Matjiesfontein in the Karoo

If Alfred Hitchcock had set his thriller, Psycho, in South Africa, Janet Leigh’s character would have checked into the Lord Milner Hotel, the equivalent of the Bates Motel, located in the Karoo Desert village of Matjiesfontein.

This wayside train station, 150 miles from Cape Town and 750 miles from Johannesburg, is quirky, weathered like its desert environment and creepy. These are not reasons to pass up an overnight stay in this historic Victorian village, but you might want to bring a friend for company and for piece of mind. Nights can get long and a bit unnerving in this African dorp of 300 people.

It’s a six-hour journey by train on the Shosholoza Meyl that departs daily from Cape Town and arrives in Matjiesfontein mid-afternoon (or later if the train is delayed). Few passengers disembark at this National Heritage Site and less – as in no one on the day I arrived– boards the train in Matjiesfontein for points north.

Although this is a tiny village – or dorp as the Afrikaners call a small town – you are still momentarily disoriented when you step off the train. The Shosholoza doesn’t linger. The minute your feet touch the platform, the train begins to slowly depart the station, leaving you alone with your luggage in the hot African sun wondering where to go from here.

A man, whose sun-kissed face nearly matches the reddish-orange color of his well-worn bellhop uniform, appears out of nowhere. No words are exchanged. No introduction and no offer to assist with your luggage. There is just a slight movement of his eyes, which suggests that he knows who you are and where you are going. You follow this silent character off the platform, through a corridor, down the steps of the train station and across a dusty parking lot to the former Births and Deaths Registration Office, which is now the reception area for the Lord Milner Hotel.  Some towns have cheery signs that welcome you. Matjiesfontein welcomes you at the Births and Deaths Registration Office. Hitchcock would be right at home.

There are no cars in front of the hotel and no guests in the lobby - just a sole woman standing behind a counter with an “I’ve been expecting you” look on her face. Unlike the Lurch-like bellhop who delivered me to this spot, the receptionist speaks. She welcomes me to the Lord Milner and asks me to sign an old-fashioned guest registry where I write my name, address, telephone number, country of residence and passport number – for all the world to see. (Didn’t Norman Bates ask the same thing of the doomed Marion Crane?) She hands me the skeleton key to my room and, without saying a word, the mysterious bellhop again makes a subtle gesture and begins walking. I quickly grab my luggage and follow him to room M19. He opens the door. I step into my room and when I turn around, the bellhop is gone.

I don’t need the ashtray on the table to tell me I’m in a smoking room. I smell the stench of decades of cigarettes that have been smoked in M19. Given the general state of things as the Lord Milner Hotel, I see no reason to inquire if there are non-smoking rooms available. Or, for that matter, if there are non-ant rooms. I assume it is not just my room that has little brown ants scurrying on the bathroom sink and on the nightstands and even on the bed. One ant goes down the drain when I turn the water tap on and I assume another is crushed when I toss my backpack on the twin bed. 

I throw open the shutters and discover glass-paned doors which lead to a wooden deck which overlooks a dry riverbed. It is 90 degrees and absolutely still. Not a leaf on a tree is moving.  The only way to get cool, and to wash off the accumulated sweat and dirt of six hours spent traveling in un-air-conditioned discomfort in economy class on the Shosholoza train, and now checking into my un-air-conditioned room, is to take a swim. I quickly peel off my clothes that are sticking to me, put on swimming costume (yes, that’s what they call a swimsuit here) and go in search of the swimming pool.

“Pass the traveler’s chapel, cross the dry river bed and take a left” were the directions to the swimming pool given to me by the receptionist. With the sun beating down I envisioned an oasis of chaise lounges and umbrellas surrounding a blue pool filled with shimmering, inviting water. What I discovered was a holiday resort for frogs and toads.

The water can best be described as a shade of excrement brown with an occasional tint of green from the growing algae. The brown water and green foliage made wonderful camouflage for the frogs that were doing their equivalent of floating on air mattresses and drinking pina coladas. I wondered, had I somehow gotten on the wrong train in Cape Town and ended up in Robert Mugabe’s run-down Zimbabwe? Still, it was so hot that the thought crossed my mind of submerging myself in the water. Since I couldn’t see what else might be in the murky brown liquid, I returned to my room to take a cooling shower instead.

