Wood-fired hot tub stays on Route 62 and the Klein Karoo

Route 62 is the road you take when you are in no hurry. Billed as the world's longest wine route, it threads inland from the Cape through Montagu and on into the Klein Karoo, a slower, scenic alternative to the coastal rush of the N2. The reward for driving it properly, with the windows down and a farm stall stop or two, is a wood-fired tub at the end of each leg. These are not a dense chain of soaks lined up door to door. They are well-placed stays along and near the route, the kind of overnight stops that let you break a long inland drive into something closer to a meander.

Why Route 62 rewards the slow driver

The pleasure of Route 62 is in what it makes you give up. There is no motorway pace here, no monotony of tarmac and toll plazas. Instead you get mountain passes that climb and fall, dorps that have not changed much in decades and farm stalls selling dried fruit, witblits and home baking. The wine route gives the road its name, but the Klein Karoo gives it its character: a wide, dry, generous landscape that opens out the further east you go. Driving it well means stopping often and arriving late, which is exactly why a hot tub waiting at the end matters. After a day of passes and padstalle, lowering yourself into hot water under a Karoo sky is the whole point of going the long way round.

A luxury soak near Montagu

Montagu sits at the western gateway to the Klein Karoo, where the Breede River Valley gives way to the drier country beyond and it makes a natural first night. Just outside town, Leopard's Kloof Luxury Tented Camp puts you inside a private nature reserve without asking you to rough it. This is a luxury tented camp in the proper sense, with a wood-fired hot tub and a heated pool, so you can alternate between a long laze in the warm water and a few unhurried lengths. It is the kind of stop that resets you for the deeper inland stretch, close enough to Montagu's restaurants and wine but far enough into the reserve that the quiet feels total once the day-trippers have gone.

Cabins and cottages off the route

Not every stay on this trip sits squarely on the white line of Route 62, and that is part of the appeal. Detour north into the Tulbagh Valley and you find Radio Nowhere Cabin, a two-sleeper cabin built for couples who want nothing more complicated than a bottle of local wine and a wood-fired hot tub with the valley in front of them. It is small on purpose. Further into the Karoo proper, Montana Vista at Gecko Rock is a cottage on the Gecko Rock reserve with a wood-heated hot tub of its own, the sort of place where the nearest light at night is a star. Both reward the willingness to leave the main road for a few kilometres, trading passing traffic for the kind of silence the Karoo does better than anywhere.

Planning the drive around the soaks

The honest way to plan a Route 62 trip is to treat these stays as anchors rather than a tightly spaced string. Pick two or three, work out the driving between them and let the passes and farm stalls fill the hours in between. A night near Montagu, a detour to the Tulbagh Valley, a stretch deeper into the Karoo: each leg is a few hours of road and a wood-fired soak at the end. Every tub here is wood-fired, which means the heat comes up slowly while you settle in, lay out supper or simply watch the light go. If you want to keep exploring the wider area, the Breede River Valley and the Central Karoo both have more stays worth building a route around, so the drive can be as long or as lingering as you choose to make it.