Short travels

Walter and I have been exploring places a little closer to home than Tuscany lately; the combination of the petrol price, the currency and work demands have limited our choices.

Have hat, will travel.

In a fit of insomnia-induced midnight madness I decided we should go to the Clarens Craft Beer Festival. Walter agreed, then went back to sleep.
The closer it came the more I panicked. Surely this was a huge mistake? Wouldn't there be drunken students and mad crowds? I decided we would have to manage our exposure to both quite carefully. I booked the most expensive food and beer pairing I could find for the night before the start of the festival and chose accommodation just beyond staggering distance from the festival itself. The pairing conveniently doubled as our Valentine's Day celebrations even though it was well after the actual date. This is how I rationalise the cost and appear thoughtful while cunningly avoiding commercial traps.It has nothing to do with forgetting the date. At all.

Yes I spotted the typo, but we weren't there for the writing. The food was excellent.


We stayed at the Maluti Mountain Lodge - it's affordable and close enough to Clarens that you don't need to own a minor Arab Emirate to afford the petrol required for scenic meanderings.

It's a three-star establishment, so temper your expectations accordingly. The pretty walkway from reception to the rooms, quite separate from the main lodge.

Taken very early in the morning while drinking coffee and enjoying the silence. I could hear the gas burners adding small jets of hot air to the envelopes

The next day we drove south to Ficksburg in search of a restaurant highly recommended on the Eat Out website.
There is space to breathe in the eastern Free State.This is not the flat, treeless tedious N1 scenery of the Cape Town Christmas lemming rush.Winding country roads skirt broad fields of glorious black-faced sunflowers under the widest sky you will find anywhere. Oddly-spaced mesas and buttes that change colour throughout the day give this part of the country unique visual appeal, with the sandstone changing from grey to rose depending on the angle of the sun. Each bend in the road revealing more beautiful scenery which my inadequate photography skills could not fully capture. My "Pull over, I MUST have that shot!" demands sorely testing Walter's patience and driving skills (the MX-5 does not come with a spare, pulling onto the verge should be avoided for fear of rusty nails and tyre-shredding sharp stones)

This part reminded us of Tuscany, but without the thick black mud and with the beautiful African grass

The TomTom (Seamus, who took us all the way through Tuscany and has travelled far and wide with us) got us to Ficksburg and announced "You have reached your destination" outside a place that was clearly not our destination. After driving up and down the main road a few times Walter sighed and took a very brave decision - he went into a guest lodge and asked for directions. The restaurant had closed down three months earlier (lesson - call ahead to find out if they are still open before driving eighty kilometres in expectation of a really good meal)
We decided to eat at the guest lodge - good hamburgers but really not what we had in mind.
Arriving back in Clarens in the late afternoon and dizzy with the courage we felt after asking for directions, we decided we were brave enough to go to the beer festival after all. After a nap.

Which is probably why we missed the festival entirely. The gates close at 6pm and we only arrived at ten past. No drunken students or rowdy revellers, just a few pot-bellied middle-aged men on Harleys and some well-behaved stragglers. So it's quite safe for you to go next year, even if you don't like the thought of crowds. Just remember the early closing time.

Walter went above and beyond on the homeward leg, driving onto a very dodgy dirt road so I could watch this crop-sprayer close up. Fortunately the tyres survived