Pine-scented air & woodsmoke

Woodsman Inn, Sabie: There's only four of us at the warm, cozy bar. An Afrikaans couple in their early thirties; he's going to Swaziland tomorrow, they've ordered bar fare and are very friendly, in softspoken Afrikaans, with the well-spoken and gracefully tall black barman who has a large bronze-coloured name tag that says 'Oscar'. The large, overweight black man to my left with the red and black striped golf shirt has just finished a large full plate of food that anyone could see he'd enormously enjoyed. Until he spoke to Oscar in a local indigenous language I thougt he was from elsewhere in Africa. He's putting back double whiskeys on the rocks and soad and has a chubby fistfull of blueish R100 notes. And I've ordered a full, tall glass Hops Hollow Brew draught, it's from the local brewery I passed on the way here, just as I drove over the escarpment from Lydenburg/Mashishing. It's also what I drove 150km to drink, and to walk out of my normal Sunday evening box.

So what's special about Sabie? It's not hard to put your finger on it: it's the only place that I've thus far travelled to in the world where the air is always pungently pine-scented, and hazy with firesmoke, atmosphericly surrounded by mostly forest-covered mountains. This is a quaint forest town built on wood and always has a sense of being filled with foresters and their houses. The fresh pine-scented air immediately launches you into a high, it feels otherworldy and harkens to a both a pace and way of life long fogotten by the majority of the South African population. If that's not enough, you're likely to go weak at the knees because of its beauty, also the fact that it's vegetation is all lushly exuberant and exotic because everything flourishes in the Lowveld clime. And the folk here are strangely black-eyed beautiful as if they were born from coal. My best is the fact that this is a town, because of the altitude, of perpetually flaming, roaring hearths and pine wood smoke.

Graskop, Hazyview, Nelspruit, Pilgrims Rest, the caves and countless waterfalls, forests and God's Window are all within a 50km radius. just beyond that is the Kruger National Park and Mozambique.