How we found Kanaan.

For most of my adult life I was a traveller. More than thirty countries, give or take, before any of this began. I had been on the road, on and off, for years — and I had reached the point every traveller eventually reaches, where you start to feel that it might be time to come to rest somewhere. Not stop moving entirely. Just to have a place to come back to.

I spent close to a year in Argentina. I loved it there. I was looking, quite seriously, at buying a small vineyard — somewhere I could put down roots and pour myself into a long, slow project. I have always loved projects. The two other homes I have owned were both run-down places that I rebuilt, room by room. There is something about the transformation of a place that fits me. You walk in, you see what it could be, and then you spend years quietly making it true.

The vineyard did not work out. Things rarely do when you push them too hard. I came back to South Africa to be near my family, with the project still rattling around in my head and no idea yet where it would land. And around the same time — quietly, without much announcement — I met Matthew.

I knew Hazyview, of course. Most South Africans do. It sits at the edge of the Lowveld, where the highveld escarpment falls away into bushveld and the Kruger National Park begins. It is a beautiful corner of the country. But I had never thought of living there. I had a hometown. I had family. Hazyview was a place you went on holiday, not a place you moved to.

Then it was Matthew’s birthday.

He took me to a waterfall on a farm he knew the owner of — the kind of detour you make when you are still in the early, generous days of a relationship. We brought drinks. We sat at the edge of the water for sundown. The afternoon ran long. And somewhere in the middle of it, I started telling him what I had been telling everyone that year — that I was looking for a project, that I wanted to settle, that I knew the shape of what I wanted but not yet the place.

He listened the way he always does. Then he said, almost casually: my boss mentioned this farm — the one we’re sitting on — is for sale.

The next day, we drove in.

There was no gate then. You could just turn off the R40 and roll quietly up the track, past the mango trees, all the way to the lodge. We were not exactly invited. We were not exactly trespassing either — there was nothing to keep us out. So we walked the property. I could see the work. The rooms inside were very, very old, the kind of run-down that intimidates most buyers. But I could also see a project. A real one.

The bones were good. The land was extraordinary. The mango grove must have been forty years old. There was a river running cold through the property, even in the summer heat. There was space — proper, breathing space — and the bushveld stretched all the way to the horizon. From the road, you would never have looked twice. From inside the gate, it was something else entirely.

As we were driving back out — past the same gate-less entrance we had come in through — the old man caught us.

He was the owner. He came over and asked, fairly enough, what we were doing on his farm. We were caught off guard. We said we were tourists, just in the area, just curious. It was not entirely a lie. We were curious. We just were not exactly tourists.

The day after that, we went back. This time we knocked. We told him we wanted to make an offer.

He took us through the property properly, room by room. I confirmed everything I had seen the first time — plenty of work, everything needing attention, but underneath it all a place that had been loved once and could be loved again. We made an offer that was significantly below market value. We were taking a chance. He thought about it. He accepted.

The rest, as they say, is history. We bought Kanaan in August 2025.

The renovation has cost more than we thought. It always does. There is always more to do than you realise at the start. Walls that come apart when you touch them. Pipes nobody knew existed. Trees that need attention you only notice in the second season. We are nearly a year in, and we are still going.

But it has been an extraordinary year. The mango grove has been hosting campers under its branches all summer. The lodge units are starting to look the way I always saw them. Travellers are finding us — quietly at first, then more — and many of them are exactly the kind of person I was hoping would come. People who travel because they want to see a place properly, not because they want it served to them through glass.

It turns out the farm was not really for sale, and we were not really tourists. We found each other anyway.