Underberg
"We came for one night and stayed three, just watching the light change on the escarpment."
A sleepy farming town where the tar road ends and the Sani Pass begins its wild climb into Lesotho.
We rolled into Underberg late afternoon, tank low, GPS insisting we’d somehow left the highway behind an hour ago without noticing. Lia was the one who spotted it first — that shift where the maize fields and trout farms give way to a wall of sandstone cliffs, the whole Southern Drakensberg escarpment suddenly filling the windshield. It’s a small town, the kind where you can walk the main street in ten minutes, but everyone we met seemed to be either coming down from the Sani Pass covered in dust or heading up to it the next morning with chains in their boot, just in case.
We’d booked a farm cottage on the edge of town specifically because the owner mentioned trout fishing on the property, and I spent our first evening failing spectacularly at it while Lia read on the stoep, laughing every time I came back empty-handed. Underberg grew up quarrying sandstone and farming this valley, and you can still feel that agricultural backbone — it’s not a resort town dressed up for tourists, it’s a real working community that happens to sit at the foot of one of the most dramatic roads in Africa.
What struck me most was how the town organizes itself entirely around the mountain behind it. Every guesthouse, every café, every 4x4 hire place exists because of the Sani Pass — that switchback climb of roughly 1,332 meters up to the Lesotho border post. We didn’t attempt it ourselves that trip, our rental car wasn’t up to it, but we sat at a café on the main road watching Land Rovers loaded with day-trippers rumble past at dawn, and I remember thinking I’d come back just to do that drive properly.
One evening we wandered past a stage being set up in a field on the edge of town — locals told us it was for the Splash Festival, a music and arts weekend that apparently packs the whole valley with tents and campervans once a year. We’d missed it by a few weeks, which felt like the right kind of miss, the sort that gives you a reason to return.
When to go: We’d point you toward autumn, March through May, when the weather on the Sani Pass drive tends to hold steady and the hiking mornings are cool without yet being bitter — that’s when we’ll be planning our next trip back, this time with the right car.