Folks mostly talk about the past, an era of mine barons and runaway outlaws that made the region the closest thing to America's Wild West. Then times changed and copper prices collapsed, leaving Okiep as just another lonely backwater with few links to the old days. Except for the flowers. In one of the world's great natural spectacles, the surrounding countryside of the Namaqualand region blooms each spring in a psychedelic fantasy of teeming colors.
Entire valleys become a fertile rainbow, resembling tinted clouds from a distance.
Flowers line the roadsides, fill the fields and sprinkle between the tough shrubs and bushes of a semidesert environment that gets only eight inches of rain a year. You just stand in awe. No one here knows exactly why it happens amid the dusty granite hills of the arid Namaqualand. Named for the Nama people, the territory boasts spectacular rocky vistas set against the deep blue African sky. Ursinia and Dimorphotheca, a prolific local daisy, blaze orange across entire fields, set off by the purple of the lilac Senecio arenarius.