#Travel

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.

I drove Limpopo – South Africa’s northernmost province – from top to bottom and around again. I visited towns with lyrical names: Mookgophong, Mokopane, Polokwane, Tzaneen, Giyani, Makhado. I stayed in luxury lodges and self-catering chalets. I gaped up at a full moon from beneath a towering white tree that’s been dead for more than 30 years. I got lost in an orange grove. I drank gin and tonics. I ate a hamburger on a bun so stale I could have used it as a hockey puck. I ate macadamia-crusted trout and rare beef fillet and vegan burgers and beetroot quinoa.

1. Potchefstroom is a very old town by South African standards, founded in 1838 by Voortrekker Andries Potgieter.
2. Potchefstroom is a university town. The Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education – now the North-West University Potchefstroom Campus – was founded here in 1869.
3. Potchefstroom has the longest avenue of oak trees in South Africa – possibly in the entire Southern Hemisphere.
4. Potchefstroom is a long and difficult (at least for me) word to say. Thank goodness most people call it Potch. (Read more about the origin of the name Potchefstroom.)

I lived 90 minutes from Potch for nearly nine years before going there. I didn’t expect to particularly like it. With the exception of the oak tree story I’d never heard much about Potch, and it isn’t a town that one unexpectedly stumbles upon. It’s not really on the way to anywhere.

I visited the Swartland – a wine region about an hour northwest of Cape Town – almost two months ago. My visit was mostly about wine, which I wrote about already, but I have all these other cool pictures and memories from the trip that I wasn’t able to share in that post.