Five-King Bridge – Mbhashe River

A homestead near Dwesa

Mbotvi estuary

Sunset near Coffee Bay

Sweeeets!!!!

White horse of Mbotyi

Dark abyss – the 109m Magwa Falls

Cliffs at Morgan Bay

Hole in the Wall

All photos by Peter Slingsby

The purists reckon that the Wild Coast starts somewhere north of the Mbhashe River mouth. We pretended that it starts at Gonubie (properly ‘Gqunube’, or ‘place of the bramble berries’). We spent some time exploring the civilized delights of the Jikeleza Route, a complex of beautiful beaches and fine resorts that flanks the impressive Inkwenkwezi Private Reserve. There, amongst other unexpected experiences, Keith Stanton showed us how to stroke a real live African elephant. Not quite cuddly. Near Crawford’s very comfortable cabins, at nearby Chintsa East, there’s a restaurant – Michaela’s – on top of a dune; if you don’t feel like the 259 steps there’s a natty funicular.

A brand-new black top – not marked on any maps before this one – sweeps down past Haga-Haga to Kei Mouth and Morgan Bay. The Warren-Smiths of Morgan Bay Hotel have lived in the area since it was invented, and they were a fund of valuable mapping info. Our colleague Gavin Stewart drove us down to Double Mouth, the first – and startlingly lovely – hint of what the real Wild Coast is all about.

At Kei Mouth we took useful, accurate advice from Piet Bester, another rich local source of info. We crossed the Great Kei on the ferry, and about sixty-eight metres after hitting the road on the other side we discovered the real reason they call this coast “wild”. It seemed to us that it has nothing to do with the sea, or the bush, or the people or the turbulent rivers. It is, quite simply, because of the roads.

“The former Transkei”(as it is politically-correct to call it nowadays) is the heart of Xhosaland. Some might say it’s the heartland of the ANC – and even though we saw, everywhere, signs of big, brave new schools, bright new clinics and sparkling hospitals, we nevertheless found ourselves, a great deal of the time, on roads where even the most infamous of taxis would not go. Even the real 4x4’s were crawling...

But don’t let that put you off. We never got stuck, we always found someone who could speak English, and we made it everywhere, if slowly, in our Ford Bantam bakkie. The only thing we did not have – because no one had one – was a map.

Put quite bluntly, there were any number of brightly-coloured pamphlets and badly re-copied photostats, but not one of these bore any relationship with what’s actually out there, on the ground.

There was no map.

There are also no road signs, few direction boards, and only occasional signs that say things like “Luputhana” (from that point, Luputhana is actually 120km away, across a sheer-sided, 500-metre deep canyon).

Don’t misunderstand me. The Dept of Lands and Surveys puts out a really good 1:50 000 series of maps of most of the area. I say “most” because a few of the sixteenth-degree square sheets are old and badly out of date, but I understand that these are being revised. However, large 1:50 000 sheets (38 to cover the area!) are not much good to the average tourist and, even though the newer maps are a pleasure to read and interpret – so clear are they – they remain pretty thin on ground detail, such as names, shops, schools and, above all, the state of the roads.

Then there was a local government map series from the Eastern Cape Government. Useful for names, clinics and police stations, but they were very thin on road detail.

And the biggest problem was that the two 1:50 000 series – the older and the newer – and the EC Government maps all had place names that rarely agreed.

It was “terra nova”, and it was one of the loveliest travel experiences of our lives.

If you don’t know your way around the Wild Coast, or if you’re not very brave, you’ll move up the coast by heading inland to the N2, taking comfort from the familiar black-top, and then plunging back down a long, long ridge to the sea. We’re not brave and we were pretty lost most of the time, so we did just that.

Greg Woodside of Trennery’s and Daan van Zyl of Kob Inn soon put us right, helping us to discover that, in between the ridges that divide the endless, looping rivers, there are winding, climbing, falling roads through landscapes of incomparable beauty.

