OUR new Kombi camper was proving to be a great camping innovation, increasing our mobility dramatically.
The short time it took us to pack up after our night at Weenen Game Reserve made us realise just how easy overnight stops and early morning starts would be on future camping trips.
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We were soon on our way to Spioenkop Nature Reserve for another single night sleepover at this pretty spot. From there we would drive to Ladysmith early the next morning to do the Ladysmith parkrun. Then we would join our younger son and his family from Australia in the Drakensberg’s gorgeous Champagne Valley for two nights before they flew back home.
They were planning to spend that day doing the Midlands Meander. We left them to do their shopping in peace and spent a quiet day in the lovely reserve set around Spioenkop Dam. It really is such a peaceful, pretty little spot. We’d visited it recently but it is always worth a stopover and we enjoyed our day there.
In the meantime our Australians were enjoying the meander, finding all sorts of interesting crafty stuff to buy and see and taking plenty of leisurely coffee and lunch breaks at attractive but child-friendly Midlands venues. Travelling with a baby and a three-year-old is fraught with difficulties so they were grateful to find the meander so family-orientated and friendly.
It always amazes me to see how popular the KwaZulu Midlands region is with tourists, even though it lacks the grandeur of the Drakensberg regions, the wildness of our Zululand parks and the many seaside attractions of our varied coastline. What it doesn’t lack is enthusiasm, energy and friendliness from the people involved in its lively tourism industry.
And the Midlands region doesn’t try to be what it is not. It doesn’t sell itself as particularly wild, grand or unique.
It simply trades on its prettiness and its gracious rustic charms – and employs some powerful tools to advertise these attributes.
Is there a soul in South Africa who doesn’t know about the Midlands Meander? And considering all the overseas tourists we bump into whenever we meander through the Midlands, it is clear that many foreigners must know about the popular tourist art and culture route as well.
The Midlands Meander is one of South Africa’s oldest commercial tourist routes. In fact, the Midlands folk were among the pioneers of the concept in South Africa. And, although meanders, art and crafts trails and tourist routes abound throughout South Africa now, the Midlands Meander remains as popular as ever.
After a busy days shopping and exploring the Midlands our Australian family was more than ready for the old-fashioned, family-orientated hospitality offered by the proprieters and staff at one of the Drakensberg’s most charming hotels, The Nest.
Before meeting up with the family there the next morning, we drove into Ladysmith to do the parkrun. It is hard to believe that Ladysmith, a peaceful, attractive Midlands town on the banks of the substantial Klip river, was once a household name and the scene of a major military operation during the Anglo-Boer War.
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An important KwaZulu-Natal centre during the war, it was surrounded by Boer forces when British forces under Lieutenant General Sir George White retreated there after the Battle of Ladysmith. The Siege of Ladysmith lasted about 120 days from November 2 1899. According to Wikipedia, approximately 3 000 British soldiers died during the siege.
Modern-day Ladysmith is a popular destination on the Battlefields Route and is the commercial centre of a prosperous farming region. It is also a friendly town, as we discovered when we arrived at the Ladysmith Country Club to do the parkrun. Volunteers and fellow parkrunners gave us a warm welcome and the course was attractive, mainly level and pleasant, with parkrunners following a well-marked course of trails and grassy paths around the golf course. We finished with a sense of achievement, knowing we were getting close to our target of completing parkruns at 20 different venues by the end of this year.
Bill had clocked up 18 different South African parkruns and I was just one behind him. Three years ago, when he’d done the then fairly new Piggly Wiggly parkrun, I had been recovering from an injury and had been unable to do it. Shortly after our visit to the mountains, however, we woke early one Saturday morning and drove to Howick to do the now famous and very popular parkrun.
Bill usually races ahead of me, leaving me to finish my walk-run-shuffle in the own modest time but he’d had a rather nasty cold and decided to do the parkrun with me at my gentle pace. Our targeted 20 parkrun venues to become official parkrun tourists had become a great source of enjoyment for both of us and a wonderful way to achieve something together. It was therefore quite symbolic for me to complete the Piggly Wiggly parkrun with Bill by my side as I equalised my parkrun quota with his 18. With just two mores parkrun venues to tick off this year, our 20 run target suddenly seemed very do-able.
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