To the Garden Route...

On Sunday I had a day of driving from Franschhoek to my next destination of Knysna, which is the principal town along the famed Garden Route.

After a pretty average breakfast in a restaurant that had been recommended to me as the best in Franschhoek - a place resplendent with a group of northerners who loudly debated whether 10am was too early to "get the beers in" - I was of the road.

My route took me along the stark mountainous scenes of the Franschhoek Pass, where the clouds seemed to be within touching distance. Even though it was a Sunday morning and I wasn't at my most alert, I was still amazed, and not just because I'm a Norfolk lad who grew up climbing nothing steeper than a flight of stairs. Where in the UK could you possibly get views like this? The answer is probably Scotland, and I made a mental promise to myself to fulfil a long standing ambition to explore the Highlands later this year.

Anyway, I digress. After about an hour, I was on the N2 - a road that stretches from Cape Town in the west to near Durban on the other side of the country. A sign greeted me with the news that I was 336km away from the city of George, and this place is before my actual destination. It was going to be a long day in the car.

The N2 is technically a single carriageway road for most of its length, but it is as wide as a motorway. This means it is easy to pass slow moving traffic, and the extreme nature of the terrain results in some steep descents down the side of hills. At one point I clocked up 170km an hour in my distinctly un-flash little car without so much as caressing the accelerator.

I broke the journey up by stopping for a little while in Mossel Bay, which is a seaside town just outside George and the beginning of the Garden Route. It had all the faded grandeur of a UK seaside resort. Evidently it was still a popular destination for (white) South African families, but I saw little that could possibly detain me for longer than the half hour I spent there. A lot of seaside towns across the World could honestly do with being raised to the ground to allow a completely new page to be turned. Mossel Bay was no Great Yarmouth, but it still lacked any kind of charm or character.

I got to Knysna around 6pm, and realised that this was a place that oozed charm and character like a prostitute oozes promiscuity. Or something like that. What an amazing place - a town nestled between the green, expansive hills and a lagoon stretching out towards the sea. I ate, drank and relaxed with just the one impending concern - in a week's time I would be back in the UK and not here...