Photo Diary: The Small Incidents that Makes the Garden Route Memorable

Traveling along the Garden Route between Cape Town and Jeffrey’s Bay can be a very relaxing, beautiful and scenic beach town vacation. Or it can be an adrenalin filled, active and adventurous road trip. For me it was both, with surfing and bungee jumping in between the laid back beach days. Me and my friend, Michael, rented an old (I mean OLD) Mercedes Benz, and hit the roads. Cruising down the highways, with our surfboards tightly tied to the brand new roof rack, we cruised towards the surfs and small towns along the southern tip of Africa’s coast.

I won’t go in much detail about the drive, other than a few memorable moments which this post is about. One happened fairly soon after we had crossed the mountains that surround Cape Town. The road went straight ahead and had very high standard. Our speed was probably around 100-110 km/h (65 mph) when we felt and heard a little “hump”. Michael peeked out the window to check on the surfboards, and they were not there. They had lifted off. Still tied to the roof rack, laying perfectly parallel to each other, they were sailing in the wind and landed carefully on the grass next to the road. At least that’s what I imagine, as neither of the boards had as much as a little scratch from the incident.

During the rest of this road trip, Michael had to share the back seat with two, relative to the space in our car, massive surfboards (we’re beginners and are not surfing on those 5 foot short boards!). But we smiled at this, as everything else. These are all the small problems that make the trip memorable.

Another source of unplanned obstacles to our advenutre was the state of our dear Mercedes, “Goldie”. Not many hours after our surfboard-lift-off, the car started protesting against our travel plans. The first break down came after dark, in the middle of nowhere. Luckily we were traveling with two other cars at this point and they helped us push-start it every time it happened. But the break downs came more frequently, and the next day the other cars, with good reason, decided to leave us behind. I would have done the same.

We visited a local mechanic, who after a few hours claimed to have found the problem. He changed a few parts, took us for a test drive, and let us go. I guess he did a decent job, and Goldie actually worked fine for the rest of that day. But of course it didn’t last over night, and we were soon back into the old routine. The whole thing ended with our rental dealer having their mechanic drive all the way from Cape Town to Knysna with the trunk full of tools. He came, loaded all the tools into our trunk and gave us the little Honda he’d been driving. He’s plan was to drive Goldie back to Cape Town and fix whatever problems he encountered on the way with he’s tools in the trunk. I still wonder how long that drive actually took him.

Our new car was great, apart from the fact that it was way smaller, and Michael was confined to an even tiny-er space with our, now seemingly more massive, surfboards surrounding us in the car.

The last, and for most people completely uninteresting incident was when we hit a “chicken-like” bird with our new Honda. I remember every single moment of this. We were cruising at the regular 110 km/h when I saw this chicken start running across the road. Based on it’s speed I decided it would have more than enough time to cross the road before I would cross it’s path. But the bird was just dumb. In the middle of my lane he suddenly stopped in his tracks, turned 90 degrees towards us, and looked me in my eyes. It’s probably not true, but in my vivid memory of this I keep constant eye contact with him during the time it took me to approach him with my brutal Honda. I saw him start flapping his wings, just enough to avoid getting sucked under the car, but rather hit the the tip of the hood, get knocked up in the air and spin around in a cloud of feathers before falling back down to the ground. I also remember Michael’s hysterical laughter during the whole incident.

The aftermath to this accident was us hitting the breaks, performing a nice, high speed U-turn and scanning both sides of the road, back and forth, until we found the bird and could take a posed picture, proving the pathetic joy dead animals can give us evil human beings.

The rest of this road trip adventure will be told in later posts. Thanks for following. Leave a comment, but be nice.