CLARENS IN THE EASTERN FREE STATE
There’s a brooding presence that looms over the eastern Free State village of Clarens called Mount Horeb. You can climb it, play golf on its flanks or just sip at your malts and contemplate it from a distance in the early autumn evenings, when the Lombardy poplars in the valley turn gold and the air is quiet and fresh. Mount Horeb with its winter snowcap is a sight to behold.
Visitors to the small town of Clarens find themselves in a frenzy of art-buying, restaurant-hopping, cycling, game driving, trout fishing, white water rafting, bird watching and late-night partying. A weekend in Clarens is really what you make of it.
The more adventurous holidaymakers head out to Bokpoort, a farm near the Golden Gate, to visit Christo Roos, whose ancestors go back further than the Anglo-Boer War. If you like a horse, a drink or an old-fashioned lang-arm dance to concertina music that sounds almost exactly like Louisiana Cajun, then Christo is your man. A two-day outride on a Basotho pony down the Caledon River Valley with Christo is an unforgettable memory.
Gideon Groenewald is the perfect guy to take you on a walk through the Golden Gate Highlands National Park. Gideon reads these sandstone cathedrals like a very interesting history book, from the bottom up. He talks in millions of years, his world is full of dinosaurs and he will even show you their eggs and their droppings.