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Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.
“It destroyed everything that was – 100% of our market. We are starting again from the beginning,” says Andrew Attwood.
He had run a successful IT software consultancy in Germany for 12 years, when he and his German wife Corinne decided to exit the European corporate rat race and return to South Africa, opening Antbear, a lodge about 30 minutes from Estcourt, where the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands bleeds geographically into the southern Drakensberg.
“This crisis hit us unexpectedly, with repercussions I could never have imagined. We had a sum total of R1-million when we came here. We have been building it for the past 19 years, a little bit at a time, and reinvested everything we made back into the lodge. So I have no idea what the real costs [of the loss] are”.