Wednesday night: eve of national bank holiday. Not for us but it’s party time anyway. Gulp! I swallow half a sushi combo platter and drive off to where needs be with my team – Anne-Elodie and Gerard’ldine. Team mates! We meet the rest of the group in a bar and follow them to a club. It has been a while since we have all been together and we have something to celebrate. Things get loose. Young guns fly high; Mama and Papa need to make sure all kids go back to their nest safely.
Whoosh! The following day is a fast sprint for deadlines, meetings and rendezvous before I’m off for another weekend. Straight after work I get to a restaurant in Melrose Arch where Fish and Xavier have been waiting for us over an hour. Starving. You want a piece of meat? You want a piece of meat. Yes please, Russian roulette style, thank you. Seven dishes ordered; one to avoid. If you picked the cheeseburger you’re out, and in for food poisoning, a short night, stomach cramps and a nauseous weekend. I’m lucky this time as I order the too cooked and tasteless veal skewers.
A cold rain is falling when we leave the restaurant. At home we fall asleep in front of a good movie and wake up in the chilly pale morning of a bank holiday. Before hitting the road, we have breakfast at a friends’ house. Chocolate cake, yes please, with a dash of mango juice. So what’s up, I ask. We ordered cheeseburger yesterday, they say.
That’s too bad, like the weather, foggy and wet. We drive along the same road we followed the week before, and the month before. Heading for a corner of green land nested between Swaziland and the Blyde river canyon, we halt briefly next to a lake before reaching our lodge just after lunch at Shoemanskloof. While waiting at the front desk we discover the main sitting room spreading to the wooden terrace with a view on the bush and the hills around. The walls inside are made of rough bricks covered with paint: dark green at the bottom and plain white at the top. There is a lit fire place on the side of the room, two couches, a few desks and chairs scattered in the large space. A collection of hats is hung on the walls, books everywhere mixed with heteroclite objects adorning the place. An old typewriter here, a rusty honk there, a small assortment of vintage cameras and some dusty glasses all reside together on the shelves and tables of the house. Yes, house, it’s not a lodge anymore, more like a friend’s place, one of old acquaintances of the family we barely know but already like. After a while Marian – the owner – shows us our room, a cosy place with a balcony, a bathroom with red terracotta tiles and some 1950’s furniture. Comfy and slightly kitsch. It’s fun.
We ask Marian for advice on what to do and see for the rest of the afternoon. She tells about this crater, some caves and a good restaurant. It’s a great village, I love it, she says as she holds her glasses between her pointy fingers adding that it looks strange and people look weird. Sold! I wan to see this. We drive half an hour up the mountains under white clouds. Omen. We begin walking up the path leading to the crater starting from the odd village – with disappointingly not so strange looking inhabitants. By the time we get to the edge of the second largest natural crater of the planet, a thick sneaky fog has fell around us. On the verge of the precipice all we can see is a pale wall of puff. We can’t see it right now but I here the view is breathtaking. Under the rain we walk back to the car, and head to the already closed Sudwala caves. Wet and cold we decide to try a bar mentioned in the so-useful and so-reliable Lonely Planet: A nice pub renounced for its meat and its grog. Once at the bar, at 5pm, they serve us two double dose of whisky on the rocks with a splash of cold water. So where’s the grog? Disappointing even though I was not expecting anything else form the Lonely Planet guide.
Tired and hungry we are on our way to a restaurant Marian had recommended, lost in the middle of nowhere, at the crossroad of everywhere and anywhere. It took us an hour and a half to find it, even though it was only at 30km away from our initial location. A-“maze”-ing. Marian, the witch: she’s good. She sent us to a great place. Another cosy kitschy interior with a blazing chimney and random artefacts. Italian food for South African wine. It’s neither the dishes nor the alcohol; it’s not the place or the owner; not the decoration or the comfort; not the alps’ chalet feeling; not even the idea of what this restaurant is, it’s something else. It lies in the truthfulness of the house, its authenticity distinctively underlined by the sharp smell of life leaking from its walls. Yes, rare thing here. Enjoy.
Eight in the morning and the sunlight plunges through the thick layer of leaves above our room to stain the tiles of our terrace with bright rounded shapes. Marian cooks us a mean breakfast including cereals, yogurt, carrot muffins, haddock, eggs, tomatoes, sausages, bacon, toasts and the homemade lip-licking-good tomato jam. D-licious.
I want a place to see, I want a path to follow. We’re standing behind the counter like two eager dogs, as Marian scrapes her map with the tip of her sharp nail. It’s a treasure map, torn and used, covered with rivers, crosses, bridges, stones, arrows and abandoned houses. Follow the yellow painted stones. This woman, she is a wizard, or the Witch of the West.
Meet Marian, a pale haired small lady married to Paul, a potion concocter. With a true smile and glasses hung to her neck by a shiny chain, she cooks the devil’s meals, large and heavy, she makes jam and fruit liquors. She knows plants, seeds and how to use them like I know one day I’ll look back in anger and think she could be right. She knows everything about anything happening on her territory. Omniscient prophet of tourist entertainment, we sacrifice our greetings on the altar of her reception desk, and feed on her precious words of fun forecast.
Off we go, jump over the fence, land face to face with a grey cow with an Indian-style lump and pointy horns. We follow the map walking through Acacia forests and fields of dry grass much taller than us, across litchi and amarula groves, around vast properties and across rivers through bridges of thin and wobbly iron threads knotted amateur-ly around rare pieces of wood. At the end of the road, of the trip, when our legs are tired, our back aching and your neck dirty, we finally find it. The treasure. A warm bath and a nap. When I come back to the room, for a long moment it feels like floating, as if time was holding me in between its giant fingers up in the air, comfortably.
The rest of the day flows slowly: a good bad movie, a scone with jam and butter, a little shopping in an old farm with loads of charm, and a D-lectable diner: Seafood crepe, duck with orange and ginger sauce with mashed potatoes and for desert more crepes with honey and spices. Each dish was served with its glass of wine. Wham bam. Hypnotic power of the taste.
The next day we soak up the sun and I teach chess. It’s a very delicate time, like following the curves of a soft lace napkin. We stop in front of a waterfall as high as the sky surrounded by the strong sent of pinewood emanating from the forest around.
We come back to Johannesburg following a red trail of back lights for hours and hours until any patience and common sense leaves our tortured bodies. That evening we transcend pain in the traffic jam, through exasperation and frustration, and reach a higher level of cognition, to the point where the roughness and brutality of all these smoking pipes, noisy engines, aggressive lights and immobile vehicles turn into infinity of void. Yes, we became numb. Marian, the witch!
Latest comments