Day 358 / 123

Date: 5 April 2023
Sleeping location: The Beach hotel, Port Elizabeth/Gqeberha, South Africa
Distance (km today/total/total Part 2): 73 / 22343 / 7506
Estimated climb (m today/total/total Part 2): 200 / 211300 / 93300
Lonesome: no more
Day in three words: Sea the see

As Renee is a farmer he was up and away very early, so my alarm was set for 5.30 to catch a lift back to the service station with him. Thankfully Madeleine had prepared me a little tray of coffee, milk and cereal to make getting up that little bit easier. Lovely hosts, lovely people. After saying goodbye to Renee I set off - it wasn’t even 7 yet and it was a cool but bright morning. The private game reserves had disappeared and everything was farmland again now. 

Coming over a small climb I saw a big blue thing in the distance - what was this? - it was my first view of the African sea. Fancy people like the sea and the harbour town of Colchester* was very affluent, all big houses and yachts and people out jogging in the early morning. I turned off the N2 here to go on a smaller road, but the bridge out of town was closed to traffic, so nobody was using the road on the other side, so I essentially had my own private road. It was very nice and quiet and I startled some kudu who were grazing near the road and not used to much passing traffic.

Gqeberha/Port Elizabeth/PE was the biggest city I’d been to in SA so I didn’t really know what to expect. It announced itself with a long section of open land with scattered, huge, industrial buildings, before I hit the outer suburbs, a mixture of run down shanty towns and affluent suburbs. I couldn’t find a cafe to stop at so just ate a few supermarket snacks on a bench then cracked on. At the supermarket a woman informed me that Cape Town was a long way away (thanks) and advised me to basically avoid all the black areas (thanks).

I tried to follow the Nelson Mandela "cycle path" along the bay, but it wasn’t being maintained in the great man’s image and was terrible, sandy in a few places, full of loose rocks in others, clearly never much used. Eventually I got bored and ducked off onto the parallel N2, now a motorway so I probably (definitely) wasn't allowed on it. I then ducked back off onto smaller roads through the city centre, which was spaced out and run down with a few older buildings here and there. The city’s harbour is between here and the sea, so it’s not prime real estate any more cuz you gotta have that #beachlife.

 

#beachlife reappeared a bit further down the coast in Summerstrand, all beachfront hotels, shops and restaurants. I arrived at the pretty fancy hotel booked by my dad not long after noon, checked in, chilled out and did non-fancy things to bring the place down with me: washed loads of my clothes in the sink and took them outside to the pool to sunbathe with me to dry them out; cooked three packs of noodles with peanut butter to use both up and caused a minor scene lighting my stove in the courtyard of the hotel. Slightly more fancy was finding about £120 of rand that I had completely forgotten about, tucked away inside a pannier. For dinner I went out to a nearby bar and watched the beautiful sunset over the shore. It was busy on a Wednesday, full of people both black and white and noticeably more expensive than most other places I’ve been. This is a different SA to the rural agricultural towns. Dad arrived about 9.30 and we had a glass of wine and a catch up on the terrace before bed. The next, and final, chapter starts now.

*The second Colchester of my trip after the one in Essex. Dordrecht only held the crown of “only place visited twice” for less than a week