Sorry it has taken us so long to post on the blog but our internet connect has been bad plus I have been rather lazy when it comes to writing, but can you blame me when it’s 80 degrees outside I’d rather be doing something else! Anyway about Coffee Bay…
Sunday morning we got up really early and drove to the top of the mountain that we were at for sunset so that we could watch the sun rise. It felt like we were in a James Bond movie racing up the side of a mountain, and reaching the top where the air strip was driving down it as fast as we could because we didn’t want to miss the sunrise. It was just like the movie arriving just in time with the car angled on the side of the mountains watching the sun come up over the ocean. Only difference was instead of dodging bullets on the way up the mountain we had to dodge cows! Anyway it was a beautiful site and well worth waking up at 5:00 a.m. After the sunrise we went back to Jungle Monkey and got our bags and checked out of the hostel to head to Coffee Bay. It was about a 2 ½ hour drive and we did pretty good thanks to my awesome navigating skills (although if you ask Alyssa and the rest of the car they may say differently but hey we made it there)! The arrival to Coffee Bay was not what we expected. We took the worst road I’ve ever been on to get there and I will now NEVER complain about our gravel roads again. Our washboards have NOTHING on the ½ cement ½ dirt road with no shoulder, tons of deep pot holes, and animals and people walking on the sides of you at all times. The town pretty much consisted of nothing and it was really run down. We had planned to stay at a hostel for the night but they never got our confirmation online and they were booked for the night as well as all of the other hostiles in the town. We decided to see “Hole in the Wall” since we were still in Coffee Bay and go to the beach since the scenery was indescribably beautiful, but then drive to East London to spend the night.
Hole in the Wall was so cool. We drove the car down another horrible dirt road to get there and then walked on a little trail to finally reach it. The pictures are neat but it doesn’t really do it justice. The water was really warm there so we decided to swim for a while. Alyssa was super nice and said she would stay out and take pictures for us so “Thanks Lys”. The waves were pretty crazy but Patrick is an adrenalin junkie and decided to jump into the hole in the wall off the side of the cliff. I made it to the rocks but then decided on the chicken out path of walking on the rocks and cut your feet way back. Patrick on the other hand jumped TWICE. Alyssa got some really cool action shots of him jumping so that was awesome. Maria and Sara just swam in the water and didn’t really venture onto the rocks. So after the swim and a few candid pics we decided to head back to the car and then go to the beach. We were really low on gas but we ran into Scott and our Austrian friends and they said a gas station was only 15 minutes away. Thus began our new adventure that could have ended very badly haha. What the estimated to be a mere fifteen mintues was more like forty minutes coasting as often as we could because we were on fumes. The light kept dinging low fuel and so we stopped and asked a guy on the side of the road and he said it was another 30 km. Needless to say we were a little pissed off/relieved when we made it to the bar on the side of the road. Yep, I said bar. We went pulled up to a sketchy tavern and they had a barrel of gas behind the bar. It was definitely a monopoly business as they charge a ridiculous amount for only a quarter of a tank. Either way we were relieved to have found gas, even if they did fill our car using a Sprite bottle as a funnel. After that we jumped in the car and got out of there because they weren’t really the friendliest people we have run into since being in South Africa. We made our way back into Coffee Bay and filled up the tank and went to a pizza place our friend Gregor had told us about. We had to park our car at the bottom of the hill and then walk up this hill to get there. The pizza was good but pretty expensive. We saw our first TV show while we were eating and of all things it was MTV’s “The Buried Life” It was the first TV show we had seen since we had been here and go figure in the middle of nowhere MTV would be on. After the pizza we were all ready to just get to East London so we packed up in the car and hit the road for another 4 hour drive back toward PE.
We made good time and arrived in East London around 7:00. The hostel was nice and pretty much empty. Patrick and I went to Spar and grabbed some snack and then we all just watched movies on the laptop and crashed. The next morning we got up and went to the beach for a couple hours. It was Human Rights Day so everyone had the day off and the beach was starting to get busy when we left at 11:30. We made it back to PE around 2:30 and thus ended a fun and memorable road trip on the Wild Coast. It was a lot of fun, and even with some sketchy situations we had a great time.
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