It was dark when I arrived in Ficksburg. I didn’t know where on earth I would spend the night.

That may sound a bit scary but there’s a secret magic to touring around on a bicycle.
That is, after cycling around all morning and after being really tired at lunchtime, later on the afternoon you get what’s called a second wind.

Your body is just filled with energy and you feel so happy you just don’t worry about anything in the world. Not even where you’ll spend that night.

I couldn’t stay at an expensive place because I did not have all the money in the world for this trip and I was therefore on what’s called a budget trip. As I drove past the beautiful town hall, build from sandstone of course, a memory suddenly flashed through my mind.

Back in the year 1970, when I was eight-years old, I had been travelling through the Eastern Free State with my family on a camping holiday.

It was so cold my Dad decided to splash out that night on a hotel.

Now, while on my bicycle, I looked ahead and there was the very same hotel, called the Highlands Hotel! It was certainly the first hotel I ever remember staying in.

“It’s probably a bit expensive,” I thought to myself.
“Maybe I should ask them to direct me to a backpackers’ hostel.”

At backpackers’ hostels guests usually stay on bunk beds, in dormitories.
A man at the reception desk said: “We have a backpackers’ section: R180 a night with breakfast.”

Instead of leading me to a dormitory, a porter took me to a hotel room with a bathroom and toilet up the passage. What a bargain!

It also all looked so familiar. I couldn’t help wondering if it might be the very room my brother and I would have shared back in 1970, all those years ago.

The next morning, at breakfast, I read a local Ficksburg newspaper.

In it was a picture of the huge sandstone building at Gumtree, with a sentence underneath that provided the answer to the mystery of the sandstone building I had seen the day before.

It read: “The magnificent Old Mill, near Gumtree, now standing derelict, is the highest sandstone building in South Africa.”

Image: Duncan Guy, CC-BY-SA

WHAT DO YOU THINK? What other interesting buildings that are in ruins might you know about?