Dear Steemians, it's such a busy time as end of year approaches and I'm finally starting to work on a few proposals (yippee! the promise of paid work), but since I was able to carve out an hour and a half yesterday to have lunch with a dear friend who's bought a small house in the amazing little dorp of Nieu Bethesda in South Africa's Eastern Cape, I thought I'd share a few photos of one outstanding feature of this eclectic place with you.

We've visited our friends in Nieu Bethesda a few times over holidays (they live in Pretoria and use this house as a Karoo pied-à-terre), mostly because it's great to stop off on a long road trip and play Scrabble, scratch the dog's head and have a couple of glasses of wine to lubricate the chatting and catching up, but also because it's a really weird and fun place which always has something interesting to offer the traveller.

Today I'll focus on one of the truly odd and fascinating experiences that Nieu Bethesda has to offer - the Owl House. I had driven past Nieu Bethesda and the signs for the Owl House many times since moving to South Africa in 1997, but it was actually only three years ago that @tim-beck and I took the turn off the highway that splits the twelve to fourteen hour coast to Joburg trip into a more relaxing two-day trek, as well as a journey back in time.

Quick overview of the Owl House

An amazing artist, Helen Martins (who you can read all about in the Owl House link in the previous paragraph), lived in the scrubby little town of Nieu Bethesda which had been formed in 1878 by local farmers who wanted to establish a village and a church congregation closer to their farms than the nearest town, Graaff-Reinet, now only about half an hour away by car (mostly on excellent highway), but you can imagine how long it would have taken by horse and buggy back in the 1870s! Helen was a shy, almost reclusive woman who had quite an unhappy life in our world, but when she moved back to her family house she became inspired over a period of more than a decade to transform her house and garden, inside and out, into a fantastic sculpture garden depicting all sorts of creatures heading to the mystical east. She wasn't a trained artist, rather an "outsider artist", as explained on this page of the Owl House website.

The sculpture garden

These pilgrims, camels and other creatures were all headed east on some pilgrimage Helen Martins understood best.

Here's a look more head on - those colours have survived decades in the harsh Karoo sun.

Mermaids, stars and flowers....

The mermaid on the left seems to be leaping out of ocean waves made from green bottles.

Seen from the other side....

Sphinxes and pyramids!

These owls perched forever on the cistern seem to be watching over bottle-skirt lady.

I don't pretend to understand it all....

But I think you'd agree it's delightful, no?

One of the many owls perched around the garden:

Owls and camels nestling together....

The outside of Owl House

Everything about the house was turned into art.

On the front porch....

And a view from across the road showing the massive owl by the front door (the human is @tim-beck).

A tale playing out on the wall under the vines greeted us as we headed into the house.

The inside of Owl House

She worked hard to transform the interior into a place of riotous colour and playfulness.

A sunny ceiling reflected off a shiny kettle....

The sun on the windows....

If you go back to that photo of Tim sitting on the front steps, you can see that window from the outside on the right.

She transformed all the glass in the house....

Every room has its own charm. I can't remember if this was a guest room or one of the main bedrooms, but the message seems to be that in the Karoo, you all slept in the same room! That rug in the foreground is made from the pelt of a springbok, a medium-sized antelope which you can see throughout the Karoo.

Owls and colour in the kitchen!

It's always a treat to go into an old Karoo house and find tins which we think are quaint but at the time held necessary ingredients for life. And I see there's a tin of Lyle's Golden Syrup at the left on the top shelf - we grew up with that in England in the 1960s and I'm pretty sure it lives on to this day (didn't I see a factory in Zaanse Schans that makes it...? But I digress.)

That was just the Owl House

Nieu Bethesda is home to many artists - painters, sculptors and other whizzes of the arts (including our friend who is an accomplished painter - when she exhibits in Cape Town in March we'll be sure to write about it), and it has the most amazing night sky, with nearly no light pollution. If your interests tend more to the paleontological, the whole Camdeboo area is a feast for fossiling. Nieu Bethesda is well worth a visit - it will steal your heart. The town is like an agate - from the outside it looks like a rock, but open it up and you gasp at the beauty it has to offer to those who look.

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