Angus Begg
Cruising through the quiet Mpumalanga highlands town of Machadodorp, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the entire town had just attended its own funeral.
Unemployed youths linger around the general dealer in trademark fashion, an attractive, period-piece church stands as a landmark in the town centre and an assortment of 4×4 vehicles pass on through, taking a left turn at the top of the street and heading for the countryside just over the hill.
With fly-fishing attracting new participants every weekend and tourist activities booming in the village of Dullstroom, just up the road, it’s almost inconceivable that this town is so dead. After all, Machadodorp is where the fly- fishing aficionados come, to tackle the trout in briskly running rivers and streams as opposed to the well-stocked dams of that popular, trendy village up the road.
And therein lies its attraction – the uncrowded hills and rivers outside town.
“That’s the problem,” says Yusuf Bhamjee, owner of Amy’s Supermarket and one who believes that the town needs industry to bring the business back. “The people come to fish and bring what they need with them – no one stops in town.”
Taking the R541 towards Badplaas out of town, one passes the turn-off for the pleasantly situated hot springs that people I know in Johannesburg were visiting 20 years ago. Further up the road is Mountain Rhebuck farm, owned and run by Cheryl and Rudie Taljaard, and as the road continues, signs for B&Bs and guest farms dot the road.
Quiet is the countryside and seemingly full of potential. Rudie Taljaard, who also works at a mine near Badplaas, wants to show off the ruins on their farm. Anthropologists have, he says, dated them as either stone or iron age.
On a pair of his white Arab stallions we head into the hills in the direction of Waterval Boven, just over the horizon. In various thickets of indigenous and exotic origin, Taljaard dismounts and draws back heavy branches to reveal tightly packed, lichen-covered stone walls.
He says the University of Pretoria’s cultural history department has visited the sites, more than 50 in all, on numerous occasions and is about to start digging at some of the more accessible locations. Apparently a number of cartridges dating back to the Anglo-Boer South African War have also been found near the walls.
North, east and west of us the hills are big, belying the existence of the N4 to Nelspruit somewhere down below. It’s early winter, the sun is sinking early and we head back, taking in a herd of lost sheep along the way.
In the Taljaards’ self-catering cottage I find my bed for the night, with wood in the shed outside.
Roughly 40km further along the road is a stone farmhouse, delightfully rustic in appearance and dating back roughly 150 years. With a smallish dam in front and tall, aloe-dotted sandstone rock formations behind, this is the home of Francis Darvall the archetypal city refugee. A former TV ad producer, today he’s a property developer and an artist “who paints pictures that nobody buys”.
He tells me the house was built as a way station in the days of the gold rush, on the main road from the Rand to Barberton and the farmlands of the Lowveld. The dam he discovered and renewed while clearing the area of alien tree plantations. It was apparently originally built to service the oxwagons that took the mielies to the markets in Nelspruit and Barberton . The Kruger family owned the land, says Darvall, “and Oom Paul apparently even slept here”.
It was only once he’d cleared the land of the black wattle plantation and thus exposed the views of the valley below that he realised the value of what he’d stumbled on. A neighbour’s conviction on charges of stock theft resulted in him buying his property and today he owns 1E000ha, a small portion of which he now intends developing as upmarket holiday homes.
Darvall, a passionate character with every third word used an expletive, raves about his home of 18 months. “I saw a semi- survivalist dream here where a few wealthy men with like mind about ecology and the planet could enjoy clean water and a beautiful environment.”
Just outside town, at Millie’s Trout Stall, trout emperor Wimcar Celliers holds court. A dour sort on first impression, he’s responsible for supplying Woolworths with an assortment of trout packages, from roulade to hot and cold-smoked and terrine. Arguably the largest trout producer in the country, he also supplies the trout he farms to owners of dams around Dullstroom.
Celliers is worth a small fortune. He employs 120 people in a town that is, like most other small towns in South Africa, weighed down by the unemployed.
I learn from his manager in the processing plant that machines are available to do the work of those skinning, filleting and smoking fish. Celliers says it’s the responsibility of business to create jobs and he wouldn’t even think of installing the machinery.
Darvall doesn’t react kindly when I put it to him that the town of Machadodorp, about 35km from his stone house up in the hills, needs an injection of life if it hopes to attract tourists. “Who says that Machadodorp needs to be saved? It’s a small vestige of old Africa and we love it for its isolation and decrepit eccentricity. We have here a village in the middle of fuck knows where, only two hours from the biggest industrial zone in Africa. So we are enjoying what will soon be gone under a wave of gentrification and common shops. See Dullstroom, and [if we go the same way as that] then we will all get rich and mourn what we have lost.”
For information about places to stay and things to do in the Machadodorp area contact Cheryl Taljaard of Mountain Rhebuck farm on Tel: (013) 256E0868 or Catherine Rademeyer on Tel: (013) 256E9110 or 082 462 2235