COUNTRY ROADS
From Highveld to Lowveld, Andrew Unsworth enjoys one of our nation’s greatest drives
CROSSING the Highveld on the N12 and the N4 on your way to the Lowveld of Mpumalanga can offer very different experiences at different times of the year.
This must be one of the best-maintained highways in the country after the upgrade of the “Maputo Corridor” between the capitals of Gauteng and Mozambique. At present, it is a pleasure to drive. In summer, you cross rolling grasslands with cattle, maize and even a huge cabbage patch.
In autumn, you might catch the display of cosmos, a South American weed introduced in fodder for British horses during the Anglo-Boer war.
I have also driven it on a winter morning, when the smoke from veld fires and the power stations of the coalfields south of Ogies and Witbank (now eMalahleni) mingle with mist to create a hellish monochrome landscape. Some bright tourism-promotion signs call this the “Cultural Heartland”, but on such bleak days, it reminds one more of Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills”.
Unless you count Anneline Kriel of Witbank, who became Miss World in 1974, the area’s only great contribution to culture was artist Gerard Sekoto, who was born at the Lutheran Mission Station, Botshabelo, near Middelburg. (That station was established in 1865 by two German missionaries, Alexander Merensky and Heinrich Grütner: its fort, church and other buildings are well maintained but, strictly speaking, are off this route.)
The N12 from Joburg and N4 from Pretoria merge at eMalahleni. Either way, there is not a lot to see until you have turned off the highway after about 200km, towards Belfast. This dorp has seen better days, and seems to have lost out on the tourism bonanza and gentrification that has blessed and blighted other rural villages around the country. Today, the only thing to make you pause is the state of the road through the town.
Move on to Dullstroom, 35km down the R540, across increasingly scenic and pleasing countryside of grass-covered downs and occasional copses of pines and eucalyptus trees. Dullstroom did happen as a town, thanks to the trout-fishing in the area and its location: a perfect position on the Highveld, clean stream and far enough away from the highway. Its downside is increasing development, as every visit reveals more restaurants and shops. Still, I almost always stop to buy farm-bread, real
boerebeskuit , preserved figs, cheese from nearby Tonteldoos, and, just occasionally, the expensive trout.
Moving on, the road crosses a low ridge before winding down the beautiful valley of the Dorps River towards Lydenburg. Take your time to admire this route, not least because there is now the occasional pothole — but not nearly as many as Lowveld people believe: they always recommend the N4 all the way to Nelspruit. That route is scenic but you share it with trucks and taxis hurtling down to Maputo, and miss the magnificent Long Tom Pass.
About 20km out of Dullstroom, there is a small roadside monument on your left, which I’ve passed a dozen times on previous trips before actually stopping to look. It is well maintained, with even a path from the road cut from the tall grass. It is dedicated to 10 British soldiers killed there by Boer fire in 1901 during the Anglo-Boer War. Stop and reflect if you will: did they die for the ultimately lost cause of the British Empire, or did their deaths leave us
a united country, geographically at least? You decide, but there is something utterly sad about such monuments to young men who died far from home in a foreign field.
The larger town of Lydenburg (now Mashishing) was named as “Place of Suffering” in 1850, when earlier Voortrekker settlers in Ohrigstad were decimated by malaria and moved here to higher ground. It was once the capital of its own republic before joining the Transvaal republic.
The town’s museum, on your left as you leave on the R37 to Sabie, has copies of the famous Lydenburg Heads, the oldest-known ceramics in South Africa. It was a 10-year old schoolboy who first spotted some pieces on a farm in 1957 and, over the next few years, he kept returning to the farm to search for more. Finally, the pieces were reassembled to reveal seven heads, estimated to date back to 600AD. The originals are in the Iziko Natural History Museum in Cape Town.
The museum is at the foot of Long Tom Pass, one of the most beautiful in the country. It follows, more or less, the route of the Old Harbour Road between Lydenburg and Delagoa Bay (Maputo), with the first road built in 1875/6 by Alois Nellmapius. The present road was finished in 1953 and only tarred in 1964. At 2 150m above sea level, it was for a while the highest tarred road in South Africa. It’s deceptively easy to drive, but must have been hell in an ox-wagon. Today, more or less atop the pass, you can pause at Hops Hollow Country House and Brew Pub for just the one glass of their excellent ale.
On the Highveld side, the road offers glimpses into deep ravines and valleys. From the top on a clear day, you can see down to Sabie and beyond, across a landscape now transformed by forestry plantations. In 2007 the whole area was devastated by fires, but new seedlings have already covered the hills again.
The pass takes its name from two French-made “Long Tom” 15.5cm calibre guns that a Boer commando used to fire down on the British forces in Lydenburg in September 1900. There is a replica of one of them at its last position of battle, a few kilometres down the pass towards Sabie.
In late summer, the roadside is at times thick with white lilies, Lilium regale, which are not indigenous but were apparently deliberately seeded by a long-dead resident of Graskop. Considering the millions of foreign pines and gums covering the hills, it would seem churlish to object to lilies.
As you descend Long Tom Pass into Sabie, you are entering the Panorama Route, offering a host of guesthouses and lodges. Foreign tourists appreciate it as much as we do, almost always spending a day or two exploring the waterfalls of the Sabie-Graskop plateau (it’s not really the Lowveld yet), God’s Window and the Blyde River Canyon.
Sabie also boasts the tiny parish church of St Peter by Sir Herbert Baker at the centre of town, which is sometimes open, but the exterior is prettier than the interior.
From Sabie, you can take the road to Hazyview and the Lowveld, a national favourite with bikers, but rather take the loop via Graskop to enjoy another pass. The 30km to Graskop is lined with pine plantations, but they are ever-changing with fellings and replantings. About half way is the Mac Mac Falls, with a nominal entrance fee, one of many in the area but the only one with a fall of water which was, according to legend, split in two by gold prospectors breaking away rock at the top.
Once upon a time, every dorpie in South Africa had a hotel, usually the Grand or the Royal; Graskop still has one, revamped and thriving, along with a host of good B&Bs and guesthouses. Busloads of tourists seem to eat at Harrie’s Pancakes, but it’s not the only pancake shop in town. Although trains stopped running to the timberyard station in 2007, it is still a forestry town, which just happens to be perfectly placed for exploring the Lowveld, and it’s cooler.
Outside Graskop, Kowyn’s Pass drops 457m down to the Lowveld in just 3km. Since it was built in the 1890s, it has had a reputation as one of the most dangerous in the country. The present pass and road were finished only in 1959 and tarred in 1968. A rockfall shelter built of concrete in 1971 was the first in the country. The road was reportedly once lined with the beautiful, drooping, blue agapanthus now called Graskop Blue, but no longer: presumably motorists took them all. You can see them and buy them at Kirstenbosch in Cape Town.
Once you arrive in Hazyview, you are in another country: warmer, more lush and more densely populated until you enter the Kruger National Park. This is a belt of litchi and mango trees, of banana plantations, of roadside stalls selling it all.
Information on the passes thanks to The road offers glimpses into deep ravines and valleys