Haycation

You will reach Kersefontein, eventually, if you just follow directions and ignore that voice in your head (or the backseat) telling you you're lost. Once you see the wind turbines alongside the main stretch near Hopefield, you're almost there. Just a few unexpected twists and turns down a back-country road and then you're deep in a place so utterly faraway, time dissolves; dirt roads, bulging trees, bridges over streams, nuzzling horses, geese on patrol, a cow, sheep, chickens, and what's with that hog rolling in the muck?

ʻHappy as a pig in sh**' is the expression. I'd barely arrived, and I was that happy.

Apart from those pleasantly organic smells, the deep lungfuls of oxygen and full-body joy of arriving in this bucolic werf, there was Julian Melck, the kind of host who is part of the experience. When he appeared – kitted out for hard graft on