It’s been weeks since my stay at Kings Walden – in Agatha, Limpopo, above the town of Tzaneen – and I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to write about it. Perhaps it’s because this magical place is difficult to describe in words.

Back in the olden days, I often used this blog as a vessel for my grief and sadness. I went through a lot of tangible pain in the early 2Summers years – losing a partner to addiction, among other things – and the blog was one of my coping mechanisms. (You can find those old posts under the grief hashtag – scroll back to the early ones.)

After spending two days overlooking the beach in Plettenberg Bay (see part 1), our group of lady journalists took a quick hop over the Outeniqua Mountains to spend two days in the desert town of Oudtshoorn.

JoburgPlaces, a downtown tour company that I’ve written about many times, recently introduced a couple of different city experiences that center around the concept of migration.

The JoburgPlaces Migrant Cuisines Storytelling Dinner is an epic evening at the Thunderwalker (formerly Somerset House) on Gandhi Square, in which JoburgPlaces guide Charlie Moyo explains the history of Johannesburg in terms of the multiple and overlapping waves of migration that have been happening since the city was founded 133 years ago. The historical overview is accompanied by a series of migrant-inspired food dishes cooked up by in-house chef Princess Bulelwa Mbonambi.

Earlier this month I visited Plettenberg Bay (a.k.a. Plett), one of South Africa’s most popular beach towns, for the first time. Plett is part of the drop-dead gorgeous piece of coastline east of Cape Town called the Garden Route, near the border between the Western Cape and the Eastern Cape provinces.

I love Limpopo and I also love African craft art. So when I went to Madi a Thavha Mountain Lodge – a lodge outside Louis Trichardt in far northern Limpopo that promotes the work of Venda and Tsonga artists – I was in heaven.

Today is National Women’s Day in South Africa. South African Women’s Day, which is a public holiday and falls on 9 August, is different from International Women’s Day on 8 March. The holiday commemorates the Women’s March of 1956, during which 20,000 South African women of all races marched in Pretoria to protest the apartheid pass laws.

From the Melville Cat:

Forgive me friends, as it has been many months since my last update. I’ve been busy. For a while I was spending most of my time outdoors in an effort to escape the insufferable badgering of the Trixie, the Midget Fluff Ball Menace. She has grown larger and her harassment progressively more tiresome.