The Garden Route is one of the most beautiful stretches of coastline in South Africa. It is also one of the strangest. Visitors arrive expecting beaches, forests, surf and holiday towns. Those things certainly exist. What they don’t expect is that every town seems to have developed its own peculiar personality disorder.

Nowhere illustrates this better than Victoria Bay.

Victoria Bay is a magnificent accident hidden at the bottom of a steep valley where the sun only remembers your existence sometime around 10:30 in the morning. It has one of the best right-hand point breaks in the country, a beach that looks like it belongs on a postcard and a microclimate that appears to have been designed by somebody with a dark sense of humour.

On a recent winter morning I was standing on the beach wearing what can only be described as my entire wardrobe. Four jackets, and a beanie. The wind was blowing down the valley with conviction, the sea looked horrible, and the handful of surfers checking the waves all wore the expression of people who had made several poor decisions in a row.

Around this time a fisherman arrived from Mossel Bay. He stepped out wearing shorts and a T-shirt. We got chatting.

“Mosselbaai is baie warm,” he explained in Afrikaans, by way of justification for his complete lack of winter clothing.

Unfortunately for him, Mossel Bay was more than forty kilometres away and therefore of little practical value. Within minutes he was visibly freezing. He had no jersey, no jacket and, judging by the increasingly desperate look on his face, no backup plan. Realising that endurance alone was not going to solve the problem, he gathered his fishing gear and marched purposefully towards the tip of the point, the one place in Victoria Bay where the sun arrives slightly earlier than everywhere else.

Adin Masencamp, Rip Curl Vic Bay Surf Pro, Victoria Bay. Photo by Kody McGregor/World Surf League

The Victoria Bay Climate

For reasons known only to meteorologists and minor deities, Victoria Bay has developed its own weather system. While George is enjoying a pleasant morning and Mossel Bay is apparently basking in tropical conditions, Vic Bay spends much of winter manufacturing refrigerated air and firing it directly down the valley at the innocent. Until mid-morning the beach remains trapped in shadow while everyone stares hopefully towards the eastern headland waiting for the first patch of sunlight to appear.

Then, almost without warning, the entire place changes. Jackets come off, coffee is abandoned and surfers paddle out. The same people who were contemplating moving to Durban an hour earlier suddenly begin telling everyone what a magnificent day it is.

This is how this place traps you.

The Wilderness Roadworks

No visit to Victoria Bay is complete without passing through the Wilderness roadworks. Most people refer to them as roadworks, which implies an eventual conclusion. There is very little evidence to support such optimism.

Entire generations have been born, completed school, raised families and retired while waiting for sections of the N2 to be finished. The remarkable thing is that the project doesn’t seem to be getting smaller. It appears to be expanding. What started as roadworks around Wilderness has gradually spread eastwards. Every year fresh stretches of highway appear to fall under its influence. Barriers multiply, temporary lanes emerge, stop-go signs appear in new locations and dust settles over previously untouched territory. The latest evidence suggests the project is now extending its reach towards Sedgefield, although nobody seems entirely certain where it will stop.

The Karatara Theory

Sedgefield is lovely. The beaches are lovely, the lagoon is lovely, the forests are lovely and the people are lovely. In fact, Sedgefield is so relentlessly pleasant that it occasionally feels as though somebody has edited out all of life’s rough edges.

Perhaps that is why nearby Karatara continues to occupy such an outsized place in local folklore. Tucked away on the edge of the forest and wrapped in enough history and mystery to support a thousand stories, Karatara has become the default explanation for anything on the Garden Route that nobody can quite explain. The continuing expansion of the Wilderness roadworks? Maybe Karatara. Victoria Bay being colder than that thing we don’t talk about? Possibly Karatara. Perfectly sensible conversations taking unexpected turns somewhere between Wilderness and Knysna? Almost certainly Karatara.

The people of Karatara are, of course, entirely innocent. Yet there is something reassuring about knowing there is a small settlement tucked away near the forest that can absorb responsibility for mysteries that refuse to be solved.

The Cosmic Undertow

Wilderness has always attracted a particular type of person. If you were searching for a place to disappear for a few years, reconnect with the universe, start making pottery, write a novel, discover yourself, discover someone else or discover an entirely new dimension, Wilderness would be a logical destination.