Back in sweltering M19, I stripped off my trunks and turned the water on in the shower. In my mind, the tiny bathroom became the black-and-white set from the movie Psycho and I couldn’t get the screeching soundtrack from the shower scene out of my head. I needn’t have worried about my safety, however. Since there was no hot water I was in and out of the cold shower quicker than it would take any psychotic employee of the Lord Milner Hotel to use his skeleton key to gain entrance to my room and pull a Norman Bates number on me.

Refreshed, but hungry, I had 15 minutes before the coffee shop would close for the day at 5:00. Since there is no grocery store and the only restaurant in town didn’t open for dinner until 7:00, I made a dash for the café. Well, it really wasn’t much of a dash. It’s a dorp, remember. The coffee shop was only a minute’s walk from my room.

I entered the coffee shop, what was once the general store for Matjiesfontein and, like the street, and the hotel’s reception area and the swimming pool, there was no one there.  I grabbed a menu and sat on a rickety wooden chair to consider the offerings. Silently, a server appeared at my table. Perhaps she was the bellhop’s sister because she just stood at the table, not saying a word. Not a “Welcome to the coffee shop” or a “May I take your order?”

Matjiesfontein is a fascinating combination of the desert wilds of South Africa mixed with a holdover of British colonialism. What better way to acknowledge this coming together of two worlds than by having what can only be called a “Karoo high tea.” I ordered two scones with cream and granadilla curd (that’s passion fruit puree where I come from) and a drink called cactus shandy. The scones were flaky and delicious. The granadilla divine. The cream was a bit off, but what dairy product wouldn’t be in the heat of the desert? The cactus shandy, made of cactus syrup and soda water, was fluorescent purple in color and very sweet. Tea would have been better, but then there would be nothing South African about my midafternoon treat except the granadilla curd.

I was too hungry and it was too late in the day to leisurely enjoy my snack. It was 5:00 and the silent server stood by the cash register, a not so subtle message that it was time for me to go. I nearly licked the bowl clean of granadilla curd before leaving the coffee shop to explore the streets, buildings and museums of Matjiesfontein.

As this is a near-deserted desert town, there was no need to look both ways before crossing the street that separates the hotel from the train station. A car traveling on the main street of Matjiesfontein is as rare an event as a word coming out of the mouths of the hospitality staff.

A local, who had clearly had too much sun and beer, stopped me as I walked the stairs to the train station and offered to sell me a small apple tree he had dug up earlier in the day and now carried in a plastic grocery bag. He assured me the wilted plant would thrive, even in winter in the U.S. If  I would purchase his offering, a few rand would buy food for his wife and two children who lived, he said, “on the other side of the tracks” from the Lord Milner. There would be no getting to a museum housed in the train station without appeasing the cordial panhandler with a few coins. I gave him five rand but insisted that he keep his dying apple tree.

The encounter with the local resident cost me the same amount of rand as the admission to the Marie Rawdon Museum. Named for the mother of David Rawdon, the man who purchased all of Matjiesfontein in 1968 and brought the dorp back from the dead, the museum, according to a brochure, “houses a vast collection of pieces and is probably the largest private collection open to the public in the country.” But multiple collections do not a museum make. There is a large collection of cameras, along with a smaller collection of bedpans of various sizes and shapes and a still smaller collection of false teeth, along with thousands of other “pieces” displayed haphazardly in cases and on tables and hung from the walls.

The basement of the museum is absolutely eerie. Past a display of artifacts from the Anglo-Boer War, and the collection of bed pans and an occasional mounted animal head missing an ear or two, is an exhibit that could have been taken right out of a scene from Psycho. A female mannequin, attired in a dressing gown, is slumped in a chair facing the mirror of a vanity. An assortment of hairbrushes, hand mirrors and tins are displayed in front of her. It is an homage to Norman Bates’ mother that seems perfectly at home in this odd and sometimes macabre museum. I make a beeline out of the basement and back to the platform. There the local still waited to once again try to give me the dead apple tree to take back to the States. The tree might have been dead, but our interaction was far more engaging than anything I had just seen in the lifeless museum.

