We left for the first leg of our long awaited (and obsessively planned) road trip of South Africa on Friday 9th September. We were as ready as we could ever be with loads more stuff than we packed for the America trip! In terms of clothing we are travelling fairly light, but in terms of everything else I may have gone a little overboard with cutlery, two cooler bags, mugs, food, coffee, tea, etc etc.
We managed to more or less cram everything into the car but it was a tight squeeze, and I have no doubt we’ll collect more things as we carry on and realise we need more stuff.
Our first day was going to be a fairly long trip, taking us from Stellenbosch to Wilderness. We left at 9am and made a few pit stops for pictures and comfort breaks, but other than that just drove, and got to our B&B in Wilderness just after check-in at 2pm. The B&B was The Pink Lodge on the Beach, and while it was a bit tired looking and could do with some TLC, it was a huge room right on the beach with all the creature comforts you could need – even a couple of hot water bottles that came in handy later on the evening! We are from the look of it going to be quite unlucky with the weather and the first week to 10 days of trip look like it will be quite chilly and rainy (though the weather report is constantly changing). Fortunately the weather was ok-ish when we arrived and of course we immediately wandered on to the beach and stumbled upon Salina’s, the closest restaurant to our B&B. We had a couple of drinks and a bite to eat before heading back to the B&B, resting up before going out for dinner.
For dinner we ended up in Cocomo Restaurant for some burgers and drinks, that were fine but we had an early night after that, heading back to TV, bed and hot water bottles to keep us warm! Wilderness is a beautiful and quiet (in off season anyway!) town and I’m very glad we stopped over as I’ve driven through multiple times and always wondered what it was like. Hopefully on this trip we can do a lot more stopping than we normally do when driving the Garden Route as we are not really time constrained. So far it doesn’t feel much like a road trip at all as we’ve driven this route quite a few times and I don’t have too much to say about where we’ve been and what we’ve seen. It was a fairly uneventful day, other than two close shaves with a troop? of baboons appearing out of nowhere in the middle of the road outside Caledon, and a couple of guinea fowl trying to commit suicide by jumping in front of the car unexpectedly and while we were going at high speed! All in all a nice and quiet start to our holidays.
On the way to Wilderness we stopped at Dassiesfontein Farm Stall for some great pictures of Canola fields, Klein Brak River as I’ve never been there and Dolphin Point viewing site just before Wilderness. I’m not planning on being too wordy with this blog and would rather let the pictures do the talking…so here they are!
Biltong and Burger 