Graskop

Graskop takes its Afrikaans name, roughly "grassy hilltop", from the farm on which it stands, high on the Drakensberg escarpment. The area drew outsiders in the 1870s, when diggers working the streams below the escarpment found alluvial gold at Pilgrim's Rest, a few kilometres west, and the rush that followed filled the valleys with tents, trading stores and transport wagons. Graskop was established in the 1880s as a gold-mining camp on the high ground above those workings, and grew into the service point for the district.

When the easy gold ran out the district turned to trees. From the early twentieth century the state and private companies planted pine and eucalyptus across the high rainfall belt between Graskop and Sabie, creating one of the largest planted forests in the country, and sawmills and forestry jobs replaced prospecting. The railway that once served the timber trade has gone quiet, but the plantations still cover the hills.

The third phase began with the road. As motor touring grew after the Second World War, the string of viewpoints along the escarpment — the falls, God's Window, the canyon rim — became the Panorama Route, and Graskop, sitting at its centre with fuel, food and beds, turned into a stop on almost every itinerary between Johannesburg and the Kruger National Park. After 1994 the town was absorbed into the Thaba Chweu municipality with Sabie and Lydenburg. Tourism has since become the mainstay, and the gorge below the cliff edge has been developed for visitors.

Graskop is a small highland town with a mixed population, and the languages of the streets reflect the meeting of provinces: siSwati and isiZulu from the Mpumalanga lowveld, Sepedi and Xitsonga from the north, Afrikaans from the farming and forestry families, and English as the common tongue with visitors. Most of the town's working life turns on hospitality, so people are used to travellers and the day has a passing-trade rhythm of arrivals and departures.

Craft selling is part of the local economy and part of the culture. Stalls around the main street offer beadwork, wire and tin work, carved animals, basketry and printed cloth, some made locally and much of it brought in from elsewhere in southern Africa, and quiet bargaining is expected. The town has also become associated with a single dish: pancakes, filled savoury or sweet and eaten at the tables that line the main street, are a running joke and a real tradition among South Africans driving this route.

Outdoor pursuits shape the rest. The gorge below the town draws visitors to its edge and its paths, and hikers, trail runners, anglers and cyclists use the plantation tracks and the escarpment paths. Church life is strong across the community, weekends fill with visitors from Gauteng in the school holidays, and the local calendar follows the forestry cycle and the tourist season rather than any large festival.

Graskop is home to a few thousand people in the town itself, with more in the surrounding settlements and forestry villages, and it forms part of the Thaba Chweu municipality along with Sabie and Lydenburg. The built-up area is small enough to walk across, with a commercial main street, a school, a clinic, a few churches and a residential grid behind, and newer housing spreading outwards towards the edge of the plantations.

Three things pay the bills: forestry and the sawmills of the district, tourism along the Panorama Route, and the government and municipal jobs that come with being a service town. Many households depend on seasonal or informal work — guiding, craft selling, hospitality — which makes the quiet winter weeks and any downturn in travel felt quickly. Wages are low, unemployment high, and commuting to Mbombela or the lowveld farms is common.

The day starts early, with minibus taxis running to Sabie, Hazyview and the plantations, and ends early too: shops close in the late afternoon and the town is quiet by dark except for guesthouse verandas. National problems arrive here as elsewhere — power interruptions, water supply that fails when pumps or pipes break, potholes on the district roads — and are met with generators, tanks and patience. Mist is the other constant, arriving from below and closing in the streets in minutes.

The dish people associate with Graskop is the pancake, a soft, thick crêpe folded around fillings rather than the thin French kind. Savoury versions come with curried mince, chicken and mushroom, beef and cheese, or spinach and feta; sweet ones with cinnamon sugar and lemon, caramel or berries. Several establishments on and around the main street make them, and stopping for one is close to a ritual on the drive between Johannesburg and Kruger.

The rest of the local table is standard South African highland fare. The braai — boerewors, a coiled spiced sausage, lamb chops and steak grilled over coals — is the weekend centre of family life, eaten with pap, the stiff maize porridge, and chakalaka, a spiced vegetable relish. Biltong and droëwors, air-dried spiced meat, are sold in the shops for the road. Cold streams and dams around Graskop and Sabie hold trout, which turns up smoked or pan-fried on menus across the escarpment.

Down the pass the lowveld supplies fruit, and roadside stalls on the Hazyview road sell bananas, mangoes, avocados, litchis and macadamia nuts, along with achar, the oily mango pickle. Sweet things lean Afrikaans — koeksisters, milk tart, malva pudding — and the drinks to try are rooibos tea and Amarula, the cream liqueur made from the marula fruit that grows in the lowveld below.