Travel pieces are frequently frothy, sycophantic affairs. Of late, I notice an increasing trend among certain publications (no, not this one) to farm out freebies at local hostelries and such to gushingly grateful, junior staff members.
So a standard introduction to a piece on some country retreat often alludes to how wonderful it is to break away from the frenetic city with its incessant demands.
Food is invariably referred to as cuisine. Hosts are gracious.
And most writers attest to instant and highly restorative sleep under billowing duvets and sheets with a high thread-count.
Ardmore Guest Farm in the Drakensberg, my favourite getaway in all of Southern Africa, has most of these things – although I refuse to call its home-cooked food “cuisine”. That’s such a silly and pretentious word.
In fact, I like it so much that over the past, let me count, 15 years, I’ve visited there at least as many times.
Along the way I’ve become friends with owner Paul Ross, who has an uncanny resemblance to Tom Hanks, and his English wife Sue, who he met when she was a guest.
And I feel so at peace at Ardmore, basking below the three highest peaks in SA, that I want my ashes scattered there – something I haven’t yet shared with Paul – which to some will make this a rather unfrothy travel piece. But it will just be my ashes, not me, and I do look forward to death, although perhaps not so much the actual dying.
I’ve had premonitions of it, and how my soul will leave my body for a waiting stage where Johnny Cash will meet me in a dusty, pale-green, 1972 Buick Electra.
With a gruff “get in, boy”, he’ll drive me over to The Other Side to meet The Carpenter of Nazareth.
In my premonitions, The Carpenter is standing in an endless meadow, under a cerulean sky.
As I get out of the Buick, my dogs past and present run deliriously to me, and The Carpenter, wearing the World War II uniform of an RAF Air Marshal (for in the programme I adhere to, one follows the God of one’s understanding), will turn to me.
With a look of ineffable sadness – perhaps at everything from Auschwitz to the stupidity and horror perpetrated in His name – The Carpenter will smile softly, His golden goodness washing over me.
But that’s all in the future.
In the corporeal present, Ardmore has something of a Goldilocks and the Three Bears quality to it. It’s neither too stupidly, worryingly chintzy for its own good, nor is it alarmingly rustic, and while none of the accommodation has TVs or telephones or anything so crass, it’s comfortable. In fact, the whole of Ardmore is comfortable.
Last time I was there I ran out of coffee in my rondavel. So with a towel wrapped around me, and Milo – my adopted Jack Russell cross, who is my Spirit Dog – at my heels, I strolled into the still-deserted breakfast area and poured myself a cup of freshly brewed coffee. I can’t imagine doing that in many other hostelries.
That it’s pet-friendly is another reason to love Ardmore, and over the years I’ve visited with Gatsby, my departed Stafford who I like to think waits for me with The Carpenter and, more recently, Daisy and Milo.
Daisy, it must be said, should have been called Voddy. For when I bought her for R50, as a half-starved, mangy, shivering little pup, I was drinking apocalyptic quantities of cheap vodka.
And Milo? I got him with that name – also as a neglected little animal. But I should have called him Benzo. At the time I was eating fistfuls of benzodiazepines – you know, Valium and all its relatives.
Both animals came to me at a dark, dark time. Some would say by Divine Providence. No matter.
Little Daisy the Dachshund cross prefers to stay indoors, but Milo loves playing with the farm dogs, only returning to the accommodation when called repeatedly.
Accommodation, by the way, has expanded since Paul bought Ardmore in the mid-90s to include five rondavels, two family units, and four double-storey cottages complete with three bedrooms, whirlpool baths, and views that make you very inclined to support creationism as opposed to evolution.
I love the Ardmore routine. Dinner in the Yellowwood dining room is invariably a robust, multi-course affair using as much local produce as possible. Afterwards, guests sit in the lounge – around a fire if the weather calls for it – chatting, sipping coffee, and reading.
Many seem well-heeled, many are foreign, many are repeat guests, and almost all, it strikes me, could afford to stay somewhere far more expensive than the R465 that accommodation starts at.
That, by the way, is per person and gets you a large garden-view rondavel with queen bed, bath and shower, and log fireplace. There is even enough cheaper accommodation in the guise of a little rondavel with shower only at just R385.
Prices include dinner, bed and breakfast. I particularly like the latter – “picture breakfasts” as I dub them, where you order your hot breakfast by ticking with erasable marker the appropriate illustration of one or two eggs, boiled or fried, one or two sausages, and so on, off a laminated menu.
Paul and Sue have a preternatural ability to cater for guests’ needs. If you want to be left alone, you will be. If you want to chat, then Paul or Sue or one of the other guests is almost always on hand to engage in conversation that invariably seems to be fascinating.
Activities abound in the Champagne Valley in which Ardmore is set. Golf, hiking, rafting and helicopter flips are all a short drive away.
At the guest farm itself, you can fish for bass in the dam, birdwatch, swim in the pool, which is very much a summer activity, or order tea and snacks in the tea garden. Then there is the on-site African loom weaving outfit where you can buy hand-woven bags and cushions, made from home-dyed cotton.
Just as fascinating is the Ardmore Ceramic Art Museum, displaying a cross-section of this world-famous art, which had its genesis in a cottage on Ardmore back in 1985.
Me? At Ardmore I’m happiest sitting in the serenity of the front garden, pondering those three peaks: Mafadi (highest at 3 450m); Injisuthi Dome (second highest at 3 410m); and the majestic Champagne Castle (third highest at 3 377m). In winter they’re dusted with snow. In summer they’re green and verdant and alive.
And at any time of the year they remind me that there is a Divine Author, and that one day it will be so very good to go Home, crossing the Great Divide in an old Buick Electra. - Sunday Independent
lTel 036 468 1314, or visit www.ardmore.co.za