The Allure Of A Garden Route, South Africa Tour - Come And Indulge Your Senses
A famous South African writer once said that a person starts off at the farm gate and eventually your journey will end there as well. The Garden Route in South Africa’s Southern Cape area, reminds one in some way of this saying.
Many of us started off in small towns and farms and this quiet unassuming life style lies engrained in the evolving human psyche. Even a good spread of hard core city dwellers have a family history where some great grandfather had to leave the family haven in order to make a living in the big cities of this world. Quite often the wilder spirits in rural areas would get restless and, just had to leave to experience first hand what was said or whispered about the great rush of city life. So, many of them went to the cities and stayed on. Assuring themselves and loved ones far away that the money was good, and that thus the future would therefore also be good. They settled in small capsules where the soul bounced easily from wall to wall, and remembered with aching hearts from time to time that out there, far away, was a place where your eyes could rest on far away hills, blazing blue oceans and soft green valleys. But, they assured themselves, the money is good and one day they will return home in comfort and settle once again to the familiar smells of the country air.
But life, said some else, is a bummer. You plan and you dream but too often the fight for survival drains the last inkling of remembrance of that thing pulsating in the core of your being. It can so easily kill the last vestige of that part of you that wants to stand proud in your own historical shoes.
The Garden Route in South Africa does not offer the glitz of the big cities. For that reason you will most likely not stumble into the film stars and international celebrities in places like Mossel Bay, Great Brak River or Heroldts Bay. For that you will have to do the walk at the street cafes of Camps Bay or frequent the night clubs of Cape Town. It offers the visitor exciting places and exhilarating experiences and it will leave you tired and happy at the end of every Cape Town holiday.
But it is not the Garden Route. A Garden Route tour beckons another side of human engaging. For a start, it will call up memories of long left family farms, small villages where you or grandfathers before you had those special moments and first glances that will haunt you for the rest of your life, or that have haunted those restless men fighting the tigers in the big cities. It is so personal and varied, those memories of bygone days, but trust me, the Garden Route will prod you in remembering the things that human beings are constituted off.
The very first thing that one experiences when entering the Garden Route is not the magnificent Indian Ocean, or the lush greenery, or the majestic mountains. The smell will hit you first and it will keep on following you for ever. Either by smelling it directly by being there, or in memory where ever or when ever your thoughts will turn towards that landscape.
I get very frustrated when I endeavor to describe the smell of the Garden Route, for what ever is stated, will do harm to direct existential exposure to it. All I will therefore do, is to list some of the organic ingredients and leave it up to you, the reader, to go and be captured by it. The peculiar shrubs, flowers, bushes and trees in its different variety right through the Garden Route of South Africa provide an earthy grounding to ‘the smell’. The Afrikaans speaking people has a word for some of those wonderful flora, they call it ‘fynbos’.
The scenery changes all the time when traveling guided by a Garden Route map. In the Mossel Bay area the climate is moderate and the landscape reflects that. In the Knysna area the climate is more humid with more rainfall and huge trees and thick forests are found there. One will have to compare the smell of the different areas in the Garden Route to what a wine connoisseur do when judging two bottles of solid red wine. The nose will be different and it will excite the senses in different ways, but a final choice is not to be made when it comes from the same stock. The intriguing smells of the Garden Route is like that. It differs, but together its peculiar smell is a very specific and exciting experience.
It might be very subjective but the huge waves building up in the deep ocean that come pounding against the cliffs at Heroldts Bay (Voëlklip area), have an effect that lasts in one’s mind for at least one life time! Most likely the developers of golf estates realized the effect of the Indian Ocean on viewers and quite a few golf courses, Pinnacle Point in Mossel Bay, Pezula in Knysna amongst others, have a location right on cliff tops, overlooking those huge swells of waters. It is not a strange sight to see golfers, and they are a strange breed, forgetting to play on, just staring at the breathtaking display of crushing waves or watching the whales or dolphins diving deep and surging high up into the air.
There are beautiful beaches from Stil Bay right through to Storms River and they are never as frantically crowded as the beaches on the main tourist tracks. That leaves space for all kinds of sport to be pursued. Scuba diving, wind sailing, surfing, fishing etc. It should be mentioned that you haven’t done body surfing before you have tried Victoria Bay at high tide.
One can choose where to go for an extended walk on the beach as the Garden Route provides many beaches that are clean and easily accessible.
To mention a few that will leave you tired but happy at the end of it: Stil Bay, Mossel Bay, Great Brak River, Wildernis, Glentana, Sedgefield, Buffels Bay, Plettenberg Bay, Nature’s Valley etc.
For a different kind of walk one can do a day walk or a four, five day walk in the forests of the Tsitsikamma. The Otter Trail is booked for a year in advance and many others too. Luckily there are so many places where one can park a car and enter those mystical forests to encounter ancient trees and huge ferns waving in the breeze. I have often watch tourists coming out of those woods, relaxed, slow moving and slow talking. Always the give away of real forest therapy!
There are various boat trips, from Knysna to Mossel Bay and apart from just tripping for the sake of watching the passing forest scenes or waves demolishing stark cliffs, one can also take a boat out to do some shark watching from a cage under water. Or go on a boat to measure your muscle power in angling against the big fish out there on the open waters.
The coffee shops, restaurants, antique shops, art galleries etc. are quaint and once again the style will suit the person who does not require high adrenalin injections but prefer slow qualitative surprises.
One need to really explore the Garden Route. A quick tour through South Africa will prevent you from a lasting experience that this southern cape coastal area offers. It might make sense to buy yourself a holiday home in the Garden Route - for example at the exclusive Avonddans Country Estate - share it with friends and family or to rent it out. If you don’t take time to explore thoroughly, the chances are good that the Cango Caves in Oudtshoorn, the vastness of the Klein and the Groot Karoo can be missed. It will be the tourist’s lost if the curving road through Meiringspoort that leads one into the Karoo, cradle of mankind, not be followed.
We have not said anything about the Knysna Loerie, the dark waters of the deep rivers, the velvet green of the Outeniqua Mountains or the hypnotizing Black Mountains, the lakes, the lagoons, the game reserves, the nature reserves, the steam locomotive trips, the moderate climate, the history of the area, the brilliant day breaks, the lazy sundowners at Kempton on Sea, strange little chapels, the elephants that hide away in the forests, the ostrich farms, the ghost ships sinking at the Knysna Heads, the Knysna sea horse, royal blood kinship, archeological finds, talented singers in small community hang outs. This is just a taste of what awaits you on a Garden Route South African tour.
The allure of South Africa’s Garden Route is not to be exhausted by words, it asks one to come visiting and experience its power directly. Buy your ticket and watch what will be happening to you when the plane door opens at George Airport or the bus makes a pit stop at Mossel Bay!
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