A river runs through it

Sabie is onthe Drakensberg escaromentialongMpumalanga’s famous Panorama Route. Want a weekend away surrounded by forests and waterfalls? Here's wnat you need to know.

- MIA LOUW

Happy voices mingle with clinking beer bottles and music on the stoep at Sabie Brewing Company. In the street outside, a motorcycle revs behind a fully loaded logging truck. Yup, this is forestry country and from the brewery you can see how the northern Drakensberg wraps around the town - every hill is covered in green plantations or indigenous forests.

Earlier this morning I visited the Forestry Museum and read that plantations are only established in areas where the annual rainfall is higher than 800 mm - so mostly on the upper reaches of catchment areas where there are also lots of rivers. Lots of rivers at high-ish altitudes mean trout, and almost every restaurant in town has it on the menu: smoked, fried, rolled...

But first, more about the beer. I take a sip of Glynn's Gold Ale, named after Henry Thomas Glynn who bought one of the first farms in the district. According to legend, a stray bullet hit a gold reef during a hunting expedition led by Glynn in 1871. A new mining settlement followed, which led to demand for firewood and building poles. A man called Joseph Brook Shires saw an opportunity and started the first plantation here in 1876.

But long before Glynn and Shires came along, the Shangaan people called the Sabie River ulusaba, which means "fearful", possibly in reference to the hippos and crocodiles that once thrived in the river.

These days, mining activities have largely ceased and Sabie is surrounded by one of the biggest manmade forests in the country. And the river, filled with rapids and waterfalls, is a source of great fun.

On the first weekend in February, more than a thousand people float down on inner tubes as part of the Sabie Tube Race. "The race is 48 years old - I've been here for 37 of them," says Joy Comley. The Comley family owns Merry Pebbles Holiday Resort, where the race ends.