earth: rock fused like glass. A womb through which crystal-clear water rushes.

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