The Vaal River is the main tributary of the Orange (Gariep) River. It is a 1210km long waterway that forms a boundary between the Free State Province and the provinces of Gauteng, North West and the Northern Cape. It supplies water to the country’s industrial heartland, including the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria. It is the longest river in South Africa after the Orange River. Its source is at Klipstapel in Mpumalanga from where it flows to Douglas in the Northern Cape. Here it meets with the mighty Orange River, which then flows west into the Atlantic Ocean at Alexander Bay.
The Vaal River means “drab” or “dull” in Dutch because of its brown-grey colour. It is divided into three catchment areas: the Upper Vaal, Middle Vaal and the Lower Vaal.
The Upper Vaal is centred on the towns of Vereeniging and Vanderbijlpark whre expensive real estate and riverfront guesthouses lines it’s banks.
Several hundred islands along the river is found, which in turns help to create it’s white-water rapids. The biggest and trickiest section of rapids is between Parys and Christiana, where rapids with names like “BigDaddy” assure adrenalin-packed white-water rafting.
The Middle Vaal, mainly an agricultural region, covers parts of the Free State an North West provinces, and The Lower Vaal comprises the are between the Bloemhof Dan and the confluence of the Vaal and Orange rivers at Douglas in the Northern Cape.
The town of Douglas was founded in 1848 as a mission station on the farm Backhouse, by the Reverend Isaac Hughes. In 1867, a group of Europeans from Griquatown signed an agreement giving them the right to establish a town.
It was named after General Sir Percy Douglas, Lieutenant Governor of the Cape Colony. Near the confluence of the Orange River and the Vaal River, Douglas is a thriving fast growing town surrounded by a wealth of agricultural and stock farming ventures fed by two of South of Africas’s greatest rivers.