Pofadder

Pofadder's name regularly appears on South African road trip lists for its phonetic appeal, but the town itself is more interesting than the joke suggests. A mission station was established here in 1875, named for Klaas Pofadder, a Korana chief who had lived in the area and was killed by local farmers. The town that grew from it was officially called Theronsville when it was formalized in 1918, but Pofadder had already stuck and the official name was eventually changed to match.

The Korana springs, Koranna Springs, are what drew people here originally. Fresh water in Bushmanland is not a trivial thing. The surrounding district is arid, rugged, and sparsely populated in the extreme. This is the Bushmanland, south of the Orange River and east of Namaqualand, a vast semi-desert plateau where sheep farms are measured in thousands of hectares and the nearest neighbour might be an hour's drive away.

Pofadder sits on the N14, the national road that connects Springbok to Upington through some of the emptiest country in the country. The town is 170 km west of Upington and roughly 60 km south of Onseepkans, near the Orange River and the Namibian border. Date plantations and solar power stations have added some economic activity to the traditional sheep farming. The solar farms visible from the N14 are a feature of the landscape around Pofadder now.

The town has a pub, a few shops, a guesthouse, and the particular character of an outpost that exists because of what's around it rather than because of what's in it. The landscapes on either side of the N14 through Bushmanland are stark and beautiful, and Pofadder is a natural stop in the middle of them.