FALLING FOR LIMPOPO
Angus Begg gets to experience the many charms of Limpopo through the eyes of the people who live there
Last year, I flew from home in Cape Town to Limpopo, a place I once knew well, for the first time in well over a decade.
I was tagging along with a group of tour operators being shown the best of Limpopo by people who live there, such as Deon Pinard of Love Limpopo.
Love Limpopo is a collection of product owners and guides who use their skills, assets and knowledge to grow tourism in the province.
SA has plenty of experiences on offer, but not many of them are put together in a package. Pinard and his associates in the industry have done exactly that.
Stretching my legs at the Kranskop food and fuel stop, the mountain horizon in the background and the lingering scent of bushveld bring happy road-trip memories flooding back.
We start off at Kurisa Moya, an old farmhouse in the Magoebaskloof hills — paraffin lamps, great rusks etc — surrounded by the Woodbush Forest Reserve. I had no idea this is the second-largest indigenous forest in SA and is easily accessible from the R71, with some bumpy dirt road.
With the prolific forest and lowveld birds
on offer, it makes sense that local expert David Letsoalo, regarded as the country’s top birding guide, takes us for a walk after breakfast. Birders, incidentally, regard the 14km forest drive as the best forest-birding area in Limpopo, if not the country.
On our way to go ziplining across a mountain gorge, Pinard told us about the numerous avocado plantations.
“Y’know ZZ2 tomatoes (north of the Soutpansberg)? They’re planting plenty avos. In fact,” he says, as we start edging down the escarpment, “they have a biosphere planned for the valley down there.”
The ziplining at Magoebaskloof Canopy Tours, just off the George’s Valley road, is fabulous, zig-zagging back and forth across the subtropically vegetated gorge.
“Unfortunately,” says Pinard, “Zwakala Craft Brewery is hosting a wedding, so we can’t visit, it’s such a bummer, ’cause the beer is really good.”
Instead, we lunch at Wegraakbosch Organic Dairy, where the word “authentic”, much favoured in tourist brochures in recent years, seems to be as much etched into the old barn as it is into owner Nipper Thompson’s countenance.
The barefoot Thompson is a bundle of energy and experience, whose shorts bear the scars of a war against invasive aliens in his garden, across the dirt track from the barn.
Under a pergola adjoining the barn, Sylvia, his Swiss wife, serves us lunch prepared from the farm — cheese from her Swiss cows, chorizo from the pigs, and salad. If we were tourists we could assist in making cheese.
Then it’s down into the Lowveld to Twananani Textiles in Mbokota village, where residents dress in traditional clothing as part of daily life, not for display. I remember visiting here 15 years ago.
Back then, Florence Ngobeni was at Twananani and she still runs it today. When her colleagues are not sketching, cutting and decorating cushions and fabrics to order, they take tourists through the process of creating their own batik-style cloths.
After braaied chicken for lunch on the road, the night is spent at the community-owned Nahakwe Lodge. Nahakwe is simply a stopover on the road from A to B, a smart lodge, no wildlife, but with all the accommodation bells and whistles.
After sundowners on the deck and dinner in the boma, we spend the evening drumming with a handful of young, local musicians.
The next morning, past Giyani, a dirt road through mopane woodland takes us past Baleni Cultural Camp to the Letaba River, close to the boundary of the Kruger National Park.
We meet two women, Emelina Mathebula and Maria Mkhariare, doing what their ancestors have done for centuries: harvesting salt from the dry riverbed. They sift riversand through a filter system made from gwarri branches and earth, then cook it. R10 buys you a bag of pure salt, no chemicals added.
We learn that the cloths we think of as Shangaan actually arrived with Indian traders after World War 2. We also learn that Mathebula and Mkhariare are Tsonga, a subgroup of the Shangaan people.
We spend that night in canvas tents at Mtomeni Safari Camp, on the Klein Letaba River, in the Letaba Ranch section of the Kruger. Each tent has a double bed, a toilet and shower, and even a coffee-table and hairdryer.
Juvenile elephants trumpet from the darkened riverbed below while we are fed by Susan Mhangwana, who drives her fresh ingredients in from Lulekani.
In the morning, we drive and walk with a guide soon after dawn. Featured are elephant dung, birds singing, leadwood trees and hippos grunting in the river, all underlaid with the trademark scent of wilderness waking.
You have to love Limpopo.
Begg was a guest of Love Limpopo and the African Ivory Route.