Published: 06/06/2010 by South Africa Tourism

Welcome to the Kids Directory for North West Province in South Africa.

North West's Southern Region is wet and wild, offering your every adventure activity imaginable including watersports and fishing on rivers and dams that also make for ideal platforms from which to view the herds of game roaming through a wide open landscape marked by historic towns and the Vredefort Dome.

The North West Southern Region: bushveld, water and wildlife enliven North West attractions like the Vredefort Dome and North West tourism drawcards like Boskop Dam.

Welcome to the North West Southern Region - welcome to the great outdoors. Hiking, camping, mountain biking, white water rafting, canoeing, yachting, 4x4 trails, mountain climbing, abseiling, fly fishing, angling - here, the accent is most emphatically on adventure.

The landscape is a patchwork of green maize and yellow sunflower fields, bushveld plains interspersed with wild olive and umbrella thorn trees, and water - plenty of water. With the Vaal River flowing the length of its southern border, Bloemhof Dam - one of South Africa's largest at 25 000 hectares - and Boskop Dam, the Southern Region is a particularly fertile site for watersports. Mainstays of North West tourism, Bloemhof Dam Nature Reserve and Boskop Dam Nature Reserve let you combine fly-fishing and angling with game viewing, with large herds of black wildebeest, eland, springbok and gemsbok. Also giving onto the Bloemhof Dam are Sandveld Nature Reserve, a birding hotspot, and SA Lombard Nature Reserve - a particularly good game-viewing choice because it has so few trees to get in the way of your camera.

Among the biggest North West attractions is the World Heritage Site of the Vredefort Dome 120 km west of Johannesburg. Two billion years ago an asteroid the size of a mountain struck the land - and destroyed almost all life on the planet. Today the 190 km-wide crater cradles a micro-ecosystem unique to the area. The Dome Bergland Meander will provide you with an adventure experience in a landscape steeped in geological, biological and archeological heritage.

Heritage is also the hallmark of the North West Southern Region's towns. Christiana with its Diggers Diamond Museum and Bushman rock art, Krugersdorp with its gold mines and museums, Parys with its art-deco buildings and Potchefstroom with its vibrant pub culture are all fine places to unwind after a thrilling holiday.

Bophirima, North West province, with its wide open spaces and big skies, gives you the chance to view and even walk among the wild animals of South Africa on its trails, experiencing untamed landscapes that have remained unchanged since the San painted views of them on the rocks.

Bophirima, North West province, numbers among its principal attractions big skies, rolling plains, game, and a world-famous skull. Previously called Stellaland, the 'Texas of South Africa' with its healthy dry climate and sunny winter days, is South Africa's least populated area - ideal for getting close to nature.

Bophirima's main town is Vryburg, once capital of the Republic of Stellaland. Explore its past at the Vryburg Museum, the Tierkloof Missionary Station, and the Theiler Agricultural Museum and Cattle Research Centre. Be sure to inspect the Old Gaol main gate and the many Bushman rock paintings in the area. The Leon Taljaard Game Reserve stocks a wide variety of game and contains Bophirima's exciting Vryburg Trail.

Bophirima has other charming small towns - Reivilo, Stella (host of the annual October Cattle Festival) and Schweizer-Reineke, with its 20 000-year-old Bushman rock paintings - all near the Taung Heritage Site. This scientific landmark showcases Dr Raymond Dart's 1926 discovery of the Taung child skull, the first known instance of ancient hominid Australopithecus africanus. Round off your trip back into deep time with a picnic at the pristine Blue Pools picnic site at the Taung Heritage Site's Buxton quarry.

Tucked away in the west near the Botswana border, 250 km north of Vryburg, the 24 000 hectare Molopo Game Reserve teems with herds of game such as eland, blue wildebeest, gemsbok, red hartebeest, kudu, zebra, impala, waterbuck and springbok; and predators such as cheetah, brown hyena, caracal, black-backed jackal, African wildcat, honey badger and the small spotted genet.

Birdlife also abounds, the reserve forming part of an interprovincial raptor conservancy covering a million hectares. View game at waterholes by day or night and explore a special Bophirima attraction, the fossilised Phepane river bed that carried a mighty river millions of years ago.

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