We slept very well in Lord Fraser’s enormous bed.
I think my brain was experiencing pandemic sensory overload (and clouded by the tall can of Maluti beer I drank while we spoke). Swanepoel but can no longer remember anything we actually talked about. (The bar was filled with boisterous young Heath Department workers who were staying at the Lord Fraser while doing covid testing at the South Africa/Lesotho border post.) I wish I’d taken notes during that conversation because I was fascinated by Mr. Swanepoel - a tall, imposing man who yelled at his staff in rapid-fire Sesotho when the bar started to get a bit rowdy. A taxidermied sheep stood on one of the tables.īack at the Lord Fraser, we went to the bar to order dinner and had a long conversation with Mr. We walked through the bar, which was very dark and had two cow heads mounted on the wall. Elmien welcomed us warmly and took us to our room, several dogs trailing behind us. The knots in my stomach tightened.Įventually we found the manager, Elmien, in a sitting room behind reception, surrounded by a ragtag pack of dogs. We walked in through the wrong entrance and struggled to find the reception area. The Lord Fraser is on a dead-end street and surrounded by a grove of massive oak trees - just behind the row of bombed-out shops, in fact - so it’s hard to get a feel for the building from the outside. But I swallowed my trepidation, reminding myself I am supposed to be a badass travel blogger. When I saw that row of burned shops, the boarded up hotel across the street (which was fortunately not the Lord Fraser), and the noisy cluster of people spilling out onto the pockmarked pavement around the bottle store (bottle stores, like cockroaches, survive every calamity in South Africa), my first instinct was to ask Thorsten to turn the car around and continue on to Bloemfontein, which was 90 minutes away. It came to exist and flourish during colonial and apartheid times, and hasn’t adjusted well since those times ended. But it’s safe to say that like many other small South African towns - and many small American towns, and many small towns the world over, for that matter - Wepener is a forgotten place. I’ve been thinking for weeks about how to write about Wepener without incorrectly characterizing a place I know almost nothing about.
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