Today was a big travel day. Ganora Farm to Coffee Bay was 7.5 hours on Waze and that is not allowing for stops. 560 kms – which you would usually think would take 5-6 hours allowing for you traveling between 100-120 km/h. Read on to see why it takes 7.5 hours without stops.

Before breakfast, J managed to get to feed the lambs (see pic above). Little does she know that all she is doing is fattening up the little one for future guests to eat lamb pie for dinner. We had breakfast at 7:30am and already had our cars packed and ready to go as soon as we finished breakfast as we knew it was going to be a long day on the road. The first 25 km were on dirt road to get back on to the tar roads.

Our first stop was Cradock as I was dangerously close to running out of fuel. The Beast (aka my Toyota Landcruiser) is a bit of a diesel guzzler and the 4×4 route yesterday didn’t help as we were doing most of it in 1st or 2nd gear on the way up. A was in the lead and passed the first two petrol stations and I was wondering if he wanted to test the limits of my range until I found out he was looking for a BP so he could earn his Discovery points. Turns out the BP had become some other strange brand and so we then had to find another petrol station. By the time we found that I was down to a range of 45 kms.

The next stop was going to be Queenstown to buy groceries for the next few days as we knew where we would be staying had no shop whatsoever. When we arrived in Queenstown it was loadshedding and all the traffic lights were out and it seemed the whole population of Queenstown were either driving or walking in the roads. The place was teeming with people. You would have thought it was a Saturday morning. After negotiating around drivers, taxis and people we found the mall and went to P n P to so some shopping. Options were pretty limited. As an illustration, the poultry counter was half filled with chicken feet. After negotiating our way out of Queenstown we headed Butterworth and back onto the N2 (which is a main national road).

We refueled in Butterworth and again had to negotiate through masses of people to get out of Butterworth. By the time we turned off the N2, it was showing +- 70kms to Coffee Bay (our destination) but that it would take 1 hour 20 minutes. The navigation software was wrong – it took longer. The reason – the road. It is hard to explain how bad the road was. Besides navigating through goats, sheep, cows and people wandering over the road at random intervals, you had to navigate through potholes. I say ‘navigate through’ and while that sometimes could be ’round the potholes’, in many cases it was simply through. It is hard to describe 40-50kms of road with significant potholes. Sometimes you are only doing 10-20 km/h as you weave your way through the potholes driving from left to right and right to left. Sometimes it is actually better to leave the road entirely and drive on the gravel on the side of the road. Sometimes it is better to drive on the left and sometimes it better to drive on the right into oncoming traffic. Avoidance of the potholes is an impossibility. The photos (taken by H) hardly do it justice how bad the road was and for how long it was so bad.

The good news is that we finally managed to make it to Coffee Bay and it is beautiful. We had been warned that due to recent flooding in the area, the main bridge was washed away but we could take the diversion around and that we could get to our accommodation. We are staying in self catering apartments called Cottages @ 20. We have 3 separate apartments with have having 2 bedrooms. We drew lots (or something very similar) to see who got what rooms and A&O are sharing the 2-bedroom one with R&J and then B&S and ourselves have individual ones.

We had cleverly thought to bring ready made lasagna’s with us for dinner tonight knowing it was going to be a long drive so dinner was relatively hassle free. We had found that loadshedding was at 7pm (pretty inconvenient when it comes to eating dinner) especially since the sun is setting at 5:55pm here now. Turns out though that the apartments seem to continue to have power through loadshedding. We assume solar generated but haven’t entirely figured that out yet but pleased that is the case as it makes our lives much easier.

It is now 10pm so time for bed!

Until tomorrow

P, H, O (just generally being nice to me), A (some responsible driving even though Discovery don’t think so), R, J, S & B (some very dodgy driving which was apparently cheered on by S, R & J so we they are all appropriately demoted)