From Cape Town we took a couple of days to drive along the Garden Route to Port Elizabeth, now called Gqeberha. This follows the south coast of South Africa and has diverse landscapes ranging from open vistas, mountains, cliffs and forests. It was a beautiful drive.
Enjoying lunch along the way at one of the many picnic pull off areas off of the main highway.
Mossel Bay
Mossel Bay is a famous beach spot in South Africa but it was windy, cloudy and cold so we didn’t spend much time at the beach (even though we could see it from where we were staying). Instead we did a short part of the Cape St. Blaize Hiking Trail. The full trail is about 14km long one way and maybe if it had been a warm day we would have tried that (taking a taxi back to our starting point) but in the end we got cold enough that we only did about 2.5 km out and then back.
The start of the trail was at this large rock structure with a partial cave that was used during the Stone Age. It also had lots of rock hyraxes running around it.
Enjoying a familiar Dutch snack with a view at our turning around spot.
Africamps
There aren’t a lot of big towns along the way and our next destination had more limited options. We had found online this glamping camp and we thought we would give it a try. It was really nice and we wished we had stayed more than one night.
We have learned already on this trip of needing to go with the flow and at times get creative. I had failed to mention in the Hout Bay post that South Africa has a serious problem with the power grid and they have scheduled load shedding (rolling black outs). This happens on average 3 to 4 times a day for 2 hour to 3 hour chunks. There is a mobile app that let us see the schedule for the location we were in (as it varied by neighbourhood) but it did mean needing to schedule laundry, school work, blogging, etc. around the power on times. What we didn’t anticipate is running into sun issues. Marika needed to do some thermal experiments for her science course and we either didn’t have enough full sun or it arrived too late in the day to get it done in Hout Bay. Mossel Bay also thwarted us. She finally was able to get it done here in the camp!
Storms River Mouth Trail
Our last stop along the Garden Route was at Storms River park. In this area the highway crossed a number of large canyons with rivers, and this park was on one of them where it emptied into the Indian Ocean.
The start of the trail. We ended up hiking to the peak on the upper right.
The suspension bridges over the mouth of Storm River where it meets the ocean.
The river canyon and the view from the opposite side looking back down towards the suspension bridges.
While taking a snack break at the first overlook point these brave little mouse/chipmunk rodents came out of the rocks looking for dropped food. They would come right up to your feet!
At the start of the trail you could hear the waves crashing and there was some little rock bays where the foam piled up. From this lookout you could still hear the waves crashing and you got a good view of how high they sprayed with the perspective of the buildings and cars. Some of them were higher than the buildings.
Hiking the top ridge.
The second view point. There were no benches here but a nice deck to layout and warm up in the sun in.
At this second lookout there were these bushes with large flowers and this cool bird with a really long tail that put on a show for us displaying its tail and eating nectar from the flowers. Google tells me it was a Cape Sugarbird.