Words by Camilla Howard
We left P.E on a bit of a high after our clean up. The city certainly lived up to it’s reputation of being the “friendly” one and we were sad to move on. We stayed in Colcester on the Sunday’s river for two nights and caught up on laundry and rest as we each had our own bedrooms, a rare occasion!
Besides a detour around Kouga it was a very straight-forward but windy walk until we crossed the river. We then entered SANparks territory on a roughly 80km beach stretch from the Sunday’s river to Kenton. Unfortunately the powers that be had inexplicably forbidden us to walking on the beach in the middle section. This meant our first day was incredibly long, 36km on soft sand, over dunes, through thick dune-forest and onto some farmland where we meandered our way to a road to meet our support vehicle. We were gutted about having to walk the next 20km inland on hot, dusty, shadeless farm roads instead of along the cool breezy ocean. The pain was, however, lessened by the legendary Nanaga pies we picked up en route.
We hopped over a fence into a game farm at one stage and then saw what looked like a mirage in the distance! A lake that did not appear on Google Earth was ahead of us as well as herds of zebra, hartebees, bontebok and nyala to name a few. We met up with a group of boys near the lake and after chatting to them, found out we were on the Kaba farm where the manager, Jim, runs Quest Africa. He kindly showed us the way through the forest to the next farm, Elephants of Eden, which was where we were to sleep that night. The path was very overgrown and covered with spider webs. A very trying 40 minutes for me! Ian Withers from the Knysna Elephant Park and Elephants of Eden kindly let us join his family for dinner that night.
The next day the boys from Quest Afrika joined us to walk the last 24km to Cannon Rocks. There we were met by the proud Cannon Rocks Rate Payers Association who braved the gale force wind to welcome us through their town. They had even put a welcome sign up for us! We saw our first beached dolphin just below the Dias monument on the next stretch, very sad.
Our stay in Kenton for the next two nights was very comfortable by our kind and generous hosts Simon and Judy from River Roost B&B and we loved the walk to Port Alfred. We swam across the icy river and rushed straight to three media interviews in a row. The last of which was with a dynamic team from Bay TV. Despite asking the locals through all the media channels to please join us on a clean-up walk to Kleinemonde on Saturday morning only a Dutch couple who live in Port Alfred pitched up. It was lovely to walk with them though and it was great to have some ‘local’ knowledge to point out the 3 sisters etc.
I spent the next day in the spa while the boys slept in after their party the night before. We spent the second half of our rest day at the Fish River Villa’s and lay by the pool while we waited for our laundry to be washed and dried. We slept there again after we’d walked from Kleinemonde to Mpekweni and while Mike and I walked from Mpekweni to Hamburg, Jordyn drove on ahead and set up camp for us on the Hamburg River. We camped there 2 nights, returning after our next 24km trek to Kaysers Beach. From Kaysers in was a bit of a dreary walk in the rain to Gulu but we absolutely loved our night there. It is somewhat of a menagerie with 100’s of species of birds providing background music for our delicious dinner and stay at the Gulu Private Resort. Another 20km later we’d hit East London! We crossed the bridge over the port as there was no access down to swim it (thank goodness!).
Our clean up on Kings Beach the following day was rather disappointing compared to our Port Elizabeth success but we still managed to get 120 people down there and collected half a ton. After the clean up we walked with out host, Wendy Counihan, from the start of Kings Beach to Gonubie. We were shocked to see how much litter was piled up just past the blind river at the end of Kings Beach. If only we had known, we would have sent all our clean-up’ers there that morning! We said goodbye to Jordyn Napier who has been supporting us for nearly 3 months and welcomed Pieter Hugo who is going to be with us until the very end at Kosi Bay!
