First off I knew how this report would go. To assess each province’s most enjoyable hot spring, I am aiming down an old-fashioned dirt road. Not to any of those fashionable hydros, where the privileged client is pummelled with knobkerries and his spine is weighed down with warm stones. I mean bubbling mire, steaming out of Mother Earth. I mean real mineral baths smelling of hell itself, where you can wallow freely like a warthog.
At the filling station the attendant greets this creaking elder: “Ja, that way, oubaas!” And I know unbelievers who doubt my quest will retort: “For holistic wellness, might as well stay home and fart in the tub.”
But what I am aiming for when I return to that filling station, spry once again as a juvenile, is: “Jislaaik, my basie!”
France alone has 1 200 springs gushing into more than 100 thermal stations; Italy has that many just in the Euganean Hills, as the Romans well knew. And wasn’t it Herodotus who noted that, down south from Ethiopia, it was the lighter waters of Africa that promised eternal life? So I am after no mere designer detox; I want the real hammam.
In South Africa, it turns out, there are more than 80 of them, half within what was the old Transvaal. Pumping up from the guts of our seething planet are 36 000 kilolitres a day. Most are on private properties, such as at Zimthabi, where you paddle alfresco in a pea soup of algae (right of admission reserved). Others are definitely public. So here goes:
Western Cape
Gone are the days when one had to clamber into a black hole under a hosepipe at The Baths near Citrusdal; now it’s all shallow solariums beneath lowering mountain views.
Just after Union a century ago Thomas Cook could book you on the New Cape Central Railway up to Montagu to treat nervous exhaustion at the thermal springs for 10s6d a day. Currently, it’s all Avalon, even though the temperature at source stays at a constant 43°C.
At Goudini there’s also a fine ATKV resort.
The properties of Caledon were first bruited abroad by Anders Sparrman, the Swede, in 1775, while botanising in the fynbos. Describing the cistern built by the VOC government as full of tinny chalybeate, he advised crippled dames and their gouty good men to be accompanied in case of swooning. So there were pits outside for their Hottentot and slave attendants.
Even Lady Anne Barnard dabbled her fingers in the “emerald bubbling cauldron”. James Holman, the blind voyager on his round-the-world tour, in 1828 sank himself into “this ferruginous bliss” (not that it restored his sight).
For me, this elaborate resort, including even a clanking casino, meant fangotherapy. Michael the mudpack artist from Genadendal knew just how to plaster me in gunk. After that, spooling off in the Victorian Spa, no less.
Further inland is the Warmwaterberg, little more than a braai place and tented site (no nude swimming). And then, off the R26, comes the Calitzdorp Spa.
When I visited, the chalets — in an awesome setting — were up for sale and the extensive basins were choked with mimosa blossoms.
Eastern Cape
Although my AA Book of the Road shows at least two more inaccessible gushing artesian fountains, there is still the Cradock oasis.
A playground alongside the Great Fish River, this is not to be sniffed at — or rather should be sniffed up for sinus evacuation.
But for a real “heart of the Karoo” experience, Aliwal North is where most springs erupt. At their Elands-hoek farm they even bottle some at source, pure after filtering through alluvial gravels.
At Aliwal Spa, an entire township has developed around about, with an aviary, tearoom and even a dancehall. As the Railways and Harbours Magazine used to advertise, “many are the crutches and sticks left over after an immersion”.
This is where Sol Plaatje, hoping to cure his consumptive daughter, was notoriously turned away by injured rugby players. Nowadays it is a fine stopover on the N6, open to all.
Free State
Across the Orange River these eruptions continue with, at Badfontein Guest Farm, a rare opportunity to witness that the Earth knows no boundaries. Here the outpouring runs 1000m deep, producing about 10 000 litres an hour. But the novelty is seeing an original wetland swamp, reedy and a-cry with korhaans and fish eagles. This spectacle I visited one freezing winter. I felt even the adjacent warm pool was beautifully rusted.
North West
Alongside the Vaal River on the N2, outside Christiana, is Protea’s Nkolo Spa, complete with landing strip and even a team of white rhinos. Once when I overnighted there, under the previous management, for a de-scaling, the tub had been privatised. It was full of stompies and dead insects. Also the “warming” (up to 34°C) took 20 minutes and the showers for closing pores were broken.
Rather join the sporting types in the Olympic bath outside, playing waterpolo on a Sunday. Or watch for golden bishops, where any flood could inundate the caravan park.
Northern Cape
The most remote and scenically memorable mineral spring ever is the only one to be visited in this province. Be it said with a compass and solid 4×4, for this is in the Riemvasmaak reserve area — a lunar, desert landscape still scarred from the time when it was a defence force weapons-testing range. Through camel thorns and down quartz screes, one descends into the granite canyon of the Molopo River.
The present intrepid traveller arrived there one October, that is shortly before summer daytime temperatures soar to more than 40°C. Lolling in the modestly constructed baths, I was humbled to learn that I was in the cirque of a fossilised riverbed, meaning that any water flow ran underground and only surfaced once a decade or so. Soon after, despite the coffering, the lapa, change rooms and all were washed away by a catastrophic wave. They have since been rebuilt for ‘specialised” tourists who carry their own fresh water.
