Coffee Bay

Five of us, two rucksacks and one guitar squashed ourselves into a Citi Golf for a 7 hour road trip to Coffee Bay on the Wild Coast last week Tuesday. We were headed to The Coffee Shack, a lovely retreat situated by the mouth of a river leading to the Bay. It was a pretty relaxed place and I enjoyed chilling in the hammocks or stumbling over the rocks to visit the beach.

Road trip! 

The Wolfpack and the poor car, the wing mirror was previously hanging off. 

We stayed for 3 nights and had 2 days to explore the area. On the first day after a pointless excursion to the petrol station (we needed to pump the tyres but all pumps were out of order) we went to Hole in the Wall. It is a stunning rock formation off the coast which you can swim out too. Unfortunately I have no pictures as it was a rather impromptu trip so I will have to try and find some. The sea is pretty rough where the waves come crashing through the hole so we decided it was best not to swim into it, just upto it! We clambered on the surrounding rocks though and had fun wondering round, watching the waves and diving back into the sea. 

We walked to the local shop to buy ingredients for dinner and a crate of beer which I'm glad I didn't have to carry back over the rocky and hilly footpath. The evening was a bit of a party at the hostel but we didn't really venture out, or at least not like we did in Durban. Quite a few of the local kids hang out near the hostel so we spent some time with them and there were drumming circles too which was cool. It was another late night which involved lying in a tree, stumbling to the beach in the dark and then making spaghetti on toast at 5am and eating it outside under a terrace to stay out of the rain. Perfect. 

The second day was also pretty chilled out. We lazed around in the morning before heading to another river where you could jump off the cliffs into a deep pool. I didn't get round to jumping off the cliff.. 7 metres was a bit too high for me, I stuck to diving off the 2 metre rocks. The water wasn't the nicest and after a while we had attracted an audience of local children so we decided to leave and go for a paddle in the mouth of the river/the sea instead. The coastline is absolutely stunning and it was a pleasure to spend the afternoon clambering over rocks to get to beautiful rock pools and swimming around with great company. 

My one photo of the landscape of the Wild Coast taken from a moving car. Bit of a fail.

We left the Coffee Shack earlyish on the Friday to get back to Durban. It turned out to be a pretty eventful car journey with an already fairly clapped out car, probably something to do with the terrible roads, horrendous unmarked speed bumps and then rally driving back from Hole in the Wall. Oops. After dropping Ladina in Mthatha and when we were about 200km away from Durban on the N2 we had to dodge cows fighting in the middle of the road whilst going uphill and the car decided to die on us. After putting out the small fire with someone's water and staring at the engine cluelessly for a bit the four of us decided to carry on driving back to Durban. Somehow we and the car made it back alive and in one piece, apart from the cow poo splattered all over it. Lush. 

Dropping Ladina off in Mthatha.

I had an amazing 3 days and my only regret is that my camera was not strapped to my hand for the whole trip! 

Until next time. 

A x