Where to stay

Cleopatra Mountain Farmhouse Owners Richard and Mouse Poynton have transformed an old family hunting lodge into an extraordinary mountain getaway with beautiful and individually decorated bedrooms. From £120 per person, including breakfast, light lunch, afternoon tea and dinner. Balgowan, 00 27 332 677 243, cleomountain.com

Fordoun Spa Hotel This comfortable and welcoming spa hotel with fabulous facilities and rooms is not only a great base for exploring the Midlands, it also reflects the history of the area and how it continues to evolve. Come here, too, to enjoy consultations with traditional healer Elliot Ndlovu, who offers treatments that incorporate Zulu plants and practices. Double rooms from £57. Nottingham Road, 00 27 332 666 217, fordoun.com

Giant’s Castle Resort Stay in comfortable mountain lodges within a wildlife reserve. Activities include trout fishing, mountain biking and hiking, including walks to caves decorated with San rock art. Private lodges sleep six, from £235. Ezemvelo, 00 27 363 533 718, kznwildlife.com

Oaklands Country Manor Country estate located on the highveld halfway between Johannesburg and Durban at Van Reenen’s Pass. Warm hospitality in comfortable, well-appointed rooms and family suites. Exquisite local cuisine is a given and the wide range of outdoor activities include polo, riding and walking in the midst of secluded and stunning scenery. Double rooms from £85; suites from £170. Van Reenen, 00 27 586 710 067, oaklands.co.za

The Oyster Box This iconic South African hotel, located on the Indian Ocean at Umhlanga Rocks north of Durban, has been lovingly restored to its former colonial-era splendour. As well as excellent restaurants, facilities include pools, spa and cinema. Sea-facing double rooms from £383. Umhlanga Rocks, 00 27 315 145 000, oysterboxhotel.co.za

Silver Hill Lodge Surrounded by mountains rich in flora and fauna in the lovely Kamberg Valley, this thatched mountain lodge offers well appointed and comfortable accommodation. Double rooms from £40. Kamberg, 00 27 332 677 430, silverhill.co.za

Travel Information

Currency is the South African Rand (£1 = 14 ZAR). Drakensberg is two hours ahead of GMT. December to February is midsummer season and temperatures average 22°C, rising as high as 30°C. The winter months from June to August are dry and pleasant during the day with lows of 5°C and highs of 20°C. Temperatures can drop significantly at night (sometimes below zero) with snow occurring in higher regions.

GETTING THERE
South African Airways (flysaa.com) flies from London Heathrow to Johannesburg, with onward flights to Durban.
British Airways (britishairways.com) operates regular flights from London Heathrow to Durban, via Johannesburg.
Qatar Airways (qatarairways.com) flies from Heathrow to Johannesburg.

RESOURCES
South African Tourism (southafrica.net) is a helpful resource for planning your trip, with events listings, information on what to do, and details on how to get around in the Drakensberg region.

FURTHER READING
Barrier of Spears: Drama of the Drakensberg by R.O Pearse (Southern Book Publishers, £14.95). A history of the area and its people, with emphasis placed on mountain routes, peaks and passes.
Encounters with the Dragon by John Hone (Art Publishers, £55). Drawn back to Drakensberg after childhood holidays there, this is the author’s testament to 20 years spent photographing the region.

Where to eat

Prices quoted are for a three-course meal excluding drinks, unless otherwise stated. South African wine ranges from about £8.50 to £15 per bottle in restaurants.

