Three taxis, $55, and a $50 US-passport tax just to cross the Zambian border into Livingstone — and that’s before I even got on the plane. That’s how this leg started. Colm and Caitlin, my Irish travel companions, sailed through the border checkpoint for free while I stood there watching my wallet take another hit. The US curse is real and it is expensive.
By the time we landed in Port Elizabeth, I was already running on fumes. A woman named Margret let me sleep in her daughter’s room for the night, fed me pizza, and let me sit by the pool with a glass of wine. For about twelve hours, everything was fine. You know what that means in Africa.
The Nomad Tours truck showed up five hours late. Five. Hours. Their own printed itinerary said 8am. It was 1pm when the thing finally rolled in, and we’d already bought our own lunch — which was supposed to be included. When we got on board and met the rest of the group, I had to double-check that I hadn’t accidentally signed up for a family holiday. Two ten-year-old girls. A late-60s German couple who spoke no English. This from a company whose own website talks about being “up to your elbows in mud rescuing your sinking truck.” Sure.
I stuck with Nomad exactly long enough to reach Tsitsikamma National Park, where I promptly hotwired a stranger’s car in the parking lot. Not metaphorically. A guy had dropped his keys off Bloukrans Bridge mid-bungee jump, and this ancient Russian matchbox car was stranded in the lot. Someone asked if I knew anything about cars. Former GM engineer. Four wires on the ignition. Ten minutes and a filed-down hairpin later — with a guy named Clive and about fifteen locals watching — I had the thing running. Rigged up a toggle switch with electrical tape for the ignition. Took my payment in beer. Missed dinner entirely.
The next morning I jumped off the bridge myself.
Bloukrans Bridge. 216 meters above the Bloukrans River. Highest land-based bungee jump on the planet. You pay $115 USD, they weigh you (I was 92kg, down 15 pounds from home — silver linings), they strap cushy red ankle cuffs on your legs and tie a nylon tow strap around them that looks exactly like the one I keep in the back of my Jeep for pulling cars out of ditches. Then they walk you out on a catwalk under the road surface where everything — every single thing — is grated metal with chain-link on the sides. No solid ground to retreat to. Anywhere.
5… 4… 3… (oh shit)… 2… (what the HELL am I doing)… 1… and then I just bent my knees and everything south of the equator heard me scream. I was pinwheeling my arms trying to find balance while still horizontal, then pointed head-first into the canyon, and then — strangely — it got peaceful. The ground came into focus, the “accidental falling” sensation dissolved, and for a few seconds it was just free fall. Then the bungee caught. Then it threw me back up 30 meters and I fell again. Four times total before I was just hanging 190 meters below the bridge with blood rushing to my head, grinning like an idiot.
Colm took approximately ten minutes on the edge, delivered a continuous stream of profanity that I could hear from the far side of the bridge, and eventually had the jump assistant say the words: “Dude, you have to let go of me.” They got him to the edge, counted to four, and pushed. Caitlin and I laughed ourselves hoarse.
That afternoon I walked the Otter Trail at Tsitsikamma — four hours along a coastline that doesn’t look like anything else I’ve seen in Africa. No sand beaches. Jagged sheets of rock set on edge, the southern ocean hammering them from every direction, spray reaching us on the cliff path. We spotted a huge pod of dolphins and a whale offshore. By the time I got back to the trailhead I’d completely forgotten I was furious at Nomad. The ocean has a way of doing that.
Nomad did not pick us up at 4:30 as agreed. Or at 5:00. The truck showed up at 6pm, an hour and a half late, in the cold, while I was sprinting to the bathroom every fifteen minutes with a case of what Africa travelers know simply as Africa Arse. I was feverish, cramping, dehydrated, and done. That night I decided I was leaving the tour in the morning and not paying for it.
Clive — who runs Bloukrans Backpackers right at the river — drove us to Plettenberg Bay the next morning and basically saved the rest of the trip. He knew everyone on the Garden Route, found us an Avis rental car, waited with us at the hotel, and called ahead to get me a discounted shark dive in Mossel Bay. The man is a connector in the best possible sense. If you’re on the Garden Route, find Clive.
The rental car turned out to be a manual-transmission Chevy Spark. Right-hand drive. I hadn’t driven a stick in over ten years. Now I had to do it left-handed, on the left side of the road, with Colm in the passenger seat watching me like a driving examiner who’d already decided I was failing. We took a whale watching boat out of Plettenberg Bay first — the “Fat Boy” — and it delivered immediately. A right whale mother and calf came within a few feet of the hull. Several more right whales through the afternoon. A couple of dolphin pods. The sun was out and the swells were light and for a few hours everything was right with the world. I bought a pair of knock-off “Oakey’s” from a table vendor for $7 on the way back to the car. They were terrible and they were perfect.
