Let’s face it – once you have travelled past Houhoek on the N2 east in the southern Cape, there’s a tedious stretch of nothing until you get to Mossel Bay and the start of the Garden Route.  If you want to see anything special, you will have to take a detour.  Which is not a bad thing.  Just to the left of the N2, on the roads known variously as the R321, R406 and R43, are a number of valleys containing some of the most beautiful farming country known to man.  Just imagine plump hills, flowering orchards, olive groves, shimmering dams, little farm stalls and meandering lanes.  A secret garden, indeed. The Theewaterskloof Municipality has decided that all this beauty is wasted on the locals - who see it every day anyway - and have launched a tourism initiative to persuade travellers on the N2 to take a slower route and spend a while in the Elgin Valley.  It’s called the Theewaterskloof Cape Country Meander, centred around the Theewaterskoof Dam (which by the way, gets its name from the colour of the water). Apart from the obviously beguiling mountains, farmsteads, vineyards, lakes and country lanes, this region is also home to South Africa’s apples.  And the story of our an-apple-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away industry which was established, interestingly enough, by a doctor, is a tale worth telling. It started with a railway. Even the earliest settlers had recognised the agricultural potential of the Elgin region, so the Cape government built first a wagon trail and then, in the 1890s, a railway to haul the riches that were sure to come out of the valley. One of the local farmers was a Doctor Viljoen, a medical man who swopped patients for potatoes, and started experimenting with different crops. During the Boer War he went off to fight for the Afrikaners, was captured by the British but was then released on parole and allowed to go back to his farm after he agreed to pay the salaries of his two guards – ‘a unique way of being a prisoner-of-war!’, as TV Bulpin says in his travel book Discovering Southern Africa. Viljoen decided, after a chat with the Cape Minister of Agriculture in 1902, to try apples.  It was the beginning of an industry that would change the fortunes of the Cape forever. He bought 24 apple trees from the famous Pickstone nursery, planted them on his farm Oak Valley, and awaited events.  Ten years later the first fruit was ready to be picked.  Viljoen organised a gala day of neighbours, family and friends and pronounced the apple harvest to be first class. Viljoen and his son-in-law George Rawbone – a well-known forestry officer from the Cape - decided to farm apples on a large scale.  The outbreak of World War 1 slowed expansion, and unfortunately Viljoen, who was knighted in 1916, did not live to see his first large-scale crop.  But the apple industry was on its way. There were lots of hiccups at first, of course.  Viljoen’s neighbour, a Miss Murray, sent her first 25 boxes of apples to the Johannesburg market and sold them at R2 a box.  But the market agent complained that the apples had been so battered during shipping ‘that it was hardly possible to find one good bite between the bruises.’ By 1923 a group of farmers had decided to pool resources and expertise and create a co-operative, and by 1931 the Elgin Fruit Company was formed.  Technology and science improved crop yields immeasurably, and then an immigrant Italian farmer had a great idea.  Edmundo Lombardi adopted the ancient Italian practice of palmette, where apple trees are planted close together, their branches grafted onto each other, and a continual wall of vegetation is produced.  Production quadrupled. A problem now arose because there were just too many of them little apples.  What to do with surplus, low grade or untransportable fruit?  Once again the industrious Italian came up with an answer. Together with a Professor Luthi of the Department of Agriculture in Switzerland, Lombardi developed an apple juice that could be pressed, bottled and shipped without additives and preservatives, and in 1966 the world discovered Appletiser.  The Elgin Valley is home to the Appletiser factory, which now supplements the apple juice with grape, pear and other juices, still using the same world-famous techniques. Twenty years ago when you bought apples they were either Golden Delicious, Starking, Granny Smith or Ohinimuri (we used to call them Oh Henry Murrays).  Nowadays there is a bewildering array of types all year round and from all over the world. Other towns on the route include historic staging post Botriver, Caledon with its hot springs, South Africa’s oldest mission station at Genadendal (a Moravian mission dating back to 1738), Greyton with its thatched cottages and homestays.  But mainly, it’s about the apples. So after you pass Houhoek Inn, with its giant eucalyptus tree, its legends and its ghosts, take a left to the Theewaterskloof Cape Country Meander.  It’s a turn for the better.