Trout, Huge Thighs and Christmas in July
One thing we've decided since moving to South Africa is that we want to leave Johannesburg at least once a month. It doesn't have to be a grand adventure or a bucket-list destination. Sometimes the best weekends are simply an excuse to point the car in a different direction, switch off for a couple of days and see another small corner of the country. This month, that corner was Dullstroom.
About a three-hour drive east of Johannesburg, Dullstroom is one of South Africa's highest towns, sitting over 2,000 metres above sea level. Founded by Dutch settlers in the 1880s as a farming village, the town was almost completely destroyed during the Anglo-Boer War, with many residents killed or sent to British concentration camps. When the survivors returned to rebuild, the town's future would revolve not around farming, but trout. A chance discovery in a nearby river led to local streams being stocked with trout, and before long Dullstroom had reinvented itself as South Africa's fly-fishing capital. These days, even if you've never held a fishing rod in your life, South Africans commonly know Dullstroom as the obligatory halfway stop on the drive between Johannesburg and the Kruger National Park.
Rather than the town centre, our real destination was our beautiful Airbnb located in the Highland Gate golf estate, hidden among rolling green hills a few kilometres outside the village. Together with a group of gays, we spent the weekend doing little more than stuffing our fat necks, polishing off alarming amounts of red wine and becoming inexplicably competitive over a collection of silly little games.
Eventually, we ventured into Dullstroom itself. The high street feels like someone assembled a village with shops when they were high as a kite. There's a trout outlet, naturally, because in Dullstroom everything eventually comes back to trout. Then there's an entire shop devoted to rubber ducks. Not duck-themed gifts. Not children's toys. Just shelves upon shelves of rubber ducks in every costume and profession imaginable. Including one dressed as a stripper with a gag in its beak. Quack.
There was also a shop dedicated almost entirely to Christmas decorations. Turns out "Christmas in July" is a genuine South African tradition. The idea, borrowed from Southern Hemisphere countries where December is too warm for roaring fires and mulled wine, is to celebrate a winter version of Christmas complete with festive dinners, log fires and cosy jumpers. In a town where winter mornings regularly dip below freezing, Dullstroom probably comes closer than anywhere else in South Africa to delivering the Christmas weather many of us grew up imagining.
Then there were the town's billboards. One advertised "Boer Shorts", accompanied by a hench Afrikaans farmer modelling a pair of shorts so aggressively short they looked as though they'd lost an argument with a tumble dryer. The man's thighs could probably crack a watermelon. It was accidentally homoerotic. Although I suspect we weren't exactly the campaign's intended demographic. Another billboard proudly proclaimed "African Apparel", while featuring exclusively white cast of models. Slightly awkward. Elsewhere, a local brewery had embraced some rather broad, old-school caricatures in its branding that felt like they'd survived from a different era.
To me, none of it came across as malicious, more as a reminder that every country has its own cultural blind spots. Britain certainly isn't short of its own. But it did make for an entertaining game of "did they really sign this off?" as we walked around.
It's an odd little place, but that's precisely its charm. One thing I've learnt since moving here is that you don't really get to know a country by visiting its highlights. You get to know it through places like Dullstroom, slightly baffling, thoroughly charming and unlike anywhere you'd expected to find.
Notes from 26° South.
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