South Africa has a vast range of accommodation types, styles and standards and one of our many roles at Where It All Began is to shine a light on the lesser-known and more imaginative ones.
We were delighted to get an email from a past traveller of ours telling us about research he’s doing for his PhD in botany about Khula Dharma.
It’s quite hard to describe what this place is: both a fully sustainable farm, an eco-village and a B&B, it allows visitors to stay pretty much as long as they want so long as they contribute in some way to the running of the place and its development (and this does not necessarily need to be a financial contribution).
Everything is done in conjunction with and in direct support of the local community, turning around over-ploughed land and making it productive again. ‘Khula’ means ‘grow’ in the local language of isiXhosa and ‘Dharma’ is Sanskrit for ‘the right path’- perhaps ‘grow in a good way’ would be a good translation?
Khula Dharma sits in the one of the world’s most unspoilt and stunning coastlines, the Wild Coast near Haga Haga in the Eastern Cape. Getting there from East London Airport is about an hour’s drive and East London is about two hours by plane from Joburg.