Caversham Mill Friendly, informal restaurant with outdoor tables overlooking the Lions River. The menu is an eclectic mix of world and local foods: New York crab cakes, Dargle Valley gammon, Drakensberg trout. From £12. Balgowan, 00 27 332 344 524, cavershammill.co.za

Cleopatra Mountain Lodge Dine in the Pioneer Room overlooking a trout lake surrounded by the high mountains. Richard Poynton’s cuisine is as exuberant as he is: abundant and rich in flavours and intensity. Dining here is almost a theatrical experience. There is an excellent cellar stocked with some South African gems. A six-course tasting menu is £27. Balgowan, 00 27 332 677 243, cleomountain.com

Goundens Restaurant and Takeaway Smack in the middle of a factory in working-class Umbilo, this is the place for the ultimate Durban ‘bunny’ experience. Go for a mutton bunny or a broad bean bunny and remember, this is food to rip into with your hands – so no cutlery! Bunnies from £2.50. Durban, 00 27 312 055 363

Granny Mouse Country House & Spa This popular country house hotel is a favourite place to eat, either informally in the bistro or in the fine dining restaurant. There is an excellent wine cellar. From £14. Balgowan, 00 27 332 344 071, grannymouse.co.za

Hartford House This beautiful colonial homestead has possibly the finest restaurant in the Midlands. Jackie Cameron, one of South Africa’s leading chefs, transforms local produce with precision and artistry. Five-course tasting menu from £26. Mooi River, 00 27 332 632 713, hartford.co.za

Oaklands Country Manor With produce sourced direct from the estate as well as neighbouring farms, Oaklands offers simple and beautifully prepared modern cuisine with flavours as fiercely striking as the African landscape. Game, including wildebeest, is a speciality. About £18. Van Reenen, 00 27 586 710 067,oaklands.co.za

The Oyster Box This iconic hotel, which has been restored to its colonial glory, is a dining destination for everything from oysters with sparkling wine on the terrace or a sumptuous traditional afternoon tea, to its famous curry buffet in the Ocean Terrace or an elegant and more formal dinner in the Grill Room. Ocean Terrace from £23; Grill Room from £32. Umhlanga Rocks, 00 27 315 145 000, oysterboxhotel.co.za

Food Glossary

Amasi

The Zulu name for a sour, fermented milkcurd (maas in Afrikaans).

Biltong

Cured and air-dried meat, usually beef but also sometimes springbok, blesbok or wildebeest.

Boerewors sausage

The Afrikaners’ ‘farmers’ sausage’, usually made from beef flavoured with lots of spices – especially coriander seed, black pepper, nutmeg – to be cooked on the braai.

Bunny chow

Durban’s spicy curry served in a hollowed-out loaf of white bread. There are scores of stories about its origin – it seems probable that Durban’s Indian community found this was a convenient way to carry meals with them to work; or else, it could have been that the bunny chow emerged during the apartheid era when non-whites couldn’t share dining areas or even cutlery with whites.

Koeksisters

Popular type of doughnut made of plaited dough, deep fried and then soaked in sugar syrup.

Phutu or pap

Starch made from mealie meal or coarse white cornflour, a sort of South African polenta – it can be wet and loose or dry and grainy. Enjoyed across cultures.

Rooibos tea

Herbal tea made from a red bush plant called aspalathus linearis. It can be served with milk and sugar, or lemon.

Food and Travel Review

Dusk caresses South Africa’s Kamberg Valley in soft, ethereal light. Beneath the spine of the central Drakensberg Mountains – the Zulus’ uKhahlamba or ‘barrier of spears’ – antelope and baboons roam the gardens of Cleopatra Mountain Farmhouse.

Inside Cleopatra’s rustic hunting and fishing lodge, among its antique sideboards and historic photographs, owner and chef Richard Poynton is blending fascinating history – the Voortrekkers, the British and the Zulus – with a loving description of the menu.

The six-course meal is an eclectic mix: a French-style seafood bisque; an antipasto of roasted peppers and tomatoes with anchovies that would not be out of place in Sicily; and local foods, such as griddled springbok loin served with soet pampoen, the sweet pumpkin that is an Afrikaner favourite.

Afterwards, over a fine ‘port’ from the Cape, the convivial Richard expands on his family history, recalling happy childhood memories of the lodge his grandfather bought in 1936. Richard loved the outdoor life. Yet, growing up in the 60s, he longed to travel beyond his country, to broaden his horizons, but this was almost impossible due to travel restrictions imposed on South Africans under apartheid.

