Garden Route Road Trip

 

What better reason to do a road trip than to see free range penguins?

To give you a little context, this is the portion of South Africa that we drove. On the left is Cape Town where the boat is. Inland on the right is the Addo Elephant National Park. We did the coast road going east, the actual Garden Route, and inland through the Karoo dessert going back west bound.

    Here's our rental, off-road, safari vehicle. A Toyota Agya that costs about usd$12,800 in South Africa new. So the rental company doesn't have a lot tied up in these. It has tires about the size of a toddler's bicycle and uses a gang of turbo hamsters for speed. We opted, at great extra expense, to go with the automatic transmission. Normally I like driving a manual car, but driving on the left side of the road, doing round-abouts clockwise, listening to some Google girl tell me where to turn just 30 seconds too late, and then having to use my left hand to change gears didn't seem wise.

    Driving in South Africa is better than you might think. The roads in the Western Cape Province are pretty good and well maintained. To get where you want to go you often have to do a lot of miles on non-paved roads, but those are usually well graded. 

    One of the important driving lessons you need to learn very early to drive in South Africa is the correct protocol for passing. I won't bore you with all the sub-protocols that are required -- just an explanation of the basic passing protocol. We'll start with three vehicles -- any combination of cars or trucks will do. I'll call the vehicle that is passing the Passer. The one being passed the Passee and the multiple tons of steel oncoming on the other side of the road the On-coming.

    Passing is initiated by the Passer or just as often the Passee. The start of passing has no bearing on how solid or how many lines are painted in the middle of the road, or if there are any lines. Blind corners and hills ahead only come into play if you are within about three car lengths. The Passee moves over to the left onto the shoulder to start the process and maintains his 100kph (60mph) speed. Partly paved or gravel shoulder makes no difference. This usually gives around half a lane open for the Passer to sneak by. The Passer accelerates and starts the procedure. The On-coming then also takes to their shoulder, giving the Passer a decent chunk of roadway. If, for some reason, the On-coming is not in full compliance with the Protocol, then it is acceptable for the Passer to very briefly flash their headlights. After a successful Pass, the Passer flashes his emergency flashers as a passing complete and thank-you message to the Passee. One flash is all that is required and it shows great professionalism. Us rookies usually do 2 or 4 flashes, but that is still taken kindly.

This all works surprisingly well -- even though the road fatality rate per vehicle is about 9.5 times higher in South Africa than the US.

    One exception to the Passing Protocol are the Taxi Vans. They are vans that pick up about 12 people and drive them typically to and from the workers homes in the Townships. As far as I can tell they are not covered by any road laws or shared tradition. Just drive, change lane and honk horn as desired.

The Townships are a legacy from the years of Apartheid where blacks and coloureds were forced to leave the cities and relocate to race specific areas outside the now whites-only cities. Since the Garden Route run is a pleasant tourist trip with plenty of nice pictures, I felt like I should at least show some of the contradictions that make up South Africa. This is a 22 second clip driving along the approaches to the beach towns.

One more comment on road conditions. After a week of travel we started heading back west bound driving through the Karoo. Much of the area looks like you could be driving through Arizona or New Mexico -- with some added dramatic mountain passes. We were driving along a two lane road with a 120kph (75mph) speed limit and very few vehicles. Then up pops a 100kph (60mph) speed limit sign along with a small sign that said yield left to on-coming traffic. The road then drops to one, narrow lane with rough, gravel shoulders. You drive along at 60mph and if you see headlights coming straight at you both cars ease to their lefts and in storm of dust and gravel you pass each other. Back on the single lane to continue with hardly any speed lost. Fortunately we took the usd$4.85 per day Rock and Chip Damage on the rental. 

There are hundreds of speed cameras along the South African roads. Almost every time the speed limit is dropped there will be a small logo of a camera under the sign. In about a third of the cases you'll see a heavily metal encased camera along the road in a hundred meters or so, just waiting to take your picture and send you a speeding ticket.

We stopped at Betty's Bay (or Bettiesbaai in Afrikans) on a windy, high swell, day to check out the penguins. This place was a whaling station till the 1930's.

This is a colony of African Penguins (or Cape Penguins) that are also known as Jackass Penguins. They get the nickname from the donkey-like braying call.

Guarding the nest entrance.

They are social critters hanging out in mating pairs.

This fat guinea-pig like Dassie was also among the rocks.

Continuing to violate my no videos in the blog policy, here's 60 seconds of penguins walking around with the sound of the high winds for your listening pleasure,

And Bye to the penguins

We drove along the coast till the tourist town of Hermanus. It is famous for being a great place to watch the Right Whales from the cliffs -- unfortunately not in the summer season. Here's some local kids enjoying the ocean side swimming hole. The pool gets fresh seawater with each big wave.

Mommy Oyster Catcher keeping an eye on her chick.

Next up was a stop at the southern tip of the African Continent.

To visit the Cape Aghulas lighthouse, from the land side this time. The first lighthouse was built here in 1848 and fueled by the tail-fat of sheep. This one was electrified in 1936. 

Chris made me climb to the top of this light -- banging my head only once on the overhangs. All to get this picture.

You might remembered from our December blog the picture of us passing Cape Aghulas offshore on our way to Cape Town.

