Thursday, August 10, 2006
The Garden Route
So we eventually made it to the Garden Route albeit a little behind schedule but still with enough time on our hands to enjoy it. This is the bit along the east coast that more people have heard of and yes, it's pretty, but the inland bits and the bits further up the coast are much more breathtaking.At this juncture our random approach to finding rooms finally failed us and we arrived in Storms River Village which is in the heart of the Garden Route and the main stop off point for many backpackers to find the only two hostels were full. This was rather surprising really as recent reports of terrible weather along this route had apparently cut off some towns and villages, and even the main highway was closed for a while so we had guessed, wrongly, that people might pass this stop by. After travelling around some of the worst roads that we have come across in our entire trip with lots of potholes still full of all the storm water and thus hiding quite how deep, large and generally vicious they were we decided that we had to head onwards. This was not before we had taken a careful turn to avoid one of the more vicious of these craters and found ourselves temporarily beached on a concrete kerb stone. It must be reiterated at this point that there was no clearly defined road, no road surface to speak of (unless brown is the new black), no pavement and therefore the need for kerb stones was totally superfluous, in fact this was probably the only one in the whole village.
So we inflicted damage on our hire car for the first time in the whole trip, which considering the amount of miles we have done can't really be that bad and we thanked our lucky stars that this incident didn't occur in any of the cars lent to us by friends on this trip! It was no great loss that we had to head on because it allowed us to catch up some miles that our 3 days of reckless drinking, eating and dancing had squandered! This part of the Garden Route is 'thrill' country and as we have described before, we'll leave the bungee jumping to other people! So really, we didn't miss much out by not stopping in the mud bath that was Storms River Village. In fact, it put us a little ahead of our new revised schedule and allowed time for a great hike along the Robberg Peninsula which was really spectacular and gave us yet more opportunities to see Southern Right whales and also some time to stop at a monkey park, hence the mix of photo's in this set. Rocky outcrops and peninsulas along the coast mean one thing, yup more lighthouses so I have had my fix for a while now and Mark can breath easily that I shalln't be traipsing down any more gravel roads for a while in search of the end of the land.
Further along the route you get into surfing territory and as we had been to the surfing area near Margaret River in Western Australia we thought we should also check out this place, not that we really have any idea of a good wave from a bad one although we saw just a clearly at midday the sheer absence of anything resembling a wave that some keen Aussie had trotted down to the beach at 6am for, hence there are no great surfing shots! This part of the Garden Route has to win the prize for the funniest protection racketeer of our South African experience to date. He was all smiles and "good mornings" as we parked our car and tried desperately to get us to have it washed ... hey it was a hire car that we had just crashed do you really think that we want all the mud washed off for the true damage extent to be shown to the world? Nevertheless, we gave him the usual fee and decided in the big scheme of things that he was onto a pretty good thing. (We probably haven't already mentioned this but it seems that parking is often 'free' in South Africa, but regardless of cost you are expected to tip the 'attendant' who looks after your car in your absence. Occasionally these people are fairly official looking but at other times it does seem like you are tipping some random individual who is possibly the only person around who might actually break into your car!).
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