Already a successful restaurateur in 1993, as the Rainbow Nation was being born, Richard and his wife Mouse finally realised a dream. They took a sabbatical to travel the world for four years. ‘It was absolutely liberating. Yet the longer I was away, the more I knew I wanted to come back. This is a wonderful country!’ he roars.

Indeed it is – and few places embody this so vividly as the epic peaks of the Drakensberg. They’re one spectacular element in South Africa’s scenic and sensory journey, from the drama of Cape Town and its winelands, to Johannesburg’s dynamism, Kruger’s wildlife and the Garden Route’s coastal beauty. KwaZulu-Natal, theeastern province that contains the Drakensberg, the lilting hills of the Midlands and the coastal lowlands, is a crucial part of this mix.

This is a privileged region. The Trekboers – wandering farmers who were descendants of Dutch, French and German settlers – passed over the Drakensberg during their Great Trek, which saw them embark on an exodus from the British-controlled Cape Colony in the 1830s. They discovered an agricultural oasis ranging from the highveld at 1,700m to the low savannah of the Midlands, a rolling fertile landscape not unlike England’s West Country.

Battlefields from the Boer Wars and the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, which ended the independent Zulu nation, underline that this was a land worth fighting for. A plaque at the train station in Pietermaritzburg, the region’s capital, commemorates the night in 1893 when Mahatma Gandhi, thrown off a whites-only carriage, had his political epiphany in its waiting room. The Mandela Capture Site near Howick marks the site of Nelson Mandela’s arrest in 1962. It is from these conflicts that a new South Africa is being forged.

From the Kamberg Valley, we climb the Drakensberg foothills, heading north to Oaklands Country Manor. The isolated estate clings to a ridge above Van Reenen’s Pass, the main route through the mountains. It’s a three-hour drive north on this highway to Jo’burg, three hours south to Durban. The lodge overlooks a manicured polo field and the African panorama of highveld savannah, beneath limestone escarpments. Run by the Tully sisters, Caroline, Annie and Kathy, the homely Oaklands offers guests solitude, outdoor activities and outstanding modern South African cuisine.

Caroline’s late husband, Sir Hervey James Hugh Bruce-Clifton, an ex-Major of the British army, bought the estate some 17 years ago, and they transformed it together. Annie and Kathy joined five years ago, Annie bringing marketing skills, Kathy her culinary expertise. Over a glass of rosé from the Breede Valley of the Western Cape and a bowl of Kathy’s air-dried biltong, made from Bovelder beef, we discuss food and life at Oaklands.

‘I used to have my own restaurant in the Cape winelands,’ Kathy says. ‘Up here life is completely different. We’re miles from any shops so it makes sense to visit our neighbouring farms to source outstanding local produce. The Bovelder are hearty, slow-growing cattle that exist solely on a diet of wild grass. They’re completely organic and produce the best beef in South Africa. I buy a whole carcass then we break it down.’

One of the guests had shot a couple of wild guinea fowl. The birds are drawn and plucked, and Kathy and her team slow-braise them and make fresh pasta to create a guinea fowl ravioli. Kathy serves it with a simple sauce of the reduced cooking jus together with fresh peas and spinach from Oaklands’ kitchen garden. As the dish is placed before the marksman, he leans back in pleasure.

The next day we go walking in the Drakensberg, entering the Giant’s Castle Nature Reserve. We pass troops of baboons as we hike towards the peak that gives this World Heritage Site its name. En route we encounter cave art by the San people, nomadic huntergatherers who until the last century passed through this area for thousands of years. One of the paintings shows the San confronted by British soldiers: a clash of cultures, values and worlds.

The foothills east of the Drakensberg – the Midlands – are fertile, rolling farmland. The area has become popular with food-loving visitors from both Durban and Jo’burg who come here to stay and eat at rural inns, or explore the ‘Midlands Meander’, a web of roads between Pietermaritzburg in the east and the Drakensberg in the west that link the region’s farms, craft outlets and cafés.

