Locally brewed Hop's Hollow draught

The draught of my content. We're sitting at the Woodsman Inn in Sabie longing for the summer. We might look like alcoholics, but it's ceratinly not the case. Today is about celebrating life, leisure, rest and the magnificent roads, passes, forests and waterfalls of this countey. Not to mention winter's of eternal sunshine. Now to take the Sudwala Caves road back home via the Montrose Falls.

Sabie

That's Sabie in the distance.. I'm looking forward to a tall glass of locally brewed Hop's Hollow draught and a meal next to the hearth once there. The valley below is struggling to come terms with the vast forest fire that swept through here a few years ago, and must have destroyed millions of rands of trees.

Misty Mountain

Anna and I have just had a Heineken on the very edge at Misty Mountain. We're heading down the Long Tom Pass towards Sabie and Graskop. It's a magnificent Sunday afternoon, but icy cold. I've just had a great conversation with bikers from Malelane about the great mountain passes of Mpumalanga province. There's not a cloud in the sky and I can see way beyond Sabie, all the way to the very edge of Mozambique it seems. Despite the icy cold, it's good to be outdoors and on the road. I have fond memories of travelling in 2002 through the snow on this very same pass.

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.

Long Tom Pass

It's dusk on the Long Tom Pass. Feintly, down below, I can see Sabie's lights. Except for the odd car passing me this is beautifully bleak and a lonely place to stand on the edge of the escarpment. It's a cold, blustery wind that tossles my hair and tears at my jacket. It's also a wind that exhilarates me. Here on the edge I'm out of my box and I gulp in deeply this air. My turmoiled emotions confirm that I'm very much alive...not the living dead.

Lydenburg...

A sudden desire this afternoon for the locally brewed draught at the Woodsman Inn in Sabie has prompted a spontaneous road trip to Sabie. Right now I'm having a cappuccino (not the greatest) in Lydenburg/Mashishing and reading the weekend newspapers. I'm also processing a deep-seated skin hunger and pangs of loneliness (complicated story) that I've not experienced before. Nevertheless, and despite it being an ugly Sunday afternoon, I'm ecstatic to be alive and living in a perpetual space of childlike anticipation. And to know that I'm a free being with few limitations, and those limitations that I do have are of my own imagination and relatively easily dissolved.

The Book Case in Sabie

It's humid and overcast in Sabie; today I can't smell wood chips and pine on the thick air and my clothes are trying to stick to my body. We're heading to Graskop for coffee, maybe pancakes, then to God's Window... if His curtians are open. At this point the mist is swirling and has been since yesterday afternoon; although none of the stunning mountain views are visible, it's a moody, delightfully melancholic world we're contentedly snailing through.One of my highlights in this town, other than the Fanie Botha hiking trail and the Woodsman Inn, is the Book Case for secondhand books, where I bought four ancient Gavin Maxwell books for R12 each, books I've been perving for just under a year.