Armed with some of those re-copied photostats and a vague sense that our day’s destination lay to the north-east, we found (and mapped!) the passes that polka down into the Qhorha valley, or jink down to the narrow bridge across the Nqabarha and the lonely grave of Hintsa, the murdered Xhosa king. We found the real Mbhashe River Pass, not the wide, passé thing far upstream on the N2 with its tarred loops that rush down through the aloe fields to the so-called “Bashee Bridge”. On our real, narrow, dusty-dirt road we waited for a herd of cows, then crossed the long, narrow Five-King Bridge and wound our way up to the pretty but sadly-rundown village of Elliotdale.

At Coffee Bay, Eddie – manager at Ocean View Hotel – was another brilliant source of important things that mapmakers need to know, and we left him to explore the Wild Coast’s best-known icon, the Hole in the Wall. The road is winding and steep, but the scenery is dramatically lovely. At the top of a hill small children accosted us with pretty necklaces made from pink sea-shells. The info-blurb from the Ocean View Hotel had spotted them, too – “Along the road,” it says, “you will notice kids holding up shell necklaces for sale. They sell them for R5 each and your support for these kids goes a long way towards stopping the begging in the area – and puts food on the table for their families.” That was certainly a relief from the high, keening cry of “Sweeeets!!!” that usually goes with passing kids.

There is a route from Coffee Bay to Port St Johns, and now there’s an accurate map to show you the way, but no such thing existed for us. We decided to leave that bit of exploring to colleague Gavin Stewart and his 4x4, while we took the long route round via Mthatha to the famous tarred highway , the R61, down to Port St Johns. It’s a very good road, and it’s even better if you remember the awful old track through the Mlengana Cutting, past Execution Rock. It ends in Port St Johns, a town that seemed somehow tired to us, but the feeling left us fast at Steve Roberts’ excellent Cremorne Resort. Steve had his own rich and essential store of local knowledge to share, which he and son did with enthusiasm. We moved on to Mbotyi – “place of beans” – which might just be true Heaven on Earth, with its startling and mysterious Magwa Falls, its forests, bright green tea estates and misty, magical lagoon.

We had too few days on the Wild Coast, giving over the field research to our enthusiastic colleague, Gavin Stewart. Gavin was not there just to fill in gaps – he actually did most of the field work, intrepidly tackling broken bridges, swirling drifts and slippery slopes that would certainly have been too much for a Bantam bakkie. He was a deep mine of information, too, and the quality of the final product owes a huge amount to his keen observations.

At one point Gavin wrote, in his research notes, “A brindled dog, dirty orange ribs and mean eye, comes skulking from the grass. The orange feathers in its jaws were, until recently, a young chicken”. We marked Gavin’s dog on our map as a watermark – bet you can’t find it! – but you can see its precise homeland on Google Earth, at -32.021415, 28.850048. Copy and paste this number into the “Fly to” box and wait for the picture to come streaming in...

Gavin also bravely tackled the Collywobbles, a series of deep, massive loops in the Mbhashe River that deserve recognition as one of South Africa’s greatest geographical marvels. There’s a vulture colony there too, a viewing platform and a public loo. We didn’t put the loo on the map; Gavin’s only comment upon it was, simply, “No.” You must visit the Collywobbles, but pay careful attention to the map first.

You should definitely Google-Earth the Collywobbles, too, starting at -32.009000, 28.570000 (really!). Googs drops you to 1000m; you need to zoom back to about 18km above ground, then fly around the ‘Wobbles a bit for the best results. Oh yes, if you type in the numbers rather than paste them, don’t forget to start with a minus before the ‘32’, and separate the numbers with an ordinary comma.

Back in the office we used Dept of Lands and Surveys data – and Google Earth’s wonderful images – to make sense of the heaps of info we’d gathered. There are some locally-provided overlays for Google Earth, but we found these of rather mixed value. They suggested that the main road to Morgan Bay requires a 4x4 – it certainly doesn’t! – and listed a place to stay at Coffee Bay as “Gee Kos” (= “Give food” in Afrikaans). We couldn’t believe the name, then discovered that they really meant “Gecko’s”. Embarrassing!

And when we’d sifted through the names and their many alternates, we hope that we produced a map that will at last give this lovely, lovely area its real due. Enjoy the Wild Coast with our map!

Peter Slingsby