Some of the best conversations of your relationship will happen on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.
There are many ways to spend time with your partner. Restaurants, weekends away, the occasional holiday that involves a swimming pool and very little ambition. These are all fine. Nobody is arguing against them.
But if you want to know what a multi-day walk in the Karoo does to two people who choose to do it together, the answer is this: it strips away everything that usually fills the space between you, and leaves only the two of you, the road, and enough silence to actually hear each other again.
The Nieu-Bethesda Camino is five days of walking through one of the most ancient and beautiful landscapes in South Africa – and what it does to couples, quietly and without fanfare, is something most people don’t fully understand until they’re a day or two in and something unexpectedly good is happening. Here’s what to expect.
1. The Noise Stops – and Something Else Begins
Modern relationships are conducted largely in the gaps between other things. Between work and the children and the dinner that needs to happen and the messages that keep arriving and the television that’s always on and the general low-level hum of a life that is very full and occasionally very loud.
The Camino removes all of it. Not gradually – immediately. From the moment you step onto the route on day one, there is no inbox, no meeting, no obligation to be anywhere other than exactly where you are. The Karoo does not care about your deadlines. The Sneeuberg mountains have been here for three hundred million years and they are entirely unbothered by your workload.
What this creates, surprisingly quickly, is space. Space to talk about things that haven’t been talked about in months. Space to walk in comfortable silence without it feeling like something is wrong. Space to notice your partner – the way they move, what makes them laugh, how they handle a steep climb or a long flat stretch – without the usual distractions competing for your attention.
Couples who have done the Camino together consistently describe the first full day of walking as the moment they remembered something they didn’t realise they’d forgotten. It is not complicated. It is just the two of you, and the road, and time.
2. You Will Find Out How You Handle Hard Things Together
A multi-day walk is not relentlessly difficult. But it has its moments – a long afternoon when the kilometres feel longer than they should, a morning start that is colder than expected, a section of route that demands more concentration than the earlier stretches.
These moments are revealing in the best possible way. You discover very quickly how you and your partner support each other when something is hard. Who encourages and how. Who sets the pace and how that’s negotiated. Whether you walk side by side or take turns leading. How you handle it when one person is having a better day than the other.
None of this is heavy. It is, in fact, often amusing – the Karoo has a way of making small difficulties seem gently funny rather than genuinely stressful, which is part of its gift to couples walking through it. But the discoveries are real, and what you learn about each other on a difficult stretch of road is often more useful than anything you might learn about each other in five years of Sundays on the couch.
3. You Will Talk Differently
Walking does something to conversation. There is research that suggests people are more open, more honest and more creative in their thinking when they are moving – and if you’ve ever had a significant conversation on a walk, you’ll recognise this intuitively.
Something about the forward motion of walking, the eyes fixed on the horizon rather than on each other’s faces, the rhythm of footfall and breath – it loosens things up. Conversations start more easily. Topics arise naturally rather than being introduced with the slight awkwardness of sitting down opposite each other and announcing that you need to talk.
On the Camino, you’ll find yourselves discussing things you’ve been meaning to discuss for months. Plans, ideas, memories, things you love about each other that somehow never get said in the ordinary rush of things. And in between these conversations – the silence, which by day two feels like its own form of intimacy.
Couples often say that the five days of the Camino contained more real conversation than the preceding six months. This is not an exaggeration. It is just what happens when you give two people time, space and a long road.
4. The Evenings Are Their Own Reward
The walk is the walk. But the evenings on the Camino are something else entirely.
You arrive at your overnight stop having covered real ground on your own two feet – a satisfaction that is both physical and quietly profound. You shower. You change. You sit down to a meal that has been cooked with care on a Karoo farm, with ingredients sourced from the land around you, by people who understand that feeding hungry walkers well is a genuine art form.
There is wine. There is warmth. There are no phones demanding anything from either of you. There is only the particular easy companionship of two people who have spent the day doing something worthwhile together and are now resting in the way that can only be earned.
These evenings have a quality that is very difficult to manufacture at home, no matter how good your intentions. The effort of the day and the comfort of the evening create a combination that most couples describe as the most relaxed they’ve felt together in years. And the sleep that follows – deep, early, absolute – is the sleep of people who have genuinely used their bodies and quieted their minds.
5. You’ll Come Home Different – Together
The Camino ends in Nieu-Bethesda village on day five, and there is a particular feeling that accompanies that last walk in – a mixture of satisfaction, pride and a reluctance to let the experience end that most walkers, regardless of whether they came alone or with someone, feel quietly and deeply.
For couples, there is something additional: the knowledge that you have done something genuinely together. Not just in the same place at the same time, but really together – navigating the same road, sharing the same discomforts and the same rewards, having the kind of conversations that don’t happen anywhere else, watching the same extraordinary sky at night and waking up in the same cold Karoo dawn.
You will return to your ordinary life. The inbox will reappear. The deadlines will reassert themselves. The noise will come back.
But something will be different. A recalibration will have happened – in each of you individually, and between you as a couple. The Karoo tends to return people to themselves, and it has a particular gift for returning couples to each other.
Most couples who walk the Camino together start looking at dates for the next one before they’ve fully unpacked from the first. This is, we think, the highest possible endorsement.
Ready to walk together? Request your info pack today.
Lynnette Blackie
slackpackingthekaroo@gmail.com
📞 +27 (0)82 367 2726
🌐 www.slackpackingthekaroo.co.za
