The Purposed Trek

If you are ever feeling the urge to take a drive to Coffee Bay on the wild coast of South Africa, DON'T DO IT. I am sure it is beautiful there, but not beautiful enough to endure the drive down Coffee Bay Road for 83 Kilometers and 3,000 potholes, in the rain and fog dodging cows, sheep and goats. This picture is not one of the actual potholes on this road, however they were like this, sometimes larger and took up almost 3/4 of a 2 lane road. You could go fishing in some of these potholes, you couldn't avoid them.

This place was the place I was looking forward to visiting the most on my whole trip. It changed shortly after we arrived and endured a 1.5 hour drive traveling 83 K's. It was miserable. We hit more potholes than we missed. Needless to say we also experienced a flat tire, but not from a nail or puncture, no we completely sliced open the sidewall of our tire and it was dead, nothing could be redeemed. A spare was put on by a nice Afrikaans man. We immediately both agreed to leave the next day because the weather was so crappy that we would rather spend it driving in the car than hanging out on the beach, hoping to pick up another day at the beach when it is sunny.

So we left at 8:30am from Coffee Bay and endure the grueling road again, this time we didn't experience a flat though. Good thing because we didn't have a spare now. We made it this time in 2 hours because we couldn't see jack from the fog. We made it to Mthatha which is a big town about 20 K's up the road. When I say big town, it was big in population not size. This experience reminded me that I do live in Africa - it was amazing. Couldn't even drive down the street because there were so many people walking. We found a Supa Quick and got a new spare tire so we were covered if anything happened again.

Off to Port Edward, we were very excited, but however the weather was so bad that we didn't pull in until 6 o'clock. We were exhausted. We settled in, found a place to eat and enjoyed a nice dinner overlooking the beach and watching the waves crash onto the rocks. It was excellent food too, which helped out a lot. We headed home and feel asleep pretty early. We woke up expecting to hit the beach, but it is overcast and a little breezy, so we are going to hit the grocery store for some food and such and then find a movie theatre and hopefully catch something we both want to see.

We are here for another night before we head up to Richards Bay where we will get to go on a sunset sail for 2 hours. Hopefully the weather will pull through and things will brighten up. We need it :) We are making the most of things and regardless of weather, flat tires, and 3000 potholes, are having fun!

This entry was posted on 15 December 2007 at 12/15/2007. You can skip to the end and leave a response.