The country where KZN and PE spell BEAUTIFUL
Sue Lawley loves the amazing bargains and stunning scenery of South Africa – and the locals’ habit of shortening every name
SOUTH AFRICA is hot – and not just because of the weather. The current strength of the pound means you can enjoy the best this beautiful country has to offer at a remarkably good price. I’m not a natural believer in bargain holidays (you usually only get what you pay for), but the prospect of an affordable holiday in a place I had longed to revisit was too difficult to resist. I decided to use the opportunity to go to areas I’d never been to before. That would include KZN, PE and Plett – or Kwazulu-Natal, Port Elizabeth and Plettenberg Bay. Every name is shortened or turned into an acronym in South Africa – or should I say SA? I began on the Indian Ocean, north of Durban. As far as foreign tourists are concerned, Durban seems to be South Africa’s
forgotten city. It’s the country’s most important port and the biggest city on Africa’s Indian Ocean coastline, and was once regarded as the epitome of colonial luxury.
These days foreign visitors tend to give it a wide berth, preferring seaside resorts further south and the glamour of Cape Town. It’s a shame because although Durban itself may not have much to offer, the shore on which it stands is breathtakingly beautiful – mile upon mile of white sand and the relentless crashing of the ocean.
I stayed at The Oyster Box in Umhlanga Rocks (pronounced Oom-shlanga), a hotel that is something of an institution in this part of the world. It began life as a tea garden and eventually opened as a hotel in 1954. At first gracious and refined, it fell into some disrepair until eight years ago when it was bought and refurbished at a cost of about £40million by the Tollman family, who own a collection of luxury hotels all over the world.
Its style is South African glam: foreign-
ers may not come in their droves but well-heeled folk from Johannesburg and other big SA cities love it – and I’m not surprised. Here you can get oysters for breakfast, lunch and dinner – delicious, nutty little creatures from the hotel’s own oyster beds; eat from a huge curry buffet twice a day (Durban has the biggest Indian population of any city outside the sub-continent); or sip a dry martini at the elegant marble Oyster Bar (my favourite spot) before eating dinner on the terrace or in the hotel’s more upmarket Grill Room.
And wherever you are, the sea is with you, pounding on to the enormous sandy beaches that stretch below the hotel, while a cool breeze tempers the fierce heat.
I confess I didn’t do much except lounge by the pool, walk along the beach and play a game of golf at Zimbali, a lovely course about a 30-minute drive north. It was the perfect first stop – embracing and reassuring. Then I was ready to explore further afield.
FIRST of all we headed into the Drakensberg Mountains. The name means ‘Dragon Mountains’, a title bestowed on them by the Voortrekkers, the Boer settlers who left the area around the Cape in the 1830s and 1840s to start a new life, away from British influence, in what is now Kwazulu-Natal.
The Zulu people called the mountains ‘ The Barrier of Spears’. They stretch for 620 miles and rise to 11,000ft – a glorious wilderness not unlike the Scottish Highlands at lower levels, criss-crossed by rivers, decorated with bushman rock art, dotted with waterfalls and home to antelopes, eagles, jackals and a wide variety of frogs.
Our destination was the Cleopatra Mountain Farmhouse, a lodge that nestles below the Highmoor Nature Reserve in the Central Drakensbergs. Built at the beginning of the 20th Century, it was bought in the 1940s by a sugar farmer looking for somewhere to escape the summer heat. He and his sons and friends would leave the women behind in Durban and spend weeks fishing and hiking in the mountains. Eventually the farmer’s grandson, Richard Poynton, turned it into a hotel with an exceptional feature – its kitchen.
If you associate the outdoor life with barbecues and picnics, forget it. Cleopatra (it takes its name from the mountain it faces) prides itself on its gourmet meals, particularly its seven-course dinners that are lovingly described to you beforehand, often by Poynton himself.
There’s no choice – you get what you are given – but in the three nights we stayed there we weren’t served anything we didn’t find absolutely delicious. I don’t have a particularly sweet tooth but I was told that everyone has a ‘pudding pocket’, in addition to the stomach, and at Cleopatra it turned out to be true.
Even after clever seafood dishes, delicious soups and souffles or the tenderest springbok and fondant potato, I could still find room for cherry clafouti or poached pears and home-made ice cream. If you don’t like cream or butter or are a vegetarian, Cleopatra is not for you. If you enjoy good food, prepared with care and originality, you need to go there. (As a non-resident you’d pay about £20 for that dinner).
Before each meal my husband Hugh would wander down to the cellar to select what we were going to drink and we’d calculate how much we were paying in sterling for the top-quality bottle he’d chosen. Not a lot, I can tell you. In fact, we became very grateful for those dinners. Unusually, it rained almost constantly during our stay and we weren’t able to get out much. My natural pyromania took over and I made constant log fires and read like a Booker Prize judge – some compensation, but it made you realise that life in a mountain farmhouse is highly weather-dependent.
Damp but not unhappy, we set off for the three-hour drive back to Durban and the last leg of the trip – a flight south to Port Elizabeth (inevitably dubbed PE) and a five-night stay on the so-called Garden Route.
South Africa’s autumn sun re-emerged as we reached sea
level again and it was a shimmering drive from PE airport, through the Tsitsikamma Mountains (home to the world’s biggest commercial bungee-jump) to our next hotel at Plettenberg Bay (Plett – just an abbreviation this time).
We were staying at Emily Moon Lodge (can there be a more inviting name?), a charming hotel with only ten rooms set high above the meandering Bitou River on the outskirts of town. Emily Moon is what a holiday in South Africa should be all about. From the balcony of our com- fortable, spacious room, we could watch the wildlife along the riverbank or take a canoe and paddle softly through the water itself.
ONE evening, I saw a marsh harrier hunting over the reed beds, but we never spotted the lodge’s prize resident – a sooty falcon that, having been blown off its migratory course a couple of years ago, now returns to hunt for bats in a nearby barn.
After a delicious breakfast, we could swim in the nearby lagoon or wander along the magnificent expanse of Keurboomstrand, the local beach, or walk round the Robberg Peninsula, a nature reserve that’s home to Cape fur seals and albatross and has spectacular views across the ocean. Look due east and there’s nothing between you and Australia; face south and it’s sea all the way down to Antarctica.
One sundown we sat out on the terrace of Enrico’s, a sprawling informal restaurant that stands above the rocks at one end of Keurboomstrand, and tucked in, once again, to local oysters, a plate of crayfish tails the size of lobsters and a glass or two of Cap Classique, the South African version of champagne. In England such a treat would cost an arm and a leg. Here we paid about £20.
Plett is one of South Africa’s newer holiday playgrounds, a location too lovely for developers to ignore. The houses being built on the seafront all belong to the bags-of-money school of architecture – big windows, big terraces, big pillars, big everything – and, as elsewhere in South Africa, run the risk of undermining the natural beauty of the landscape. Emily Moon is hidden from all that. Here you can enjoy the country as it should be enjoyed – with that unique balance of luxury and the natural world that makes a holiday in South Africa special.
When not communing with nature, we played golf at local courses and each evening ate in the lodge’s bustling restaurant, one of the best in Plettenberg Bay. Again, it was great value: an aperitif, three-course dinner for two and a bottle of good wine cost about £40.
After dinner we would sit outside around open fires lit in braziers on the terrace where the fierce heat mingled with the cool air to create a wonderful sense of wellbeing.
From KZN to PE and Plett, we’d seen new corners of this vast country and I’m left in no doubt that the South African writer Alan Paton put it in a nutshell when he titled one of his novels Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful.