Tourism is about more than just profit

Five years ago, we tackled the great trek from the city to the Karoo. We had fantasised about the tranquillity and the good food and the friendly people, but encountered something else, something I like to call the New Karoo. It is the same, yet different.

Just the other day, Jeanne, who lives on the other side of town, told me about her former neighbour Tannie Bettie, who had a clay oven in her back garden and would sometimes pass a warm loaf of bread across the fence as they swapped news.

But then people from the city bought Tannie Bettie’s property. They demolished the clay oven and for six weeks they drilled through a layer of rock so they could install a swimming