To Stellenbosch...

The road back to the coast was also pretty spectacular especially just outside George when we hit the breathtaking Outeniqua Pass, a road that goes straight through the escarpment, it was awesome, winding in between sheer cliff walls on side, close enough to touch, and rolling green hills on the other. Whose crazy,but impressive idea was it to build the road through here?

We decided to miss out the Garden Route and keep on moving on, although we have a fair bit of time, we still have a lot of ground to cover to get up to Ethiopia. We overnighted in Swellingdam and had a great feed on warthog samosas, crocodile sashimi and springbok fillets. Yum.

We spent one night in the town of Stellenbosch and then a couple of nights out of town closer to the wineries, or wine farms as they call them here. Stellenbosch has to be the most spectacular and beautiful wine region I've seen. Even without the vines the area would be worth a visit of the scenery alone. What an amazing sight, rows of vines sloping up the side of the mountains.

Graaff-Reinett

We hadn't even heard of this place before, but everything we'd read about it made it sound like it was worth the extra bit of effort to get here. It involved driving through a very dry area know as The Karoo, however the other very dry area this day was our fuel tank. I (Phil) take full responsibility for the events of this morning. For some unknown reason (which in retrospect can only be put down to stupidity) we (i.e. me, Phil) didn't fuel up in Grahamstown, presuming there'd be a petrol station very soon back on the highway. Cutting a long story short, there wasn't. The low fuel warning light was (still) on, unsurprising, as it had been illuminated for 20 or so kms on the way into Grahamstown the day before. We drove 30kms this morning and still no petrol station in sight. My positive mantra "oh there'll be one round the next bend" had rapidly turned into occasional expletives punctuated by bouts of nervous silence, during which only my sweating could be heard. We reckoned (as you can't be 100% certain without a good map, again, stupidity) that the next town, that may or may not have a petrol station, was about 40 or 50kms away. It was only a matter of time when the inevitable question was aired, "Do we turn around and backtrack 30kms to Grahamstown or do we keep going?", for all we knew there could be one just round the corner, we'd refuel, have a laugh and then continue on our way. But we were pretty far from laughing at that point. The fuel gauge needle hadn't moved now for about 20km, it couldn't point any further below the E for empty, which was also summed up the state of my vacuous head for making such an error of judgement. We spotted a private game park on the side of the road and we asked the guard how much further the next fuel station was and we explained that we were dangerously, dangerously low on fuel. We'd obviously turned off the ignition whilst we were chatting, not to waste what little fuel we had remaining. The guard told us it was close and he asked to see the fuel gauge. He looked through the window at the horizontal needle, "Turn it on" he asked, I told "On or off, it has the same reading, it's empty". "Turn it on" he asked again. The only effect turning the engine on (apart from using up more fuel) was to re-illuminate the fuel warning light. As soon as this light went on he said "Ah! You will make it!". I have no idea where his optimism came from, from simply seeing that light flash on. Maybe many African guys just know these things, after all you do see a lot of African guys pushing cars around, but that wasn't a image I wanted in my mind. We weren't sharing his optimism, we asked him to call someone who actually knew which town was closer, he did this and told us Grahamstown was the closest town. So reluctantly we turned around hoping that we had 30kms worth of fuel remaining, otherwise we were in big trouble.

It must have been hilarious to watch; we were crawling along the highway doing about 50kph, we were virtually coming to a stand still when driving up the many hills with just enough momentum to take us over the brow and then coast down. It was a very nervy not to mention slow 30kms. Terrible thoughts were running through my mind and making the situation worse, adding to the potential humiliation and frustration of running out of fuel. I liken it to sunburn, 100% completely avoidable (if one was smart and savvy), but if it occurs there's not only the humiliation of the naivety but also the pain and distress it causes. Either way you end up with a red face. Anyway. Somehow we limped back into Grahamstown as we did the side to side swerving thing to hopefully slosh the remaining drops of fuel into wherever it needed to go. It had been a very stressful morning and we were still in Grahamstown. I learned a valuable lesson this day, not only does a stitch in time save nine but also 'don't be a f@#*ing idiot Robson'.

So with a huge smack of deja vu we left Grahamstown again, back down the same old road we were becoming quite accustomed to. Just for the record, if we hadn't turned back to Grahamstown we'd had to have made another 45 kms to the next petrol station, so....would we have had enough fuel left to make that extra 15kms???? Possibly, but possibly not.

Anyway the rest of the way to Graaff-Reinett was an amazing drive, for the most part The Karoo is very flat and scrubby, but in the distance we could just make out some mountains, and it was towards these mountains we were heading. It was actually escarpment, escarpment of all shapes and sizes, peaks, plateaus, singular cones and long stretches (really putting my geological nomenclature on the line here), anyway, it was amazing, very moon-scapesque, I'd imagine.

The town itself was in the middle of a C shaped cradle of this escarpment and is the fourth oldest (European) in South Africa. There were some cool Cape Dutch arcitechure especially the beautiful Dutch Reformed church in the middle of town.

Just out side of town was The Valley of Desolation allowing cool views within the escarpment itself, some great rock formations and huge finger-like columns, it was quite a cloudy day which made everything look a bit more sinister.

Grahamstown

A cool little university town with some great looking buildings, but unfortunately as it was Good Friday virtually everything in town was closed. We stayed at The Old Gaol, another one of these backpacker places that was once a jail and has been converted for the pleasure of paying guests. Unlike others I've stayed at , this one hasn't been touched up that much at all, which at first was a bit of a surprise, but once you got used to it, it was quite cool, although the uniforms were a little scratchy, the shackles a little tight and the food a little basic. The cells where we slept were nice and cool and it was nice to get out of the blazing sun.

Hogsback

We then headed back into the mountains to the gloriously named town of Hogsback. We ended up getting a cool self contained ronadaval cottage with great views of the mountains. We did the South African thing and had a braai and cooked up some boerswors!

Bulungula

Bulungula is one of those places that is a bit of a trek to get to, but well worth the effort. To get there, we had to take our tiny hire car down the notorious Coffee Bay road which they're actually resurfacing (yay!) but some areas are equal parts potholes and navigatable road. This inevitably leads to an almost constant laying on of breaks and erratic veering from side to side on the road; happily everyone is forced to travel at such slow speeds accidents don't seem to be much of a problem. After the Coffee Bay road the 'road' turns into a downright track, a punishment we didn't want out little car to endure so we got the spine-grinding shuttle over the last 17 km to the hostel.
Bulungula is essentially a hostel that is 40% owned by a Xhosa community on the Wilderness coast and is a real escape. It's a chance to sit back, listen to the ocean that's on your doorstep, enjoy sleeping in a delicious rondavel, learn a bit of Xhosa (one of the 'clicking' language), meet a few community members and gorge on amazing stews.
We did a tour with Melendinga, the local herbalist, and Conjuloola, our interpreter. We got to visit Melendinga's house/workshop, ask him any questions we could possibly think of and he rounded things off with a visit in the forest to show us where he collects some of his herbs. A few favorites included a root that could ward off bad luck, a bark used for guilt (we weren't entirely sure if it was to alleviate guilt, confuse others so they wouldn't think you were guilty, or both), and this tree that was used for tooth brushing before they used the plastic ones (it worked really well).
We'd also planned a morning of fishing but unfortunately Mr Z who leads the trips was unwell or didn't want to go out that morning because it never eventuated. Instead we spent the morning poking around some tidal pools and generally relaxing.