South Africa | Travellinglight

A wild spotted eagle owl seen in Cape Town Botanical Gardens.

We arrived home at 5am to a house that had been unheated for 2 months. The heating ap informed us we were in 85% humidity. My plants have thrived. It basically felt warmer and drier outside. And it was raining. But the village lights are gleaming and the pub has a roaring fire, where we stumble in, mud covered, (I slipped in my wellies), and soaking. We bump into an old friend and gossip by the pub fire drinking pints of real ale. As we walk home in the dark, there’s only two street lights between us and home; we pass a near neighbour in the gloaming with a head torch on, putting his outdoor christmas lights on. When we ask him why he says “Because I am so excited” in a deadpan way. We are home.

Anyway I’m only here as Clive wants a record of our holiday and I haven’t done the last two weeks. I didn’t expect to want to. South Africa, Garden Route. An afterthought really.

Oh My God. What a beautiful, wild, weird, dangerous place it is.

So I thought I’d try doing a photo montage rather than much in the way of writing. But you know me. Can’t help myself. So if I ramble on, ignore me and just look at the photos.

Route 62 to Little Karoo.

We didn’t start on the Garden Route, we started further north, on the Route 62, to the Little Karoo. I mean that’s a song, right there. To reach Prince Albert we decided to go across the Swartberg pass. The first but not the last time we realised that we should have hired a 4 by 4.

We only stayed in Prince Albert for a night. Beautiful place, very chilled, people all ages and colours cycling up and down the main and only road on clanky old bikes, often laden with gardening tools, shopping, or dogs, sometimes all three. It rained thunderously in the evening as we sat under our storm porch. No wonder everywhere is so green. It has been a very wet winter, and the summers are cooler. This makes very good wine, apparently.

Most of the buildings in Prince Albert are Victorian.

The Valley Of Ferns.

From here we headed to Knysna, without the K, pronounced Neyesna. Possibly. Again, we went the mountain pass route, this time through Prince Alfred pass, sold in our guide as not as gnarly as the Swartberg. Wrong. It’s a single dirt track about 65 km long. We drove so slowly it took us all day and views were few and far between as it rained.

The sound of the valley of ferns, heard on the way through the pass. Worth doing just for this.

Knysna

From Knysna we went on a day trip to see the end of the Garden Route at Storms River. Do not bother. It is rammed with coaches, tour groups, and people people people. I realised the way to travel is to check the Itinery of a country – everywhere is an Itinery now – and then not go to those places. Might work. A beach near our bnb called Brenton -on -sea stretched sandily to infinity. We ate sushi, which is really cheap and delicious here, drank chilled white wine, sun-bathed and paddled – the currents here are so dangerous, and cold, despite the sea being the Indian Ocean, few people are ever seen swimming. I can’t remember if I have said this bt the food and drink here is crazily good value, and delicious.

Perilous pathway.

At a beautiful place just up the road from Storms River called Nature’s Valley, we took a circular walk up from the beach to a salt river. Then we ignored the sign saying that the coastal path has fallen away and this is extremely dangerous. It was.

Almost becoming one of those annoying couples who have to be rescued by the SA version of the RNLI as they are on cliffs in a rising tide. If they have an RLNI SA version.

To Tides River.

Taking the ferry – oops.

Ignoring advice is our speciality.

Despite our Airbnb host warning us not to use the ferry as it is often not working, we rocked up on the wrong side of the river; luckily the ferry was having a good day, as the detour would probably have been around 100km, on dirt tracks.

We came here to see De Hoop, a vast nature reserve. It took us hours to drive anywhere as we kept stopping to photograph the birds we’d never seen before.

A blue crane, the national bird of South African.

The sound of the wind whistling through the trees and across the water at Tides River will be one that I hope to remember on my death bed; so lulling, so soporific, I am falling asleep just remembering it. We wondered why there were no boats. Then when we swam in it we realised – it is so shallow you can walk across to the other side at low tide.

Tides River

Cape Agulhas.

Here is the geographic southernmost tip of Africa where the Indian and Atlantic ocean’s meet. A place of gigantic 100 foot high waves. Also briefly of a very excited Clive on the look out for a yellow mongoose. Which he spotted running across the road and then being sadly squished by a car. So no photos – although the inaturalist ap does have a section for dead animal photos. Macabre.

The last few days in Hermanus.

