Would you say that the Free State is heart-shaped? That would depend whether you regarded the shape of a heart from the Cupid-and-roses perspective, or from a purely anatomical point of view. At a push the Free State could be shaped like a leaning heart, the anatomical kind, but its position in the middle of the country certainly gives it all the characteristics of the beating hub of the country.

If you read the provincial write-up on the website www.explorefreestate.co.za, you would think that the Free State is Shangril-la, Nirvana and Valhalla rolled into one.  This site contains purple prose that I would be proud to call my own.  After reading a few pages of breathless description, one’s hand is straying towards the phone to book a flight immediately to Bloemfontein (and the website tells you that Mango has just started flights between Gauteng and Bloem, so there is nothing standing in your way).  But let’s face it, the Free State is a bit of a hard sell.  It does not have beaches or spectacular mountains. One doesn’t really go to the Free State to look at it (although to be fair, the Eastern Free State is a stupendous example of nature imitating art.  The landscapes of red-gold rock, green valleys, winding little streams lined with poplars and willows are more Pierneef than Pierneef, if you know what I mean.)  The Free State is not an obvious holiday destination:  in order to find its riches – the bright yellow sunflowers against an impossibly blue sky, the fairytale splendour of Golden Gate, an alert cheetah lapping at a small stream – you have to look a lot further. What the website does very successfully, however, is encourages you to look further. And then there is a lot to see. Most of the towns of the Free State have uneventful, agrarian histories. They were named after local worthies, had small beginnings as agricultural centres or transport stageposts, lead quiet and unremarkable lives. Most of them were little more than a church and a general store to serve the neighbouring farms. Bloemfontein – which was once a world capital – has never heard a shot fired in war. The burghers of the Free State are solid, dependable, hard-working people. Even the discovery of the Free State goldfields was a non-event – not for the Free State the wild excitement of the Witwatersrand and the shenanigans of the Rand Lords. In the Free State, the people who first stumbled upon gold had to salt their discovery with nuggets from the Johannesburg mines in order to drum up some interest. Just as the goldfields got going, World War II intervened and created a distraction.  It was only a little over 60 years ago that gold was mined in the Free State, and in its inimitable fashion the Free State just gets on with it. The other mineral riches, such as coal, bauxite and semi-precious stones, are just not romantic enough to fire up the imagination and so the mining goes on without fuss.  Even the regular festivals – while they might get rowdy on a small scale – convey the same sense of timelessness as those huge skies.  Ficksburg has a Cherry Festival every November, Bloemfontein is renowned for its roses, Smithfield has a Bibber Chill Fees in winter that features a sheep-throwing competition. (This first got the animal-rights activists all het up until they realised that the sheep was a dummy and that the joke was on them). The festival celebrates everything sheep, from the wool to the meat to the slippers.  The Free State also has a number of battlefields, but even these are not all that exciting. They commemorate small backwards-and-forwards skirmishes rather than major pivotal battles. The biggest blaze of glory for the Free State is the autumn explosion of cosmos flowers that turns the flat farmland into a celebration of pink and white blooms. So – why would the tourist come to the Free State? The website does a very good job of telling you.  This province is the place you go for the less obvious things. The rivers and dams are wide and serene and lined with poplars and willows, ideal for stately guest houses, holiday resorts, fishing, boating and tubing.  Summer days are idyllic and endless.  The mountains are just the right size for a stroll to the top before tea, with perhaps a dip in an icy-cold mountain stream.  The wide sky lends itself to air-shows, ballooning, sky-diving and star gazing.  The small flashes of history and culture are just enough to add some spice to a lazy holiday. The regular festivals introduce you to the people who are the salt of the earth.  This is the province you go to when you want to do nothing, and lots of it.  The website also sends out a weekly tourism newsletter with tourism information: if you would like to get this newsletter, please send a request to info@explorefreestate.co.za