HOW FAR WOULD YOU TRAVEL FOR CHEESE?
A lustrous Jersey-milk Camembert? A head of piquant Gruyère-style hard cheese, or perhaps a soft goat’s milk, washed in late harvest wine and studded with sundried Kalahari raisins?
For me the answer was somewhere north of 3 200 km. Although, by the time I eventually made it back to Cape Town, the cooler in my car boot was, I’ll admit, filled with far more than just cheese.
For most people, the Northern Cape is little more than fly-over country. An empty blip on the way to somewhere altogether more interesting. Yet after a week spent travelling empty roads, traversing towns that time forgot, this feels unfair. South Africa’s largest province may not have the glamour of the Cape, the buzz of Jozi or the sultry allure of KwaZulu-Natal, but when it comes to down-to-earth country folk making fine food, it can hold its head up high.
My first stop was a stone’s throw beyond the Northern Cape’s borders, on the Western Cape bank of).