Hermanus is an hour and a half from Cape Town. It is a place you can stand on the cliff tops and see whales and dolphins, often as many if not more than on a boat trip. Even at the end of November when we were there the second time, and the whales have mostly left for the Antarctic, we saw a mum and baby right whale, and a pod of dolphins, on our last morning.

Happy Christmas everyone.

The first time I have heard any Christmas music this year so far.

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But first – shark news:-

Bouncing about in a cage in a force 5 with sharks skimming past a few centimetres from my nose was way less scary than I expected.

Inside the shark cage.

Visibility in the cage is very poor. The best place to see the sharks that appear once they throw the baited ropes into the sea is on the top deck of our boat. Best to avoid the front of the boat with the pukers, easily spotted with their green/grey complexion and sick bags glued to their faces.

I thought it strange that the sharks didn’t just wolf down the bait straight away but Clive thinks they like to have a nibble first to see if they like the taste. They are copper sharks, aka bronze whalers.

There are no Great Whites about as the Orcas have been eating them, in particular their livers, so they’ve all buggered off down the coast to Mossel Bay. Why it’s safer there, I don’t know.

The on/off wine tram in Franschhoek.

The wine tram is kind of a scam, as it’s really a very short track of train and mostly buses, but no-one cares as we are all trollied and can barely remember our names let alone write a Trip Adviser review.

We arrived at our first vineyard at 11.30 am as three separate small groups, but when we reboard the bus an hour later we are a decidedly tipsy unit.

A happy band of 7.

By the third vineyard the Zulu/ Leeds contingent are singing three part harmonies to a goat and the Dutch couple we have been chatting to are losing not only their English language skills but their Dutch too.

This place sells painting by Pigcasso. You can see him doing this to the sound of our group talking bollocks.

The Franshoek vines were originally planted by 300 French Huguenots who fled France in 1688 after King Louis XIV banned Protestantism. Shout out to the Holmes family on Clive’s side of the family, as they were Huguenots but fled to England.

The vines bake on North facing hillsides producing delicious wine varieties, although I couldn’t tell you which wine to buy as by the third vineyard they all tasted the same. But as a fall from grace after 9 months of sobriety it took some beating.

Visiting a township.

Cape Town is a city of two halves. Part polished and beautified, with fantastic food and wine, sandy beaches, a freezing sea, and Table mountain looming above it all. It has its share of historic buildings, many of which have troubled histories. The court house, where if they really couldn’t decide if you were coloured or white they stuck a comb in your hair.

If it stayed in, you were coloured. Fell out, white.

Nearby is The Slave Lodge, which is still called “The biggest 19th century brothel in Cape Town” in some aricles online, with no mention that the women were slaves.

Most visitors don’t see the other half of Cape Town because it can be dangerous to visit. A British surgeon was shot while driving back from whale-watching in Hermanus. His wife, mother and 2 year old child were also in the car and survived. The main freeway to Cape Town being shut due to a strike, his GPS had directed him through a township adjacent to Langa.

We visited Langa with Louis, a local tourist guide, who had spent 2 years during Covid living under a tarp being fed by kindly neighbours. The first Township, Langa was built in 1923 to segregate the black African community from urban areas and served as a labour resevoir. It still does. Visiting a Township felt like a difficult call, but I wanted to see for myself where the majority of coloured people still live.

Our guide told us that they want tourists to come, and that his job showing us around had been a revelation to him, meeting white non- South Africans who unlike the local whites were interested and cared about their situation (his words). He told us that the Township is bigger than ever, as squatting laws mean if you build a hut i.e a 1 meter square corregated iron box, and remain there for 48 hours, you have the right to remain there.

Watching a group of children dancing and singing to a crowd of local people chilling in Langa on a Saturday afternoon I felt simultaneously interested to see African music performed for African people and hugely conspicuous in our nosy whiteness.

Poverty Porn is the idea that by writing about it I am objectifying it. But by not writing about it I’d be sweeping it under the carpet. But watching a performance by local artists who have not been wheeled out for us, the tourists, to gawk at did feel different. The main streets have surveillance cameras overlooking them, but Louis took us deep into the heart of the Town, to show us the streets that regularly flood, the water pump serving hundreds on a street corner, the portaloos. It is difficult to imagine how people get to work in places like the waterfront in central Cape Town looking spic and span when they live in these conditions. But they do.

Langa’s Saturday afternoon dancing and singing in the square.

We’re now in Harnas, a wildlife sanctuary in Namibia. We are properly busy, exhausted, and the wifi is crap!

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