Gauteng
Back home in the smallest province it was my pleasure to discover a well-kept secret. We too have a crack issuing fluid balm to the bathing body and it is up in the Gausberg mountains — that is, off the R25 north of Bronkhorstspruit at Amanzintaba Resort.
It is a wild nature lover’s retreat in an indigenous forest, with chalets and basic shop included. Here each overarching tree is labelled, as in a botanic garden.
As you sink into 28°C, golden shower runs down too, past the sauna. Your escort is dragonflies, red and cobalt blue. No quad bikes or day visitors, except for wedding parties.
Limpopo
The Wilge River leads to the country’s greatest concentration of upwellings around Bela-Bela, aptly named by the Tswana for its boiling liquids, previously known as Warmbad (Warmbaths). Here traditionally more country wagons would gather over Christmastide than ever visit Durban beach today. The main marsh’s banks have served for all ceremonies — from baptism on. President Paul Kruger declared that all such sanctuaries should remain open to his drought-stricken citizens. Nowadays about two million people visit here annually.
Once a steaming sink in which mammoths bogged down, Bela-Bela is currently a chic Aventura resort, offering an entire waterfront with jetskiing. The indoor feeder is the most efficient rheumatism wallow ever and, at 23000 litres an hour at 49°C, good for sweating out all that vetkoek.
Further along the N1 north into the bushveld, Rondalia has collared one of the complexes at Die Oog. Some insulation to the mineralised pipes here would ensure the plunge pool needed no extra heating. You are situated in the leaky foothills of the Waterberg past Mookgophong, previously Naboomspruit, a great base for hikes into Eugene Marais country. Return to the beer garden and the smoke of a hundred braais neutralises the wafts of sulphur.
Further on lie more tantalising hydrothermal vents — at Loubad, Evangelina, famously at Tshipise, at Sagole in Vendaland, at Eiland, Gethlane and Makutsi — where beneficial tonification has to be weighed up against the dismal effects of anti-malarial drugs.
Thanks to these debilitating precautions, a visit up there is too risky for me to enjoy.
Mpumalanga
For a really classical experience, within its own closed village and game reserve, here the choice has to be Badplaas. From the steambath of the sudatorium, where at 53°C you could be in contact with the very convecting magma and its dissolving salts, down the foefie slide into the spectacular pool outside, this is where the connoisseur comes to splash down.
There can be none better for a coating of Dead Sea drek, or being whipped with seaweed, all within sight of the Rift Valley coming down Swaziland’s escarpment, 3500-million years old.
But rumours of body-scrubbing undines near Sabie River Bungalows were hotly denied. Rather trust the report of the Bureau of Standards: at Badplaas the secret is the trace element of fluoride. Remove your ID bracelet. Then you could survive to dance La Cucarachal under the bush willows all night, langarm.
KwaZulu-Natal
At least three spas are fine for resting lymphatic flow and freeing those ageing radicals. First is the Natal Spa along the Bivane River near Vryheid, which is rather like being shipwrecked on an old Union Castle liner. Even King George VI visited here in 1947, checking out the Bushman paintings of osmosis cures and how to stimulate your tactile receptors.
Remoter still, in the Kranskop Valley near Greytown, is Lilani, the oldest in the province and where once patients were carried down the cliffs in litters.
The first time I visited by car for a radium shot, even the quoit deck had returned to jungle. Then I was nearly ambushed in this rundown homeland ruin of old kraals.
Now the compound has been reconstructed within a barbed-wire perimeter, held in trust to benefit the locals. Phase one of development has a Zimbabwe-ruins look. Between the eucalyptus trees sucking up the subterranean benison, you could find a mango in blossom, with bees, and the mauve iboza shrubs, which the Zulus use for cough mixture.
Then to be discovered is the rarest sensation of them all, for obvious reasons, a place called Shu Shu. There are no roadsigns to it pointing off the Eshowe road, down from Kranskop to Middledrift. The reason is that your destination only appears whenever the Thukela River is low enough (in July) for those opalescent, soapy springs to show. Otherwise they are under water, alongside a thorny island that campers in the know inherited, staked out decades ago, and all under control of a tribal chairman. R10 a head for day visitors. Remember to dig your own toilet hole and to degut your barbel downstream.
One swarthy lass was practising her doggy paddle over the eye spouting through the sandy bed under the youth enclosure. She insisted I should tell her where I came from — Pietermaritzburg, only two hours away. She regarded me as though I must be some weird foreigner and then ran off to report to her parents, who were roasting an entire pig on a spit. But she had been warned that, once any female had dipped in that magic road, men would say hello.
There are a few weeks of such steamy encounters for the hard workers thereabouts, and then Shu Shu cools down as it is washed over by water from the summer rains. It is an extraordinary site, surely unique in the world of water sports and in the quest for the benefits of hydrotherapy.
Full tank, please!