It looked weird, but it was in Franschhoek. Hardly Wolf Creek, so - TopicsExpress

It looked weird, but it was in Franschhoek. Hardly Wolf Creek, so how weird can it get? Quite weird as it turns out. It was called Belle Fleur, which I assume means ‘Beautiful Flower’, but the flowers on the patio were all plastic and none of them were beautiful. There was an almost charming oddity about the place, a feeling of being stuck inside a Wes Anderson movie set, but then there was also an overpowering stench of stewing cabbage. Soon Wes Anderson had become Stephen King. If one ceramic dog is too many, and I’d argue that it is, then this place had big problems. The owner, a short woman in her sixties, spoke an almost indecipherable hybrid of Belgian and Afrikaans, which added to the weirdness. But she was sweet enough. Her son, whose room is next door to the guest room and has on its door a picture of him lying in a field of daisies with a cut out of Lassie glued onto it, was stranger still. The fleeting brushes with quirky charm were spoiled by a genuine and palpable creepiness throughout the house. I wasn’t scared but I did resign myself to the possibility, remote as it may have been, of death. A guest should not feel he must check the closet for peepholes, but this one did and not entirely as a joke. Breakfast was 10 slices of toast served with a wagon wheel of processed cheese triangles in Biltong and Sweetmilk flavour, four slices of salami, some jam, and margarine that had been lovingly sculpted into a margarine sea. The coffee was as weak as river water; I could see the ridge at the bottom of the cup through a full cup of it. In fairness, the place was clean. We had booked for two nights, but left after one. Because cabbage. And why risk it? One star.