Hartford House, close to the small town of Mooi River, is one of the most impressive of such places. This colonial homestead, built in 1875, is today attached to the internationally renowned Summerhill Stud, which breeds champion thoroughbred racehorses. Hartford’s restaurant, under the leadership of executive chef Jackie Cameron, is considered one of the finest in South Africa, with a clutch of awards and breathless restaurant reviews to its name.

A Midlands native, Jackie’s pride in her home region is reflected in her cooking. In the elegant, intimate dining room she introduces guests to each evening’s menu, emphasising the provenance of her ingredients. The starter is bread made from amadumbe, the African or Zulu potato, to dip in amasi, a Zulu dish of fermented milk curd seasoned with salt from the Kalahari Desert. A stand-out dish is seared springbok served with local beetroot, chicken liver parfait and a parmesan foam. The delicate springbok contrasts with the earthy beetroot and the unctuously rich chicken liver.

The region’s chefs make abundant use of the Midlands’ fabulous larder: pork and duck from the Dargle Valley in the foothills of the southern Drakensberg; grass-fed beef; wild blesbok and springbok; farmhouse cheeses; trout fresh from mountain springs; and foods, such as amadumbe, that reflect the Zulu heritage.

These local foods are on show at the Saturday Karkloof Farmers’ Market, just outside Howick, and are proudly served in both informal eating places and grand country lodges. Caversham Mill, in the heart of the Midlands, serves a trout so fresh it seems to have leapt straight from the Lions River that laps just beyond the restaurant’s outdoor tables. Nearby, at the elegant Granny Mouse Country House, we dine on slow-roasted Dargle Valley belly pork with butternut squash purée and sweetcorn fritters. These are hearty, simple, fresh foods that are all the more satisfying for being reassuringly local.

This passion for unadulterated, artisanal produce is exemplified at the Swissland Cheese dairy, housed in a wooden alpine hut tucked atop a dirt road that winds up the high hills of the Midlands. Up here, in the cool air, Fran Vermaak and Zulu cheese maker Nonhlanhla create an extraordinary range of cheeses from the milk of Saanen goats, a breed originally from Switzerland. Most impressive is the ash-covered Drakensberg, not unlike the pyramid-shaped French Valençay cheese, with its creamy texture and deep flavour. Visitors don’t just drive up here to see the cheesemaking process and buy samples to take home: it’s also an idyllic spot to enjoy a picnic.

Wines are also now being produced in the Midlands, albeit on a small scale. At present Abingdon Wine Estate is the only estate in KwaZulu-Natal that produces quality, certified regional wines. ‘Growing grapes here is a challenge,’ stresses Ian Smorthwaite, the winemaker, who, together with wife Jane, planted the vineyard in 2004. ‘We’re 1,100m above sea level. The weather can be extreme, with even snow falling in mid-summer.’ Abingdon’s maiden vintage, its Cabernet Sauvignon Shiraz 2007, was the first-ever certified estate wine made in KwaZulu-Natal. I taste and enjoy pungent, aromatic and minerally whites from sauvignon blanc and viognier, and reds from syrah and cabernet sauvignon that are leaner, tighter, more European in style than many wines from the Cape.

The Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal offers not only a rich culinary mix but a cultural one, too. This is one of the most fascinating aspects of a visit here. Economic and cultural divides remain, but efforts are being made to empower individuals and communities.

Take the Fordoun Spa Hotel. It was once a dairy farm supporting a village of workers and a herd of 300 Jersey cattle. Sylvia Pillay, who grew up on the estate, was the dairy manager from 1963 until 2004. She handled the dairy operations and became a skilled cattle breeder. Under her management, Fordoun’s Jersey herd won many prizes at agricultural shows. Small-scale dairy farming, however, is as difficult and marginal in South Africa as it is elsewhere in the world. Eventually, Fordoun’s owners Jon and Micheline Bates decided to transform the estate into a luxury spa hotel. Sylvia became head housekeeper, but she still judges at provincial agricultural shows.

