IN DEPTH Clarens
Surfing in the eastern Free State? It's not what we were expecting. Nor what you might be imagining.
The last time I'd spent any significant time in the area, I was a student, and we camped in Golden Gate Highlands National Park, about 20km from Clarens. Known today as the Jewel of the Free State, back then, it was a tiny farming town where a few artists would hole up to escape the world and take inspiration from their surrounds. It wasn't a blip on any tourist map. We might have paused there for fuel, but I don't recall anyone even mentioning Clarens.
What I recall vividly from that trip, though, are the amber mountains, the ochres and rusted reds, the pale-yellow grasses and the way the sandstone bluffs and humungous rocks glimmered at sunset The sort of humbling, lump-in-the-throat beauty that sticks with you forever.
Little wonder artists are drawn to this place; it's somewhere you can obsess over the colours and light for the rest of your days.
The entire area is also a paleontological hotspot, famed for the fossilised dinosaur eggs and embryos found in what was the nesting site of a herbivorous Jurassic-era creature. For the better part of a decade, SANParks has been building a dinosaur museum - situated roughly where I camped 30 years ago. The museum building is complete, but it might be another decade before exhibits are installed and researchers start using it to study fossils and rocks close to where they're dug up.
