To die for

How do you avoid the tourist avalanche if you live in an Afromontane forest where holidaymakers descend in December? You drive to lonely outposts in the mountains of the Cape, says photographer Obie Oberholzer, and you make pictures rather than take them.

- OBIE OBERHOLZER

It's the middle of December in a small coastal hamlet along the Garden Route. Two old people are sitting on their veranda. They are South African and call it a stoep.

The man is quiet; the woman talks a lot. The man and the bird don't always listen as they know what the woman is going to say before she says it. Their names are Obie, Lynn and Tommy Toraco. Behind them is the roar of the Indian Ocean that echoes off the mountain and Afromontane forest that surround them. Nothing could be more lovely, they both think.

However, they are both aware that beyond the Tsitsikamma Mountains is the incoming roar of traffic from the tense and often uptight Gauteng holidaymakers that descend on this area in December.

Obie turns lovingly to Lynn and whispers, "Lovie, I want to die on the job." Lynn's face turns pale with fright and her eyes widen. She leaps up and starts weeding the lawn. So, to avoid the Christmas tourist avalanche, they pack up and drive to some lonely outposts in the mountains of the Cape.

Three cottages have been booked through LekkeSlaap, as Booking.​com doesn't really go to out-of-the-way places like the ones planned. They drive. Knysna-George-SwellendamWorcester, then onto the R44 to Porterville. Just beyond Porterville, they turn right and head up the Dasklip Pass that winds its way up the Olifantsrivier Mountains and into the greater Groot Winterhoek Wilderness Area.

Erica Cottage, on Berghoff flower farm, is surrounded by a dramatic landscape of grotesquely sculpted sandstone ridges, that somersault over each other and lead into the Skurweberg Mountains, twisting and turning into the higher Koue Bokkeveld Mountains. To the north, the ruggedness filters into the pale blue of the Citrusdal Valley.