South Africa -- Description and travel; South Africa -- History -- 1836-1909; South Africa -- History -- To 1836
From Swellendam we went on to Caledon another exquisitely clean little
Dutch town. The distance from Swellendam to Caledon is nearly eighty
miles, through the whole of which the road runs under the Zondereinde
mountains through a picturesque country which produces some of the best
wool of the Colony. Caledon is another village of oak trees and pleasant
detached Dutch-looking houses, each standing in its own garden and never
mounting to a story above the ground. In winter no doubt the feeling
inspired by these village-towns would be different; but when they are
seen as I saw them, with the full foliage and the acorns on the oaks,
and the little gardens over-filled with their luxuriance of flowers,
with the streets as clean and shaded as the pet road through a
gentleman’s park, the visitor is tempted to repine because Fate did not
make him a wine-growing, orange-planting, ostrich-feeding Dutch farmer.
From Caledon we returned through East Somerset, a smaller village and
less attractive but still of the same nature, to Capetown, getting on to
the railway about twenty miles from the town at the Eerste River
Station. In making this last journey we had gone through or over two
other Passes, called How Hoek and Sir Lowry’s Pass. They are, both of
them, interesting enough for a visit from Capetown, but not sufficiently
so to be spoken of at much length after the other roads through the
mountains which I had seen. The route down from Sir Lowry’s Pass leads
to the coast of False Bay,--of which Simon’s Bay is an inlet. Between
False Bay to the South and Table Bay to the North is the flat isthmus
which forms the peninsula, on which stands Capetown and the Table
Mountains, the Southern point of which is the Cape of Good Hope.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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