Stephen Gray : Unspoilt places
All roads into Warmbaths lead to the Elephant Springs Hotel. This is the resort’s old bed-and-brandy joint, the Bronnehof, reclad for all modern travellers wishing to arrive in the Waterberg district.
For an introduction try the wooden deck over the main drag, where a menu of genius rejuvenates the weary on fried bushveld biltong in garlic sauce, served in the pan. Watch the dejected and forlorn in sandals slopping off to the nearby hydro, returning with damp towels jauntily worn.
Somewhere under those shiny hills accumulates the blast of hot water that is sourced in Warmbaths. More than a century ago this was swampland, where elephants got themselves mired and boiled to bones. Hence presumably the name Elephant Springs. In 1873 the Transvaal Volksraad purchased the whole mammoth graveyard to channel and drain for recreation purposes, and the development continues. A waterfront with seven restaurants is under way.
At the tourist information office I asked if they have other features. There’s the British blockhouse defending the railway (now an obstacle in a fiendish testing- ground for drivers), and there’s Buyskop. But Buyskop is not safe for non-South Africans: wild ostriches attack them there. So the spa is the main attraction. The very successful town is geared to serving its more than a million clients and visitors a year.
But Elephant Springs, with its tables of treddle-machines and its lush oasis effect, it just a forewarning of the sites to come under this inventive management. On the road out of town is the farmhouse full of Shangri-La antiques. Then turn right towards Eersbewoond and continue for 14km. The well-signed Shangri-La Country Lodge itself is the next obvious destination.
Never mind the rather out-of-date name — “Shangri-La” was the remote Tibetan monastery in a James Hilton romance of the 1930s. The luxurious lodge in the wilderness named after it is just about as lost from the cares of the real world. After a while one seems to have come adrift from the map.
I arrived with a group who were into a discipline called Cogmotics. This means they were enjoined to observe a Noble Silence. The rackety birds didn’t nor did the dinny chorus of frogs. The lack of the human voice gets a bit tough on an interviewer. When at last I could get him to speak, manager Lieben Vermeulen said: “We sell peace and tranquillity.” (No children under 12.) And didn’t we natter on thereafter.
As nature in the African wilds abhors any silence, during the night a raging thunderstorm broke. Out at the pool my morning swim was taken in a kind of blossom-soup of jacaranda and geranium. Nowhere else have I found bright impatiens flowers … floating in the toilet-bowl. Apparently that is the detail all guests recollect.
Shangri-La is a cottagey, antiquey delight, catering for group activities from bangers and mash to traditional braais through to murder evenings, even to war games in the adjacent thornbushes. The Kraal Restaurant is a thatched, model shebeen, where your old kitchen throw-outs enjoy a recycled, noisy life of their own. The surroundings are like the set of some wonderful, clapped-out musical.
If you are into butternut, mopane worms on enamel plates, tjops and sosaties and pap, you’ll find the price has gone up a tak on what used to be thought of as “boys’ food”. With the staff belting out their postprandial chant, what can be left of ethnic catering? Perhaps a last rush on Tutti-Fruity Mampoer Liqueur.
On the horizon in the cattle-and-grapes country beyond is a mountain called Kranskop. This, some early trekkers — the deluded Jerusalem-gangers — thought was evidence that they had reached an Egyptian pyramid. Following the illustrations in their Bibles, they accordingly identified the north-flowing river as the Nile. So we have the rich Nylstroom valley, and beyond that the rest of Northern Province, which, for tourist ends, has chosen to bill itself as the Province of Peace.
Stomping through the wetlands in galoshes, or sinking in beauty-mud at the watering- hole, one realises what they really do sell: soul for the jaded, new skins for old.
For further information on Elephant Springs and Shangri-La, contact Christiaan Viviers, at (014) 736-2101 or (014) 717-5381