Dog’s, Sharks, and Car’s

Dog’s, Sharks, and Car’s

I’ve made it back from the wild coast in one piece! It was an amazing trip (and I took a few pics, check back for those at some point). To give you a quick over view, we rented a car in Bleomfontein (sp?), drove down to Cinca on the wild coast, then to Coffee Bay, then finally to Port St. Johns. Truly amazing trip. Each place was more beautiful than the last.

In Cinca we stayed at a place called Buccaneer’s (yar!). As you can imagine I was rather excited about this. Cinca is a tiny little town where everyone is really rich and probably only lives there when they don’t have to be anywhere else. The Backpackers was a vast, overgrown, jungle with small communal houses. Amazing atmosphere, great staff, good beer. All a guy could want. They also had free Kayaks you could take out on the lagoon. This we did. And got stuck. When I jumped out to try to drag us to deeper water I sank into the sand up to my knee!! Literal quicksand.

In all it was relaxing.

Don’t expect any overly exciting stories from this vacation. All I really did was sit around on the beach.

The next day we headed off to Coffee Bay. Despite the name, there is little Coffee in Coffee Bay (but that’s ok because we had our own). The place got its name when a ship, full of coffee, laid anchor in the bay to weather a storm off the notorious cape. This plan didn’t work out so well and the ship was dashed to bits on the rocks. A side effect of this was all the coffee was strewn across the bay, and for just one year (as the climate doesn’t really support it) coffee plants grew wild.

Coffee Bay, like all the other places, was beautiful. The Coffee Shack, the backpackers we stayed at, was located near a small bay. This was not “The” Coffee Bay. This bay was secluded from the other, larger, public beach by a mountain/cliff type thing. As a result we had the entire thing mostly to ourselves. There couldn’t have been more than 15 people at the beach. Swimming was like taking a warm bath. We walked along the rocks too, saw the tidal pools, and killed time. In all, very relaxing.

I think you can guess what we did at the last place, Port St. Johns. Here we stayed at Amapondo’s, a little backpackers up on a hill overlooking the beach. Here we couldn’t swim because of sharks! I guess man eating sharks some times like to eat men here. We did find a safe place to swim, and built and sand castle, and just relaxed once again.

Here, when we left to grab lunch the three dogs of the Backpackers left with us. I have named them (with the help of others) Jelly Bean, a large, droopy faced dog, Fetch, looked like a German Shepard, and Gurmps McGee, which looked like no other god I’ve ever seen. She had tiger stripes. The dogs followed along the 20 minute walk to the wood n’ spoon, where we ate, sat with us the entire time we ate, an then followed us as we walked back along the beach.

This is where things got complicated.

There was a herd of cows on the beach. Why? No idea. Cows neither eat sand nor drink sea water. Jelly Bean thought it would be a good idea to try to eat one of the Cows lying down. So we left her to that.

Quickly we discovered that if you kick sand in the air Fetch would jump at it and eat it! Fetch ate a lot of sand. He also saw someone throwing a Frisbee and ate that. We left her to that.

Grumps McGee, who didn’t do much of anything, found someone’s cooler open and thought she would munch on something or other. Seeing as the owners of the cooler were apparently afraid of dogs, we left her to that.

We left with three dogs, and having successfully annoyed the cow enough, returned with only one. Good old Jelly Bean. When we went back to the beach to build our sand castle, we found Grumps McGee and Fetch just sitting where we left them, happy as can be.

That’s a short summary of my trip to the wild coast.

The highlight? Driving. I loved driving. I drove fast. I drove slow. I shifted gears when I didn’t have to. Windows down, music blasting. Heaven on four wheels.

Pics to come soon.