We South Africans live with an enormous amount of stress and anxiety, which seems to pile on heavier as time passes. Economic difficulty, drought, load shedding, crime and political uncertainty take their toll on our spirits and 2019 was positively brutal. That is why we love travelling – it gives us the chance to forget about our everyday worries, to open our hearts and minds and to rekindle the childlike spirit of adventure hiding beneath the weight of everyday responsibility within us.
A few years back we paid a brief visit to the Kologha State Forest in Stutterheim and were completely blown away by its enchanting beauty. We vowed at the time to return and explore it more thoroughly and decided that this mossy, lush paradise tucked away deep in the heart of the Eastern Cape was the perfect place for our family to start the new decade, to gain some perspective and realign our souls with the magic secreted in the untouched nooks of our beautiful country.
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One of the things we love most about travelling are those rare moments when the world seems to shrink in on itself around you. The times when you end up in a place that literally sucks the reality out of your being and leaves you feeling teeny tiny but at the same time hugely significant. Those places where time ceases to exist, where your spirit takes charge and where the meaning of life is within your grasp.
Travelstart asked us to share what we love about travelling. For us, travel is about more than just seeing new places and doing new things together as a family. It is magic in its simplest and most humanly accessible form.
There are certain places where the fabric between magic and reality is torn. Places where people gather and become still and contemplative. These places recharge your spirit and make you content, they strengthen you emotionally and remind you what an amazing gift it is to be alive.
Here are 9 of our most magical places in our beautiful rainbow nation, South Africa:
We are in the hospitality business, and our crazy season is looming. Where others are winding down for the year, and counting down to their annual holiday, we are working up to a period of non-stop work, intense stress and relentless chaos. So when deciding where to spend our last precious family holiday for the year, we settled on the ultimate in family relaxation – a farm stay at Lowestoffe Country Lodge near Hogsback.Continue reading…
Hogsback is a mystical little village tucked deep in the mountains of the Eastern Cape. It’s magic inspired JR Tolkien when he penned The Hobbit and its not hard to see why.Continue reading…