During a recent visit I found myself at a gathering that was perfectly pleasant and yet faintly unnerving. Nobody was doing anything wrong. Everyone was friendly. Conversations were polite. People smiled often. Yet there was something in the eyes of many of those present that suggested they had seen things or perhaps experienced realities unavailable to the rest of us.

The feeling is difficult to explain because it isn’t madness, eccentricity or counterculture. It is something subtler than that. You find yourself talking about ordinary subjects such as surf, weather, property prices or rugby, only to realise that the person opposite you appears to be operating from a completely different set of assumptions about existence itself.

Perhaps that is Wilderness’s greatest achievement. In a country where most towns feel broadly familiar, Wilderness retains a faint cosmic undertow. Everything appears normal on the surface, yet every now and then you catch a glimpse of something deeper moving beneath it.

The undertow is particularly noticeable at braais. At some point during the evening somebody will produce a guitar and everyone will begin singing a song with a tune you recognise immediately. The difficulty arises when you realise that none of the words make any sense. Sometimes the lyrics are in code. Sometimes they appear to be in another language entirely. Occasionally they seem to originate from another civilisation, yet everyone joins in with complete confidence. If Bennie and the Jets was suddenly performed in Upper Klingon, most attendees would simply nod appreciatively and ask for another verse. It;s not enough to make you leave. Just enough to make you take a long pull on the nearest Zamalek, drag on a Styvie Red and nod to the person next to you in quiet acquiescence.

 Herolds Bay, George, South Africa. (Photo by Kody McGregor/World Surf League)

Herolds Bay

Herolds Bay presents another mystery. Every house appears occupied, every driveway contains expensive vehicles and every balcony contains outdoor furniture, yet nobody seems to be there.

You can drive through on a perfect afternoon and encounter almost no one. The houses stare silently out towards the ocean as if awaiting instructions, giving the entire suburb the curious feeling of being permanently populated and completely deserted at exactly the same time.

 Herolds Bay, George, South Africa. (Photo by Kody McGregor/World Surf League)

The Good Life

The truly irritating thing about the Garden Route is that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it is incredibly easy to love.

Victoria Bay itself produces genuinely excellent waves when the swell arrives. The point can turn on and deliver long, mechanical walls that make average surfers feel competent and good surfers look unfairly talented. Across the region there are enough quality waves to keep most surfers occupied indefinitely, which is probably why so many of them never leave.

The Pottery has somehow become one of those rare venues that gets everything right. It hosts surf events, functions, gatherings and post-heat debriefings with equal ease. The coffee is good, the atmosphere is good and there always seems to be somebody interesting standing around discussing either surfboards, business, rugby or all three simultaneously.

The local SPAR deserves its own chapter. The Garden Route, however, appears to have quietly assembled one of the finest supermarket networks in the country. You walk in looking for milk and leave forty minutes later carrying imported cheese, craft biltong, a magazine, a steak, three pastries and a renewed faith in retail.

The region also knows how to get behind its own people. When there is a rugby match on, a major surf contest is running or one of the local heroes is doing something noteworthy, the entire area seems to come alive. Names such as Sean Holmes, David Pfaff, Steven and Forest Hair, Suede Schalkwyk and countless others are woven into the fabric of the local surf scene. There is still enough small-town DNA here that people genuinely care when one of their own does well.

For a while you find yourself completely seduced by it all. The waves are firing, The Pottery is humming, the local SPAR continues its improbable assault on retail excellence and the Garden Route starts to feel like one of the best places on earth. Then somebody invites you to a braai in Wilderness and, just as you are settling comfortably into the joie de vivre of the place, you notice a man in the corner giving a thousand-yard stare to a bowl of potato salad.

 George, South Africa. (Photo by Kody McGregor/World Surf League)

Coming Back

Despite the freezing mornings, the valley winds, the prehistoric roadworks, the mysteries of Karatara, the cosmic undertow of Wilderness, the invisible residents of Herolds Bay and the occasional average burger, people keep returning.

The reason is simple. The Garden Route remains one of the most spectacular places in South Africa. Victoria Bay itself is absurdly beautiful. The wave is world-class, the scenery is ridiculous and the ocean is magnificent. Every strange little quirk somehow becomes part of the experience.

You arrive intending to stay for a few days. You leave slightly confused, mildly unsettled, but definitely coming back.

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