(click on a photo to enlarge)
From Port Edward I headed inland through an area called the Transkei, which was one of the Homelands set up for blacks during the apartheid years, part of a system not unlike Indian resevations in the Americas. Here people with certain tribal affiliations could live together and do whatever they wanted, but were given no resources for government. The lifestyle in the Transkei doesn't seem to have changed much since the end of apartheid...it's still one of the poorest areas in South Africa, and it reminded me more of Malawi than of the rest of this country. While it's continuously and densely settled for several hundred km, there are only about five places that I would consider towns. The rest of the land is covered by sprawling settlements with no development plan whatsoever. As far as I'm concerned, the numerous warnings I'd received from white South Africans concerning safety in the Transkei were overblown - I never felt the least bit unsafe there. What I did feel there was tired. The South African terrain has been both the most challenging and the most rewarding cycling of my whole trip, and the Transkei has some of the steepest hills anywhere.
When I got back out to the coast it was at the town of Port St. Johns, a little hippie/surfer hangout in the middle of the Transkei. It's got quite a rough edge to it, but there are also a large number of people there who spend several months or several years burning about 400 calories per day, 350 of which are accounted for by lighting, puffing and passing joints. There must be more marijuana in Port St. Johns than in the whole rest of the country! The town is part of an area known as the Wild Coast, partly because it's only accessible at a few points by rough dirt roads and partly because of the number of shipwrecks that have ocurred there.
Along the Indian Ocean coast north and south of Durban it rained for at least part of every day. This caused an exponential increase in the time devoted to cleaning my bike. Of course this climate also makes for amazing temperate coastal rainforest, one of my favorite things in the world. I never get tired of riding through this kind of vegetation, it's so beautiful and so rare. The highway going through the south-central part of the Cape Coast is called the Garden Route. It's one of the most popular destinations in the country. I found some parts to be really nice, as the coastline is very pretty and the whole area is very green. However, other parts disappointed me because they are way too built-up, either with vacation homes, silly themed cottages, roads or pine plantations. For the most part I was spared from the wrath of the famous Cape winds, which can make cycling quite difficult.
I realize that I've thought this virtually everywhere I've been in Africa, but South Africans really are some of the friendliest people in the world. I've lost count of the number of times I've been invited to stay at people's houses and farms and had food, drinks and cycling equipment bought for me.
From the town of Swellendam I turned inland and headed through South Africa's Wonderful World of Wine. The area between Swellendam and Cape Town is almost continuously filled with vineyards that stretch from the roads going through the valleys to the mountainsides. There must be hundreds of wineries along the way, most of which offer free tastings, which I certainly took advantage of. I actually spent a night on the Cordoba winery near Stellenbosch. They were bottling their most recent wines while I was there, which was fun to see. This is all done with machines these days, of course, and evidently they fill about 60,000 bottles during a four-day period each year. All of the little towns along the wine routes are really nice as well. They actually remind me more of open-air museums than towns. These places were founded by the original Afrikaner settlers who eventually pushed east and north out of Cape Town searching for farmland, and are full of Cape Dutch - style homes and huge churches.
The road to Cape Town was fantastic. I followed the ocean with a coastal nature reserve on one side of the road and Cape Flats, one of South Africa's largest slums, on the other. Eventually I could make out the mountains of the Cape Peninsula, Cape Town's scenic backdrop. Here 3,000-foot peaks drop straight down into the sea. I went to Hout Bay to stay with my friends Lionel and Jacqui, South Africans I had met way back in Tanzania. The next morning I took all of the gear off my bike and Lionel and I ycled the 80-mile round trip from Cape Town past seal and penguin colonies to the tip of the peninsula at the Cape of Good Hope. This was the official end of my trip. It was a bit like any other day of the trip, as the routine of cycling was completely ingrained in my head by then, although I knew that I wouldn't be waking up early the next morning (or any other morning in the near future) to get on my bike. This gave me ten days to explore Cape Town (certainly one of the most beautiful and interesting cities in the world) and think about what I had just done.
