There are so many beautiful places in the world where one can buy property in order to create a world of private indulgence. It becomes very difficult to decide where one should go and either settle down, or return continuously for further joyful exploration.

The Garden Route on the Indian coastline of South Africa provides the tourist and person looking for a holiday home with many attractions. It will tempt you to stay on and haunt you to return!

Where does one begin to make this clear? I suspect that I will have to start with the smell of the Garden Route. When I was a child, my father took us on summer holidays to one of the many quaint towns on the Garden Route coastline. We lived for much of my early childhood in the beautiful and mesmerizing, but very dry Karoo. So, whether we entered the Garden Route via Mossel Bay or through the breathtaking Meiringspoort and through the Black Mountains, a smell excited the whole family way in advance of the scenery of the Garden Route.

Before you, the reader, turns cynical on me on strength of this description of global family bliss, I want to add that the very young ones, sometimes with blocked noses and sipping away on a bottle of milk, reacted merrily to the context as the adults and the self-acclaimed budding one, aged 10, became excited when that peculiar smell started teasing the stale nostrils. The smell outside the car, Sir, is what I am referring to.

How to describe it? It is something to experience first hand to really understand what it is all about. I think that the inhabitants and returning visitors to the Garden Route are all hooked to this peculiar whiff, whether we wake up in Great Brak River, Buffalo Bay or Knysna. It has to do with the lush variety of indigenous plants, shrubs (fynbos), the ancient trees weaving in the breezes, ample rain, a hot sun and the smell of the deep surf rushing against sea-life covered rocks.

That wonderful smell is the lurking backdrop to everything else. But then the visual scope of the Garden Route will come into play, and the play will only be kept at bay for single moments before it will strike again with the next visual offensive. The Garden Route is breathtaking, like a garden, but in immense scope. There is no way that anyone can describe the breadth of sceneries that will keep on enfolding before the tourist or permanent dweller of the area. Take slow time to explore Mossel Bay, Small Brak River, Great Brak River, Glenana, Heroldts Bay, George, Victoria Bay, Wildernis, Sedgefield, Buffalo Bay, Brenton on Sea, Knysna, Knoetzie, Storms River, Plettenberg Bay, Nature’s Valley etc.

"What’s in a name" asked the great Englishman who would have done even more for the world had he lived here on the Garden Route! Take any of the names of the towns mentioned above, and start to work, no, start to laze your way through the nuances of every area on the Garden Route. It should be like a visit to the Louvre in Paris. A visit to the Louvre will have to be over many days, should you not want to blunt your senses to the vast and intense experience.

That mischievous writer, Milan Kundera, named one of his books "Slowness" to accentuate that one should spend slow time with everything in order for the essence of things to start coming towards one. Martin Heideggar said the same thing with his term "gelassenheit". When the ego retreats, the objects become alive again, and then the shields of indifference and superficiality will fall away. Slowly. The earth will meet your feet when you walk, said Maurice Merle Ponteau.

There are endless beaches and forests to explore. The cliffs overlooking the mesmerizing depth of the Indian Ocean will provide many shows of huge rolling waves swelling and then come roaring to protest against all retaining chains. There are the dolphins to watch. And the whales. And the beautiful girls on the beaches. The budding adult, ten years of age, followed them around every stretch of the Heroldts Bay beach in quiet despair. I am not referring to the whales, Sir.

There are cozy restaurants, unbeatable golf courses in terms of location and views, there are country roads that will take you into the Klein Karoo with its quiet ways of yesterday’s world. A bit further on one can take on the Great Karoo that will allow you to test the capacity of the provincial human being to grasp the cradle of the great beginning.

One can explore the East Coast from your base in the Garden Route and that alone will take ages to laze through. Without a property base to quietly put down a book, taking a sip of wine and start planning again one’s next endeavour, it will just become another rush to touch here, and there, and nowhere.

Come walking in the Garden Route, come driving and viewing, come sitting down and become a feeling being again. Come clearing a stagnant lifestyle and breathe again.

But come and do it slowly, and again and again. But you will seriously have to consider staying on!

Worth you while.

Wim van der Walt
7 November 2007