On the other side of town, which means a three-minute walk from the train station, is the Matjiesfontein Transport Museum. The price of admission is the same, five rand, and the “museum” is similar to the Marie Rawdon Museum in that it is really just a collection of a few antique bikes and train cars and 20 or so old automobiles from a VW bug to a Citron to a Chevrolet and a Rolls Royce and a newer model Honda Prelude. But there, mixed in with all of the cars that would have been luxurious in their day, is the Matjiesfontein hearse from the 1930s. One could easily imagine it being used to transfer bodies to the cemeteries located just a few kilometers outside of town.

A smaller cemetery is located on the grounds of the Lord Milner Hotel. There, deceased employees of the hotel have been put to rest. Some of the employees who are still walking the earth work as bartenders at the Laird’s Arms, a Victorian-style pub, and as servers at the restaurant of the hotel.

The Laird’s Arms is the drinking hole and, as such, is the hot spot. It’s where you can usually find John, a local man who lives across the railroad tracks who plays the piano at the pub, imitates Louie Armstrong and Ray Charles, and does a five-second impersonation of Nelson Mandela. For a couple of rand he will take you through the “private quarters” where Cecil John Rhodes stayed on his many stops in Matjiesfontein and there he will make a few off-color jokes. When the luxury trains pass through town – the Rovos Rail and the Blue Train – John meets the well-heeled passengers and guides them on a ten-minute village tour on an old London double-decker bus that still advertises Beefeater’s gin on its side.

If you get him early enough in the morning, before his shift at the Lord Milner begins, John will have you pile into his Volkswagen Jetta and drive the 10 kilometers outside of town to the old cemetery where the founders of Matjiesfontein, along with soldiers from the Anglo-Boer War, are buried. John’s bowler hat is off his head collecting tips as much as it is on his head protecting him from the desert sun and his larger-than-life personality is worth every rand thrown in his hat.

There is no such personality working in the restaurant of the Lord Milner Hotel. The somber waitresses, referred to in some guidebooks as surly, wear a uniform of a black dress, with a full, white, frilly apron and a white doily placed on top of their heads. Guests can choose from steak, chicken or Karoo lamb for their main meal. The entrée is accompanied with potatoes, carrots, spinach, sugar beans and butternut all piled on top of each other on the same plate. The guests speak in hushed tones as they eat their meals in the dimly lit dining room.  Some couples don’t say a word. Often the loudest noise is the creaking of the floor as the waitresses deliver meals to the sparsely populated tables.

It’s as though there has been a death in the family. And there have been deaths over the years at Matjiesfontein. It’s not just me who finds the village to be creepy. Legend has it that the hotel and surrounding cemeteries are haunted.

The ghost stories from Matjiesfontein are the standard nocturnal tales of rattling of doors, sounds of laughter coming from empty rooms, cool chills that pass by warm-blooded employees and all of those things that go bump in the night. But like all other parts of Matjiesfontein, the village’s ghostly lore has a unique character who occasionally makes himself known by the side of the road near the cemetery. The apparition has appeared at night and during the day, but all accounts of sightings are basically the same. A sad-looking soldier in khakis, his head bandaged and his arm in a sling, appears and then just as quickly disappears. Could it be one of the fallen soldiers from a long-ago battle of the Anglo-Boer War who died near Matjiesfontein but who, like some of the guests at the Lord Milner Hotel, just can’t find any rest? If you ran into the silent apparition would you assume he was just another member of the staff who appear and disappear without uttering a word? At Matjiesfontein, the divide between this world and the world beyond is very thin indeed.

Matjiesfontein had a rebirth when David Rawdon purchased it in the 1960s. Now, the quirky, eerie village is in need of another transfusion. In Matjiesfontein, the set and the extras and the creepy atmosphere are all in place to make this the ideal location for a remake of Psycho. And just as Matjiesfontein can use a facelift, South Africa’s most famous actress, Charlize Theron, could use a boost to her somnolent career. Maybe a South African version of Psycho, with Charlize Theron as the ill-fated traveler who checks into a secluded Lord Milner Hotel, might revive her career and in the process, give this dying dorp new life.