Mossel Bay, two days later. Great white sharks. The dive operation — White Shark Africa — runs a surface cage off the back of a boat. You don’t scuba. You free-dive down when they call the shark, hold your breath, and look. The group the day before had seen nothing. Zero sharks. The bay was in the middle of its annual migration out. I was encouraged.
We got a juvenile female, about 2.5 to 3 meters. Not a full adult — those run 4.5 to 5 meters — but large enough that when she came straight at the cage from the front and I shoved myself underwater, the word “juvenile” stopped being a comfort. One of the other divers got seasick and chummed the water herself. That brought the shark back around. I heard the spotter shout “FROM THE FRONT — divers down” and went under and there she was: grey and white, all teeth, coming straight at me. She hit the cage twice to my right. I giggled. Genuinely giggled, underwater, at a great white shark. That’s what fear and adrenaline and total amazement do to a person.
The drive south to Simons Town that evening nearly ended the friendship. Colm was unraveling in the passenger seat, convinced I couldn’t handle left-side driving, refusing to navigate as leverage to make me hand over the wheel. I was running on no sleep and the tail end of a stomach bug. We made it. The backpackers hostel had a long balcony overlooking the harbor with the South African Navy base across the water, and I slept almost through the night for the first time in days.
Next morning: African penguins at Boulder’s Beach, waddling around the rocks in full sunlight. Then south to the Cape of Good Hope. The weather rolled in right on cue — because TIA, always — but cleared by the time we finished lunch and a glass of Stellenbosch Chardonnay at the restaurant at the base. We hiked up to the old lighthouse and then down to the new one, wind trying to knock us sideways the whole way. Standing there at the southwestern tip of the continent, watching the Atlantic and Indian Oceans collide, I went quiet in a way that surprised me. Seven weeks behind me — Egypt, Nairobi, Tanzania, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Zambia — and it all just landed at once. Colm and Caitlin thought something was wrong. Nothing was wrong.
The drive back up the coast was one of those drives. Cliff roads with thousand-foot drops. The tallest lighthouse on the African coast. Three-meter waves with surfers working them in the golden last light. The Africa Arse tried to make a comeback over a sushi dinner near Cape Town, but I ate anyway. Some things are worth the risk.
The next morning I woke up in Stellenbosch, alone in a vineyard suite at Cultivar Guest Lodge, with the sun coming through the window and mountains in the distance and no truck to wait for. I had twelve different wines at Glen Carlou — a private tasting for $8 because I was the only one there on a Tuesday morning, the sommelier and her trainee running through the whole flight with me — and then drove into Cape Town with a very good buzz and a serious flight problem. I’d accidentally booked my Cape Town to Johannesburg connection for the wrong day. The airline’s hold music played at me for 35 minutes, three times, before hanging up each time. I missed the flight. Sorted it at the airport the next morning for the price difference and a massive argument. Classic finish.
Table Mountain got climbed (rode the cable car up, hiked down — the trail description called it a walk, it was not entirely a walk), there was a dinner at Mamma Africa where I worked through kudu, crocodile, ostrich, and springbok on one plate, and then a long walk up Long Street from bar to bar before calling it a night. Sixteen and a half hours to Atlanta the next day. Two more to Detroit. Done.
Eight weeks, bow to stern, starboard side. I have no regrets. Except maybe Nomad Tours.
Ditch the tour operator early if your gut says to. Nomad’s own marketing promised chaos and adventure for the young and fit — and delivered a five-hour late pickup, mayonnaise sandwiches, and a 68-year-old German couple. I should have walked at Port Elizabeth. Find Clive at Bloukrans Backpackers instead and let him sort your logistics.
The Bloukrans bungee costs $115 USD and takes about 60 seconds of actual airtime — it’s worth every cent, but eat something first, because the adrenaline crash at the bottom is real and you’ll be starving.
White Shark Africa in Mossel Bay is the real deal, but go early in the season — by October the sharks are already migrating out and you’re rolling the dice. August or September is safer for sightings.
A right-hand drive manual on the left side of the road is not that hard — but if you haven’t driven a stick in ten years, maybe practice in a parking lot before jumping onto the N2 with a nervous Irishman riding shotgun.
Glen Carlou winery outside Stellenbosch: twelve wines, $8, and if you go on a weekday morning you might have the whole tasting room to yourself. That’s not a tip, that’s a public service announcement.
Got questions about the Garden Route, the shark dive, or how to detach from a bad tour group without losing your mind? Drop them to the Ask WildWilliam AI — it’s got the full rundown from 40-plus countries of getting this stuff right and wrong, and it’ll give you a straight answer.