All good things must come to an end and we knew our time in Africa would soon be over as we left Cape Town and headed up to Durban.  From there we planned to ship Tramp back to the UK and fly back to Sydney.  We had put our family and friends on layby while we galumphed around southern Africa for three months but home was calling and we had grandparenting duties coming soon.  Having said that, we still had a long way to go on this home stretch, including amazing coastlines, national parks, more wild animals and a famous sex shop.  Bring it on!

Julie and I are into geographic superlatives (well…me more than Julie) and the best you can do is to stand at the northern most or southern most point of a continent.  We’ve done it in North America, South America and even Europe so we couldn’t let Africa slip by. 

And so it was that we made our way from Cape Town, a city we fell in love with for its grand setting and cosmopolitan feel, to Cape Agulhas which is the southern most point of the African continent.  To get there we passed through some lovely rural countryside, rolling hills covered in a patchwork of crops, most of them already sleeping for the upcoming winter.  In the villages leading up to the cape we came across a local specialty – fisherman cottages, some said to be up to 100 years old, with their small windows and thick whitewashed walls, perfect for the exposed weather that the cape often endures. 

Cape Agulhas marks the spot where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans crash into each other, creating death-defying challenges for ships over hundreds of years.  For us it was the heavy fog blocking out any chance of seeing more than the end of the rocky shoreline but it added to the feeling of a remote and dangerous location.  We posed for the obligatory photos and had a quick hug for achieving such a mega geographic superlative.

We also visited the sleepy little fishing village-turned-holiday retreat of Arniston for more fishermen cottages, long beaches and sound asleep atmosphere.  Then it was northward again, spotting for the first time a herd of grey rheboks, through more rolling hills covered in grain crops, sheep and cattle, and through the unexpectedly beautiful narrow gorge formed by the Buffeljags River, up and over the winding Tradouw Pass.  Didn’t see that coming!

On this side of the mountain there were no green fields, groves of gum trees or rich agricultural land, all of which benefited from the higher rainfall of the coastal area.  We had entered what is called the Small Karoo, a dry almost semi-desert area where scrub bush, higher temperatures and sand seemed to rule.  We eventually made it to a place with camping and bungalows built around another set of hot springs and that night we barbequed ostrich sausages and counted the stars.   Just another special day on the road.

In this part of the Eastern Cape there are two popular ways of travelling north to Durban.  One is on the main highway that travels closer to the coastline – and which becomes the more famous Garden Route – and the other is the less travelled but arguably more interesting Route 62.  We chose a mixture of both for our journey north and we started with a stop at one of the most recognised stores on Route 62 – Ronnie’s Sex Shop. 

As the story goes, Ronnie’s shop in the middle of the desert wasn’t going so well so a mate painted the word Sex between Ronnie’s and Shop.  Well, business really took off and even though it was just a roadside bar people began hanging their bras and undies from the rafters and scrawling their name on the walls.  And so it was that Julie and I found a little space high on a wall and wrote ‘Bill and Julie, Follow the Sun, 30 April 2019’.  The fact that the little space was actually in the Men’s urinal only added to the significance of the event.  Sadly we did not leave behind any bras or undies.

Route 62 continued to cross the dry scrubby land, up and over a couple of scenic rocky passes and eventually led us to the large town of Oudtshoorn, the self-proclaimed ostrich capital of the world.  At the beginning of the last century no self-respecting woman would be seen outside without beautiful ostrich features stylizing her hat and the farmers of Oudtshoorn made a fortune appealing to this vanity.  Well, fashions come and go, the feather business died but the town still features a number of ostrich farms and curio shops selling everything ostrich. 

But ostriches are so yesterday, we were here for meerkats.  Meerkats are cute little mammals who live in burrows and are famous for popping up, standing on their hind legs and looking around to see if its safe.  But meerkats are also famously shy and are almost impossible to see in the wild because they hide or run away at the slightest provocation.  But near Oudtshoorn a small operator has spent the last few years going through a slow process of having different families of meerkats become familiar with staff and then visitors such that now these little critters will allow people to observe them at short distance.  They’re not touched or fed, they have just become used to humans.  Despite the cost, Julie and I had to see these meerkats.

We met our group before dawn at a designated spot on a dirt track and walked along trails and over a fence until we finally arrived at a large set of burrows.  We sat our chairs down and waited for the sun to rise and the meerkats to pop their heads out and look around. 

And sure enough, these cute little guys started sticking their heads out like a periscope, looking around and slowly climbing up out of their burrows.  They paused for a while, looking around, playing a bit, warming up to the early morning light before they heading off to search for breakfast.  We were only metres away from them and loved watching them start their day, not that much different to how we start ours.  Great stuff.

We headed for the coast and the famous Garden Route, keen to take in the beaches, parks and towns that line this coastline.  We pulled into various beachside communities, each with their beautiful crescent-shaped beach and upmarket holiday homes.  We admired the smooth rivers that flowed into the ocean and the tall rugged mountains that ran up and down the coast.  Beautiful resort towns like Wilderness, Knysna, Buffalo Bay and Plettenberg Bay, each with their sparkling blue water, holiday homes and nice shopping centres all looked fantastic except…they all looked similar to towns along the Australian coast.  It was all wonderful and we took stacks of photos but it wasn’t the Africa we had come to love and long for.

And this is when we changed our plans.  We weren’t ready to leave Africa yet and we found a way to get another dose of what we loved most about this continent.