Within the span of about a week I organised the whole trip and by organise I mean I rented a car and picked what date to leave and when to come back. I figured we could just make up the rest as we went. The rough outline of the trip would be 2 days on the road to get to Cape Town, 2 days in Cape Town and then 2 days on the road to get back to PE, no GPS and no maps this was going to be a true adventure basing everything we did on what our gut feeling told us and whatever would sound good at the time. The purpose of the road trip was to have a great time and see the wonderful sites of the Garden Route which is the name of the drive and here I will begin the tale of our adventure.
Day 1 - Monday the 7th of February - The Wanderers - Total Kilometres: 370
Our wonderful friend Sonja graciously offered to drive us to Lorraine so that we could pick our automobile. Our mode of transportation would be a red VW Citi Golf which thankfully had a CD player and just to add to the flavour of our road trip also came with the smell of wet dog, I don't think Bayan and I would have complained about this so much if we knew how much worse the car would smell after our road trip. Once we had our car it was back to Motherwell to pack everything in before beginning our travels. Naturally we packed in 'just incase mode'.. "Pack some blankets just incase, take those shoes just incase, bring more clothes just incase, pack an umbrella just incase, you'll need an extra towel just incase". By the time we finished packing the car the boot was full as was the whole back seat. We took so much stuff, I didn't even have enough bags to hold it all, some stuff I put in plastic bags and some stuff I just threw in the back seat. It was about 11.30am when we were finally ready to hit the road.
The Automobile
all our luggage
Road Trip Buddies- Me and Bayan
Our first stop was only 45minutes outside of PE at the very beautiful Jefferys Bay. We found a way to the beach and walked out onto a long, beautiful and empty strip of sand. Although surrounded by houses and buildings the beach itself was deserted. We frolicked and entertained ourselves enjoying having the beach all to ourselves. It is really a remarkably beautiful place and the backdrop of gorgeous blue sky highlighted by a few pure white clouds added so much to the already stunning beach. This was definitely the perfect first stop and set the tone of the road trip. When we had exhausted the scenery in Jeffery's Bay we gathered ourselves back in our automobile to venture off to our next destination.
As we left Jefferys Bay I noticed two hitchhikers on the side of the road, a young lady and a small boy and so we pulled over to give them a ride. There are a huge number of hitchhikers on the roads here and so it is very easy to ignore them but anytime I see children it usually catches my eye. Our new road trip buddies were on their way to Humansdorp about 20kms away and so decided our next stop. We entertained our new guests with our non stop singing and my awesome dancing. The best thing about a car with no power steering is that you generally don't need to pay too much attention to the steering wheel which offered my arms all the freedom I needed to bust out my moves. While passing through Humansdorp we saw a sign for a place called Oyster Bay and deciding that that was where we wanted to go next we offloaded our guests and head off for the oysters.
The sign had been very deceiving, Oyster Bay turned out to be really far away and required us going down a dirt road which was kind of exciting except the part where I got stuck behind a truck which was spraying a cloud of dirt behind it as it drove blocking all of my vision so that for a good 10minutes I was driving almost blind. Finally however, we reached the bay of oysters which didn't end up living to it's name and just turned out to be another beach. What was cool about this beach was the huge plains of sand. The beach itself was so vast that you could look straight ahead of you and see only sand on either side, needing to turn your head to get a glimpse of the ocean. There were also lots of sand dunes which offered a great venue for Bayan and I to run down from the top with our hands in the air and screaming all the way as we did in Addo. The water temperature was not tempting enough to entice us to swim so after splashing our feet in a little we left Oyster Bay for the next destination.
Now to get out of Oyster Bay required driving on more dirt roads and naturally we took a wrong turn and ended up on someones farm where a nice young guy offered to show us the way back to the highway. We were on this dirt road for a good 30minutes and the whole time we were surrounded on both sides by the beautiful tranquility of rural life, the huge hectars of green paddocks, the patch work of fields covered in crops, the simplicity of the farm houses and the strong smell of cow poo wafting through the car. Yeah... I love the country.
OMG how do these people survive, it was like driving through a 30km manure smelling cloud. It was revolting and with no aircon and the sun beaming into the car it was too hot to put the windows up and ride it out. At one point as we drove we saw a whole herd of cows hanging in the middle of the road. Like seriously just chilling, on the road. So I crept the car up slowly towards them hoping not to scare them into a crazed panic and then Bayan reaches out her hand towards the steering wheel and starts banging on the horn. Luckily they didn't freak out and instead just stood there in the middle of the road. Eventually one of the farm workers came out and forced them to make way for us and we were able to drive through but man if their poo didn't smell enough the cows themselves stink too. It was just too much for me, I don't think I'll settle for country life if there are farm animals involved.
We managed to survive the country and the dirt road and ended up in our next stop Plettenburg Bay. By this stage it was about 4pm and we were hungry. We had managed to suppress our appetites with peanut butter and celery but now it was finally time for real food so we found a super market and a fish and chips shop and stocked up to have a picnic on the beach. We spread out our mat and brought our picnic basket and enjoyed the view of the ocean as we gobbled our food. Suddenly we noticed that we had a visitor, a seagull was sitting about a metre away from us and was watching us with such intent it was uncomfortable. All of a sudden the seagull opened its mouth wide and started barking/howling/yelling in its strange seagull voice. I mean this was a scary sound, not the typical annoying seagull sound that I am used to. It was like a tribal call summoning the rest of its posse to come and stalk us. A few times we tried to scare the seagull off but it just came back again and we decided to ignore it. So we sat, watching the ocean and talking about our trip so far. We had also started watching this group of young boys who were playing a card game and clearly if you lost you had to be punished because two of the boys jumped up ran into the ocean then ran back on the sand, rolled around in it and then ran back into the ocean again. Amused by this we watched and laughed when all of a sudden I felt something next to me, Bayan jumped up and screamed causing me to jump up and scream. The seagull had come on to our mat and stole the foam container which had my fish and chips in it. I was more amazed that the seagull was able to carry such a large box in its mouth than I was shocked that it had stolen from us. In our commotion the seagull dropped the container so I went to take it back but not before it opened its mouth and started making that strange noise again summoning its friends. The seagull clearly seeing that we were distracted by these boys had planned its attack so skillfully. Anticipating another attack we packed everything into our basket and went down to play in the water. As we walked away from our picnic spot the seagull went to our basket and tried to get stuff out so we ended up having to wrap our basket up with our mat to stop the seagull.
Evil food stealing seagull
As I wanted to avoid driving at night as much as possible we decided to leave and get to our next stop which is where we would be spending the night. The place was Knysna and I had found a backpackers online the night before. We arrived in Knysna, put our stuff in our room and freshened up to go out for the night. By this stage the sun had already gone down, it was about 8pm and we decided to walk and see what this town had to offer. We found a nice Italian restaurant and got desert, we walked along the harbour and then through some of the streets. We saw a bar which had some life but neither of us was in the mood for that atmosphere. At one point I looked up in the sky to admire the stars when Bayan decided that she wanted to lay down and look at the stars. So we did, on the sidewalk outside of the pub we lay on our backs, our heads sharing her bag, and watched the stars. With our completely inadequate knowledge of astronomy we started looking for constellations. We got into a discussion on why Orian's belt is called a belt when it only contains 3 stars and then decided that it must just be some of the holes in his belt rather than the whole belt, or Orian is just very skinny. We lay on the ground for some time, drawing the glances of people walking by until we got bored of the stars and went home.
Hanging in Knysna
We shared our dorm with 2 girls from Germany who were travelling in the opposite direction and after chit chatting for a few minutes we crashed into bed.
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