Touring the Southern Cape Coast

By DAVID HILL

For 1100km along the southeast coast of South Africa, the Indian Ocean folds onto beaches of tawny sand. Inland stretch the bare, beautiful plateaux of the Little Karoo, plus green river valleys packed with vineyards.

Packed also with trees, national parks and wildflowers, this is the famous Garden Route, along the main highway from East London to Cape Town.

You can travel the Garden Route in a hire car, taking a week to detour down craft trails and wine routes. Or you can spend two days on a bus. Cupped around the mouth of the Buffalo River, East London is a busy, Hamilton-sized place of beaches and art deco waterfront buildings. If you're in East London at any time, see the museum. It's one of the best in the country, with displays of 200,000-year-old human footprints and the brilliant Xhosa beadwork that also sells in a craft market at the old Lock Street Jail.

For the easy four-hour drive from East London to Port Elizabeth, the Garden Route dips and rises across swelling hills with clumps of bush, Xhosa kraals (fenced compounds) and tall red aloe flowers. Port Elizabeth spreads itself along a series of placid sandy beaches complete with pier on which you can stroll in midsummer sunlight at 4.45 am. The 700km from Port Elizabeth to Cape Town means more surf beaches, green valleys, blue stony hills, and amazing rock-buttressed gorges down which rivers throw themselves.

There are roadsides crammed with cream and white wildflowers and water-lily ponds amid a cool, green forest that presses up to the road for 20km at a time - it all reminds you why this is called the Garden Route.

Caravan Parks, B&Bs, bird sanctuaries, horse treks, cycle and walking tracks, along with the craft and wine trails are well-signposted. It's another 70km to Cape Town, with its waterfront of restored 19th-century houses, and Table Mountain standing over the city.

We arrived the day after the New Zealand cricketers had lost yet another game to South Africa. And somebody was telling us our time on the Garden Route was over.

* Cars can be hired from about $45 a day, and a bus fare from East London to Cape Town costs about $90.