Well I’m in Durban and almost out of time!
(Note: This is a post from my 2003 travel blog IMoL: Travels and Travails.)
I left Storms River for Port Elizabeth where I stayed only one night then headed to East London. I stayed at a place called The Sugar Shack right on the beach – a surfer’s hostel. I met a surfer dude named Andy who is my age and working there and saw what could have been had I become a surf bum…
From East London, I headed up to Hogsback in the mountains to do some hiking. Tolkien used to live in this area when he was a boy and rumour has it the Misty Mountains and some of the other things from The Lord of The Rings came from this area. I can see why people might think that as it is quite stunning.
After a couple of days there, I went to Cintsa, back on the coast. I did a day trip into the Trans-Kei and visited a job creation project in the area. They have a little village where they do tours to show the traditional lifestyle of the people. In order to maintain and expand the place, they cut down alien wood (trees that are not indigenous to South Africa) to make furniture, they create leather goods, and they sell seedlings to local farmers. It was quite interesting and I even joined in with the traditional healers to do a little dance and bang on the drums. We also visited a ship wreck on the coast, where we saw lots of dolphins, and stopped at a nice lagoon for a swim and a bit of cliff jumping.
From there, I went to Coffee Bay where I partied a bit, chilled on the beach, and took a drumming lesson. Last night I arrived in Durban to pick up some more anti-malarial drugs before heading up to Swaziland. Unfortunately, I’m almost out of time, so I’m going to have to skip KwaZulu-Natal to get to Swaziland and Kruger. I guess that leaves me some things to do when I come back.
Talk at you later.