There may be worse stretches of road that I don’t know of, but in my world the most unpleasant is the N2 highway between the Hermanus turn-off and Mossel Bay. For the first bit from Cape Town, you still see False Bay. Then the road snakes through the mountains past the edge of Grabouw, but beyond the Hermanus turnoff, it’s a vast desert of fields in various shades of dust and heat. It’s a three-hour chasm you want to cross safely, with minimum damage to your wallet, both in terms of petrol expenses and traffic fines.
After years of driving this gauntlet, I recently explored the stuff in between to see if there’s value in making the journey part of the holiday. About 160 kilometres after leaving the shadow of Table Mountain, Riviersonderend is the first logical place to stop. In the middle of the town, next to the N2, I found a bakery called Ou Meul which serves pies and coffee. Now, I consider myself a bit of a coffee and pie snob and the bobotie pie and flat-white coffee passed the test with flying colours.
Shortly before Swellendam (about 55 kilometres down the road), I left the N2 and took the gravel road to Malgas. I crossed the Breede River by pontoon, the last hand-operated one in South Africa, and took the road to Witsand. I stayed at Breede River Lodge, right on the river mouth. Ask for the rooms facing the marina – if they were any closer to the water you’d have to swim from the door to the bed. Here, I braaied a giant cob on a spit and listened to the locals’ stories of peaceful Zambezi sharks in the river. (I took these tales with a generous pinch of braai salt.)
The next day I drove through Vermaaklikheid. I met a gentleman called Andries Grootlieg (Andries Big Lie) at the post office, where I was buying fishing permits. After a successful hour of fishing for a braai, I retired for the night to Oshoek River Farm on the banks of the Duiwenhoks River where, I was told by Andries, Princess Diana once stayed.
A peril of travelling the back roads is that when you wake up in a house with a bare kitchen, there’s often no shop nearby. Without even coffee, I went straight to a nearby farm for a breakfast of prickly pears, ripe and fresh from the tree (with the farmer’s blessing). Lunch was alikreukel (giant periwinkle), personally mined from the sea at Heuningnesbaai near Jongensfontein and then cooked in a potjie. The day finished with a sundowner water-ski on the Goukou River at Stilbaai.
Stilbaai is a relaxing hour’s drive from Mossel Bay, so I woke at 05h30 the next morning to surf before hitting the road. It was a great start to the day, but not as great as the rest of the day, which was spent drinking gin at Inverroche. The small distillery makes a high-quality, fynbos-infused gin and, immune to mosquitoes, I spent another night in Stilbaai.
My journey ended with lunch the next day in Mossel Bay at Kaai 4 Braai Restaurant, a bushveld lapa on the edge of the ocean. By taking the road less travelled I’d turned an unpleasant journey into a great road trip. Because great road trips are just like great braai burgers: it’s not really about what’s on each end, it’s about the stuff in between.
