About Us

 

The Tankwa Camino is a modern-day "Great Trek" that will take participants through one of our country's most starkly beautiful areas, the Tankwa Karoo.

Inner strength and a strong mind will keep you on track, but "your emotions need to be as educated as your intellect. It is important to know how to feel, how to respond, and how to let life in... so that it can touch you" (Jim Rohn) – and what better place to allow life in? This is why the Camino is considered as much a spiritual pilgrimage as it is a test of physical endurance.

Hiking the Camino, the Tankwa desert will become your drug for ten days as you walk through one of the most extraordinary landscapes in Africa. This landscape beggars belief and makes you realise that God is in all the detail.

This is a place where time and distance are stretched, where horizons dance and disappear, where every corner brings a startling new vista, but in that magical hour before dark, when the flat, harsh, grey and brown tones start turning to red, purples, and chocolate brown, you will vow to return.

Your epic Camino journey will take you through vastly different landscapes, only imagined by many and one that will stay with you long after you've shaken the Karoo dust from your hiking gear.

 

How it all started...

 

Founder, Danie Pieterse, had a dream to one day walk from his grandfather Jan Pieterse's grave in the Tankwa Karoo to his other grandfather's grave in Rawsonville. Danie shared this idea with one of his friends, Charl van der Merwe and soon, the idea for a similar pilgrimage arose in the form of the Tankwa Camino. The main idea behind the Camino was to introduce people to this beautiful part of our country that connects Calvinia (in the Northern Cape) with Ceres (in the Western Cape) through the Tankwa Karoo.

 

The Tankwa Karoo, with its raw beauty and tranquillity, has increasingly captured the imagination of tourists in recent years with the opening of the Tankwa Karoo National Park (http://www.sanparks.org/parks/tankwa/) and the annual Africaburn (http://www.afrikaburn.com/) event.

 

The first Tankwa Camino was a huge success, with interest streaming in from all over the country. Danie is now managing this event with the support of his wife, Rhina, and family, and they plan on doing the hike annually. The Tankwa Camino GIVES BACK initiative supports all hikers participating in the Tankwa Camino as part of a charity organisation.