Port Edward: A bridge too far

Speaking this past week to an old high school friend from Johannesburg about my recent trip to Pondoland, he said he’d always wanted to visit the Wild Coast. “It’s just so far,” he almost wailed.

The distance between Johannesburg and Port Edward, the KwaZulu-Natal gateway to the Wild Coast is 720km whereas the distance along the N2 between Stellenbosch and Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth) – a road I frequently travel by motorcycle – is 750km.

Nor will the Gauteng-based traveller have to drive through the erstwhile Transkei, a daunting prospect to many, to get there. Port Edward is 30km beyond Margate.

A bridge too far? Wild Coast is closer than you think

I’ve never actually visited Port Edward before, even though I’ve been going to the Wild Coast since I was a child in East London.

Port Edward entered my roadtripping gunsight last year while flying low-level back to Durban from Mkambati Game Reserve. I spotted a bare patch of ochre-coloured ground surrounded by lush savannah not far from the Mtamvuna River and asked the pilot what it was. “That’s the world’s smallest desert,” he replied.

On the north bank of the Mtamvuna is Port Edward and on the south, the Wild Coast Sun (www.suninternational.com). The bridge over it links KZN and the Eastern Cape.

As with Port Edward, I’d never been to the Wild Coast Sun, a Sun International resort that opened in 1981. My first “memory” of the place was vicarious: watching golfer Bernhard Langer on television driving off the remarkable elevated tee prior to winning the Wild Coast Sun Skins tournament in 1990. What a glorious course, I thought at the time. It still is.

Thanks to a confluence of coincidences, Sun International made contact a few months later…

…and in mid-March RoseMariè and I drove in the deepening gloom over that bridge my school buddy said was too far (having driven 660km from Bathurst and taken an unplanned detour) and checked into the four-star resort for the first of three nights.

What immediately struck me while pushing the luggage trolley to our room was that the place must be enormous because, as luck would have it, our room was one of the farthest from the lifts. I later averaged that distance at around 240 paces; a bit of a marathon when you’re to-ing and froing several times a day or have forgotten something in the car.

Still, the room looked out over the sea where a full moon was rising. Open the windows to hear the surf, pour a glass of wine, turn off the lights and… bliss.

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A resort for all seasons

I would strongly suggest making a mid-week booking if you want to make the most of the extensive range of facilities and guest activities, especially those that focus on kids such as the thrilling Wild Waves Water Park or the challenging 18-hole championship golf course.

There are 394 rooms in the hotel and our final night – the Friday before a three-day long weekend – saw all but four of them occupied.

The main mode of dining is buffet-style and, even when the hotel is packed, service is slick and the food flavourful and impeccably prepared.

Rose-Mariè had large portions of lamb curry each night while I opted for an enormous omelette every day at breakfast.

The first morning we followed Matt Williams’ directions to the Red Desert Nature Reserve (www.reddesertnaturereserve.co.za), a private-public initiative between landowners and Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife.

Williams is custodian and part-owner of the 180ha reserve, inside which the actual desert covers less than 11ha and is only 200m wide at its broadest.

“By the time you come across it, you’re halfway to the other side,” Rose-Mariè quipped.

Williams says desertification “was caused by human activity starting with early Stone Age people using fire to manufacture implements.

“Much later, Shaka… the famous king of the amaZulu… came this way to raid cattle from the other side of the river. He’d corral them here before heading back north. This caused overgrazing.”

The birdlife in the reserve is remarkable and a number of mammal species are present. These include leopard, caracal and spotted genet – all quite elusive – as well as bushbuck, reedbuck, grey and blue duiker.

There is a R40 entry fee and it’s based on an honesty system whereby visitors can visit the website to buy a ticket or use their phones to scan a QR code at the gate.

The day was warm and the sun high when we finished, so RoseMariè and I headed into town for a beer at a beachfront pub-restaurant called The Wreck, which takes its name from the sinking of the Portuguese sailing ship Sao Joao which ran aground in 1552.

About 500 of the 600 people on board made it to shore, not knowing the nightmare had only begun. A nearby memorial tells their story.

Unearthing ancient wonders

The Wild Coast Sun was built between the mouths of two rivers, the Mzamba and Mtamvuna, and it is the beach – specifically at low tide – that has been Benny Mbotho’s workplace for the past quarter century.

Mbotho is a guide and self-taught palaeontologist who shows hotel guests the panoply of fossils that include trees and ammonites that date 80 million years.

The so-called “petrified forest” is a series of trees carried downriver and embedded in rock by subsequent glacial movement.

He also pointed out the remains of “White Man’s Cave” in which many of the Sao Joao survivors took shelter before deciding to trek north to Delagoa Bay (Maputo).

According to the Port Edward memorial:

“Ahead of them lay a walk of hundreds of miles during which most succumbed to exposure, heat, exhaustion, thirst and starvation. They were subjected to attacks by wild animals and encounters with indigenous tribes. “Only 22 survived.”

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