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There's little reason to visit
GEORGE
, 66km northeast of Mossel Bay, unless you're starting or finishing a trip on the Outeniqua Choo-Tjoe. This large inland working town, surrounded by mountains, is a five-kilometre detour northwest off the N2, and 9km from the nearest stretch of ocean at Victoria Bay. Sadly, all that's left of the forests and quaint character that moved Anthony Trollope, during a visit in 1877, to describe it as the "prettiest village on the face of the earth", are some historic buildings, of which the beautiful
Dutch Reformed Church
, in Davidson Street at the top end of Meade Street, is the most notable. Completed in the early 1840s, the church is definitely worth a stop if you happen to be passing through, with its elegantly simple classical faA§ade, Greek-cross plan with an impressive centrally placed pulpit and wonderful domed ceiling, panelled with glowing yellowwood.
St Mark's Cathedral
, in Cathedral Street, consecrated in 1850, is also worth seeing, but unlike the Dutch Reformed Church which is open to the public, it can only be visited by appointment. Other than that, George's claim to recent fame (or notoriety) is the fact that it was the parliamentary seat of former State President
P.W. Botha
, the last of South Africa's apartheid hardliners and the immediate predecessor of F.W. De Klerk, who negotiated the demise of minority rule. The George Museum once housed the P.W. Botha collection, an exercise in blind adulation for one of the most ruthless proponents of apartheid. The collection was regarded as unsuitable for a museum in the "New South Africa" and was removed in the 1990s, but if you look hard you can still spot the odd fragment lingering here and there that the authorities failed to fully expunge.
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