One night at Weird Farm

When you book accommodation online, you never actually know what you're going to get. Jon Minster remembers an eventful stopover in the Karoo...

-  Jon Minster

Elliot and Francis, our two boys, immediately gave it a new name: Weird Farm. It was July in the hilly scrubland south of Willowmore in the Eastern Cape. A sleety rain fell, and it felt like dusk even though it was midday. We'd left the highway and we'd been following a bumpy dirt track for nearly half an hour, wheels slipping on stone, opening and closing wonky gates, past farm equipment rusting in furrows, through camps of scraggly goats. Now we'd arrived at the "cute farm cottage" that I'd booked on Airbnb.

It was the only accommodation on the two-week road trip that I'd booked. My wife Jess had taken care of the rest, as she usually does, with her uncanny eye for affordability and excellence. We'd been pampered at a game lodge on a Covid special; we'd fished from the deck of a rented cabin in Morgan Bay; we'd spent two unforgettable days with secretarybirds and bat-eared foxes in Mountain Zebra National Park; and we were on our way to a dairy farm behind Wilderness, with a wood-fired hot tub and views of swaying yellowwoods. But tonight, we were here. Weird Farm. Three sets of eyes turned towards me, the disdain obvious to behold.

In the sideways drizzle, the cottage was anything but cute. It was ancient, with ancient, sagging stone walls. Inside was a single room with a bare concrete floor, with four single beds covered in plastic to protect the mattresses from mouse and bird droppings. The wind shrieked through holes in the walls and rain dripped through the rusted tin roof and pooled on the floor. The solar geyser hadn't seen sun in a week and the water was nearly frozen in the pipes. The cottage was so remote that there was no lock on the door.