While change was necessary for the Fordoun estate to survive, the hotel’s healer Elliot Msawenkosi Ndlovu has found that his traditional arts still have a place in modern South Africa. In a Zulu hut amid a garden of medicinal plants, Elliot explains how at the age of 27 he had a vision from his late aunt and ancestors to take on the calling of sangoma, spiritual healer, and devote himself to gathering Zulu plants with healing properties. Today Elliot works closely with Jon Bates to produce healing and cosmetic products for the spa, and provides sangoma consultations for hotel guests. Elliot and Jon hope to conserve Zulu healing plants by cultivating them on a sustainable, commercial scale. ‘We will get there,’ says Elliot. ‘My philosophy is: don’t look backward, don’t look sideways, just look forward.’

As we are in South Africa, we must have at least one braai – the barbeque is a way of cooking and living that unites all cultures. At Linga Lapa, a butcher and deli in Howick, we buy the spicy Afrikaans boerewors beef sausage and Midlands rib-eye steaks. Proprietor Matt Mackay fires up the braai and makes phutu – a dish of maize meal that’s similar to polenta and couscous – and a tomato, onion and curry ‘gravy’. We eat, drink and relax, South-African style.

Our journey from Van Reenen’s Pass over the Drakensberg and across the Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal ends on the Indian Ocean at Umhlanga Rocks, the splatter of apartments, hotels and cottages lining a stretch of surf-lashed blonde sand. At the Oyster Box, general manager Wayne Coetzer explains how this iconic hotel, once the glory of South African tourism, fell on hard times. It’s now been restored to its colonial-era grandeur under new ownership. Over a plate of oysters gathered from the nearby seabed, executive chef Kevin Joseph tells us the history of the Indians who came to Durban 150 years ago as indentured servants, his own family story. He explains how the city’s life and food evolved as it grew to have population of Indians outside India.

Our last stop is Goundens, a canteen in Durban’s working-class neighbourhood of Umbilo, to try the city’s favourite street food: bunny chow, a curry served in a hollowed-out loaf. We pass through small panel beaters’ workshops to a simple venue where I order a mutton bunny with broad bean gravy. The place is basic but absolutely buzzing: bunny chow is an egalitarian food that unites people across all of Durban’s communities, from corporate types in ties to factory workers in overalls and surfers just off the beach. I pull off a hunk of mouth-searing, curry-soaked bread, take a long swig of cold Castle lager, and savour the fusion of flavours and cultures I’ve experienced across Drakensberg and the Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal.

Don’t Miss

Abingdon Estate KwaZulu-Natal’s only certified regional wine estate is open for visits, tastings, sales and restaurant weekends and by appointment. Owner Ian Smorthwaite produces excellent white and red wines that partner well with wife Jane’s local cuisine. Hilton, 00 27 332 344 335, abingdonestate.co.za

Karkloof Farmers’ Market Small producers from the surrounding Midlands countryside bring their produce to this shed near the spectacular Howick Falls every Saturday morning. Drop in for breakfast and a chance to meet the local community. Karkloof Road, Howick, 00 27 828 518 649

Linga Lapa Butchery and Deli Home-cured biltong, fresh Midlands meat, local cheeses, seasonal vegetables and more. There is also a restaurant by reservation – ask proprietor Matt to prepare a braai barbecue for you. Curry’s Post, 00 27 332 667 001, lingalapa.co.za

Mandela Capture Site and Apartheid Museum Created to mark the 50th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s capture at this roadside site. A small museum traces the history of apartheid and the struggles for freedom. The Truth Store and Café is located on the site. Howick, thecapturesite.co.za

Rotunda Farm Stall Stock up with a good selection of local foods – fresh fruit and vegetables, local meat, biltong and good bread – before heading to a lodge in the Midlands or Drakensberg. Hilton, 00 27 333 434 205

Swissland Cheese Dairy Drive into the hills to see Saanen goat’s milk turned into an extraordinary range of cheese. You can buy cheese, biscuits and wine for an on-site picnic. Balgowan, 00 27 332 344 042, swisslandcheese.net

Terbodore Coffee Roaster A café where single estate and blended coffees are roasted on the premises daily. Curry’s Post, 00 27 835 513 004