Little diamond of a town
CULLINAN: ONE BIG WEDDING VENUE ... APART FROM BAR GIRLS FLIPPING THROUGH MAGAZINES
Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and their surrounds, curious to feel them out. This week she’s dodging diamonds in Cullinan.
Heather and I plan to drive past the Diamond Mine. As it happens, the roadworks detour sees to that anyway. We want to see what’s not necessarily about diamonds in Cullinan.
Almost the first thing we see is a sign for Diamond Alarms. McHardy House is a museum, the first house, built in 1903 for the first mining magnate. But the fountain was built in the 1940s by some of the 100 000 Italian prisoners of war, held at nearby Zonderwater.
Another museum is dedicated to them, so many talented masons, carpenters, artisans, artists like Edoardo Villa. It contains heart-tugging items, like musical instruments, exquisitely crafted, and even handmade 3D postcards mystifyingly depicting scenes of South African history the Italians would not have known.
We try for the entrance to the recreation club where prisoner of war murals have been restored. The entrance is covered and locked by an antique shop. We return, having been advised to ask someone in the adjacent bar to open a side door. The odd thing is that the meticulously-painted murals are of those 3D postcards. Skipping old homes operating as diamond tour offices, we visit Jan Harmsgat, given over to weddings of the nostalgic type, their receptions and paraphernalia. It occurs to me that a town so diamond laden might well attract weddings, as if by association, though I have yet to prove my hypothesis in Kimberley and Koffiefontein.
Cullinan’s cute Herbert Baker Anglican Church no doubt sees its share. Even the station looks like a wedding set in a vintage movie, except maybe for two bar girls flipping through magazines under a ceiling of vinyls.
We follow a Big Hole roadsign to a wide depression with a cliffside. It’s not madly impressive but gamely we take viewing point pics of each other.
A farm bakkie drives down into it and the driver chats amiably to someone at a gate. Later we’ll see an aerial pic of Cullinan’s bigger-than-Kimberley’s hole some distance away from this puzzling, smaller hole.
Our trip to Cullinan couldn’t be completed without visiting Stavros Vladislavic, whose textured calamari or honeyed kleftiko are unequalled, at As Greek as it Gets. Next door, Rust in White Décor finishes any yen for collecting I’ve harboured because they have it all.
Here too, illustrating Cullinan’s weddingy, antiquey side, in a flower-bedecked basin, are two froggies going a-wooing in sparkling style.
It occurs to me that a town so diamond laden might well attract weddings.