Here we are straddling the same line between the Indian Ocean on the left side and the Atlantic Ocean on the right -- Chris is still pointing forward.

Next stop was Mossel Bay. Judging by the number of pictures that made it through the brutal editing process, the place was not very memorable. We did have a decent, ocean front meal, although the downtown did not look very inviting for walking to your destination. The Bartolomeu Dias Museum Complex is worth a visit. Bart was a Portuguese seafarer who was the first European sailor to round the southern tip of Africa in 1488. This was before the museum was built, but he did anchor in the bay. His discoveries lead to the sea route between Europe and Asia being established. The picture above hanging in the museum reminds you why sailing the south African coast is treacherous.

Next stop was to spend a few nights in Knysna (pronounced by non-native speakers as nies - na, or by Americans as nies - nawh). This is the Kynsna Heads on a fairly calm day. As long as the seas are under about 6 feet and you are careful the entrance by sea is supposed to be fairly straight forward. We passed it up on sail along the coast as we didn't want to get stuck inside waiting for both sailing weather and appropriate sea sizes for the entrance. 

There's a small parking lot near the trail to cliffs above the Heads. This sign helps explain a common sight when parking in South Africa. Could be a parking lot for a park, a downtown on-street parking space, a grocery store parking lot  -- there will be one or more guys with colored work vests on. They direct you to a parking place (often the obvious choice or only one), then usually greet you with a smile. When you return they stop any traffic that might be around and wave you out of your spot. You then roll the window down and hand them some spare change. 5 or 10 rand makes them grin ( 5 rand is usd$0.32). One of the non-traditional ways to try and up employment here.

 

We ran into Andre(or something sounding close) near the base of Knysna Heads. He's a very friendly wood carver from Zimbabwe and wanted to discuss American Revolutionary history with us. He grew up listening to Voice of America radio broadcasts as child in Zimbabwe. He was fascinated about the stories of the early patriots, especially Thomas Jefferson. He said he knew he was too old to ever travel, but America is the only country he really wants to go to.

Plus he made a carved elephant sale.

Next stop was Jefferys Bay of the movie  'Endless Summer' fame. Which, incidentally, gets a 100% Tomatometer rating at Rotten Tomatoes.  There was no real surf when we were there and we didn't get any decent surf or scenic pictures. After a brief stop in Jefferys Bay for caffeine we headed inland to Addo to visit the game reserve that focuses on elephants. I'm going to skip this part in the travelogue and continue on to our westerly trip back to Cape Town. Then in the next blog I'll post too many elephant pictures.

Next was a drive through the Karoo to Oudtshoon on the famous Route 62 wine trail. Their motto is 'The ostrich capital of the world'. The place was put on the map due to the ostrich-feather booms in 1865–1870 and 1900–1914. I think it might have been a bubble: Between 1875 and 1880, ostrich prices reached up to GBP 1,000 a pair. The value of ostrich feathers, per pound, equaled almost that of diamonds (at least according to WIkipedia)

Free range South African kids looking at the ostrich egg incubator.

A chick trying to bust out of the thick egg, hoping Chris won't drop it.

A successful exit.

The ostrich eggs really are pretty much unbreakable.

This is a male crouching down and flapping his wings in the hope of mating with the two chicks on the other side of the fence.

One interesting fact about these bird's anatomy is that their eyes are larger than their brains.

Next stop was to take our safari vehicle on the 15 mile gravel road over the famed Swartberg Pass. The rock wall you can see in the photo is a drystack wall laid in the 1880s. Pretty impressive engineering. 

This is Thomas Bain, the mastermind of the construction with the workers in the background. Much of the labor was provided by prisoners.

Even out in the hot dessert you still see blooming Proteas.

Massive canyons that look like they would be at home in the US southwest.

The Karoo looks pretty desolate, but you still have to watch for the Kudo crossings while driving.

We spent a nice night in an old, hotel in Prince Albert that is reportedly inhabited by ghosts. Not sure if it was or not, but they asked us not to take pictures. On the way out of Prince Albert we went over a paved pass, Meiringspoort Pass. It had some pretty impressive scenery too. If you look close you can see me standing on the rock, making that a tall waterfall behind.

This brought us to the town of Montagu. Interesting old church that is now a museum. The displays focus mainly on the years where the Apartheid laws booted the blacks and coloured out of their homes, even on the small towns, to the be relocated in the Townships.

Cool method of pumping water out of the well using a continuous chain of small, metal buckets.

Here's a nice home in the residential part of Montagu. If you look closely you can see the carport is completely encased with metal bars and the sign over the garage door lets anyone know that the place is connected to an armed response security company. This is the reality of living in South Africa.

There's a pond in downtown that seems to be a favorite for Ibis.

A good place to raise the young.

A Cattle Egret

The Dutch left some nice architecture behind. 

The South Africans are big on what they call Braai. For us it is a BBQ. The top two chef specials are on the Braai. A more or less translation would be a hamburger and a hotdog. The salad special had me taking a second look. It is Kudo and Strawberry Salad. Kudo is a large, antelope like character that you see roaming many of the game parks. Not really my kind of salad.

We spent our last night on the road in Franschhoek at a really nice guesthouse Maison Chablis. The best part of it was the room safe -- straight out of the 1930s.

Paul