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It’s amazing how many times I drove Route 62 without taking the Kruisrivier turn-off between Oudtshoorn and Calitzdorp. If you do you’ll discover, along with the famed red stone hills and awesome Klein Karoo scenery, Tinie Bekker’s small dairy and ostrich farm tucked neatly into the Swartberg mountain.…
… Tinie is entirely modest about the two guest rooms he built on account of a billiards table (long story), calling ‘simple farm accommodation’ what more arty types might describe as ‘rustic chic suites’. Rustic in the sense of reed ceilings, wonky wood floors and pebble-stoned showers – and the swallows which dart in and out in the evenings – but chic with their fine white linen and cleverly restored old family furniture, like porcupine quill lampshades and a bathtub quirkily wrapped in a wine barrel. Wonderfully unkempt gardens are a kaleidoscope of colours with such novelties (in South Africa) as pansies, while the vegetable garden provides much of your evening meal. But he’s modest about his green fingers... and modest, too, about his ‘paint-by-numbers’ cookery skills, which allowed him to conjure me up freshly-baked bread and a delicious four-course meal in the main farmhouse. Even better, Tinie’s refreshingly reasonable with his rates. Early the next morning I was taken to see cows milked in the small dairy, then spent a memorable half-hour with a just-hatching baby ostrich...before tackling the only immodest thing around here, the towering Swartberg mountain with its famed helter-skelter pass.
