My pedantic and geographically knowledgeable wife and children would like to point out that I was completely wrong about the Cape of Good Hope being the “end of Africa”. In fact, the most southerly point in Africa is Cape Agulhas. This is also the point where <cue movie trailer voice> “two oceans collide”. So that’s that sorted out then.
We got up and packed at the Cape Grace and they supplied us with a picnic for our drive down to Hermanus where the Grootbos nature reserve is located. As we were checking out of the Cape Grace, we realised that breakfast was included! So we didn’t leave quite as early as we’d expected because we were too busy stuffing our faces with fabulous bacon and boiled eggs. Mmmmm….pork products (c) Homer Simpson.
The drive out of Cape Town is really easy going past the airport on the N2. After about 50km we turned off the main road down the coastal N44. This is really an outstandingly beautiful road. The sun was shining and we drove round rocky headlands and through tiny little seaside towns. It looks like most of them are retirement villages and in typical South African style, there’s absolutely no planning control whatsoever. It appears as if you buy a plot of land and then build whatever you fancy on it. You get Frank Lloyd Wright-esque modernist bungalows nestling next to cape cod wooden two story houses and thatched cottages (!). There are wooden houses on stilts, brick built Victorian two up two downs and in one memorable case an peach coloured Mexican adobe villa. However, the architectural monstrosities actually lend a certain cuteness to the little towns and the density of population here is so low that they don’t intrude on the scenery. As we drove along the road, I did think that it would be a great long distance cycle. From the Cape of Good Hope round the coast would be even more memorable on a bike although some of the hills would be pretty tough.
The town of Hermanus is another sleepy little Victorian seaside town renowned for the whale watching from the shores. We joined a big group of people in a little park and stared out to sea for a bit but didn’t see any animals except a small rock hyrax (a “dassie”) which was picking up scraps. Although it doesn’t say so in the tourist brochures, Hermanus should also be famous for the slowest coffee service in the southern hemisphere.
It wasn’t far to the Grootbos reserve from Hermanus and when we arrived there the ranger said that if we wanted to go out to see the whales we had to leave right now! Seemingly there was a storm coming in tomorrow and all the boats would be canceled so this was our only chance. We grabbed our warm clothes and ate some of the Cape Grace picnic before we left. I was slightly worried that we might see the picnic again if the water was rough.
We jumped in the car and drove at high speed down to the little town of Gansbaai which appears to be a town with no visible means of support except pensions, whale watching and shark diving. It also has no harbour to speak of and so you have to get on the boat on dry land which is then pushed out into the water by a tractor. It’s a little odd. The boat isn’t big but it did have two huge outboard motors. That gave me a little comfort…I could see the shark diving boats lined up as well. As far as I could see, shark diving involved getting stuffed in a cage which looked like a supermarket trolley and then dropped into the ocean. Despite some promises earlier on in the holiday, I was pretty sure I was going to flake on the shark diving. Not only was it spending time in a supermarket trolley with bunch of 20ft killing machines, it was spending time in…the sea!
Trish, Isabelle and Hannah are good in small boats but I’m afraid that I’m a big wimp when it comes to “the Sea”. As many of you know, I just don’t “get” boats (“caravans without wheels”) and the proximity to a big wet thing that’ll kill you doesn’t really make me feel relaxed. This part of South Africa is still on the Atlantic and the ocean swells seemed pretty big to me. Maybe 15 feet peak to trough. You don’t get those sorts of waves on the Cam.
The guides on the boats were standard issue. Irritating because (unsurprisingly) they’re bored with the whole thing and have seen whales and dolphins and seals about a thousand times already but they have to feign the excitement. The boat pitched up and down through the swells and everybody had a grand time except me since I kept thinking about the big wet sea on the other side of the hull which I might have to swim in.
I was expecting this trip to be a bit of a disappointment when suddenly we were in the middle of a pod of Right Whales. They were breaching (throwing their entire bodies out of the sea), spy hopping and coming right up to the side of the boat. They’re huge and massively impressive animals. They’re also extraordinarily difficult to take pictures of. Between us, Trish and I took more than 120 pictures of which 115 were either of the sky, a featureless expanse of ocean or up somebody’s nostril. Pitching around in the swell (gnnnnnhhhh) doesn’t make it easy. We saw a mother with a calf, two whales mating (!) and countless close encounters as they drifted next to the boat. Fundamentally, I think that watching sea animals from the surface is a little disappointing. It is exciting and interesting to be so close to these huge animals but it might be a better experience on the Discovery Channel or with a David Attenborough voice over.
After a while, they drifted off so we zoomed out even further into the sea (!) towards Dyer Island. Dyer Island used to be a place where they collected guano to fertilise the fields. Now it’s a tiny windswept patch of land in the South Atlantic with a little island (Geyser Rock) next to it which is home to a colony of 50,000 seals. I’m not sure whether or not it’s the seals or the guano but it’s pretty smelly. However, it’s not the guano or the seals that people come to see: between Dyer Island and Geyser Rock is a deep channel about 100m wide which is known as “Shark Alley”. There are more Great White Sharks here than anywhere else. They hide in the deep water and wait for a seal to swim between the two islands and then rocket up from the depths, catch the seal and then end up throwing themselves out of the water because they’re going so fast. We didn’t see any sharks unfortunately. I was a bit worried about the shark bit having seen Jaws when I was younger but there’s a big campaign on in South Africa to rehabilitate the shark and fix its reputation problem. We saw a great TV commercial in the Cape Town Aquarium: happy families playing in the sea, then a scream, hundreds of people running from the water, the “duh duh duh duh” Jaws music and then cut back to toaster floating in the sea. The tag line: “Last year toasters killed 798 people, sharks killed 9″. In a single year in the US, 43,687 people injure themselves on their toilet (what are they doing in there?). This is 600 times more people than have been attacked by Great White Sharks in South Africa over 77 years. You are more likely to be killed by a falling coconut while driving to the beach than devoured by a shark while swimming.
Anyway, no shark sightings so all we had to brave was the increasingly rough sea to get back to Gansbaai. Grootbos is very much in the same mold as the previous places we’d been. The food is great, it’s comfortable, very pleasant and like everywhere else in South Africa, it’s got a very good wine cellar indeed.
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