On South Africa’s ‘Wild Coast’

Under the apricot clouds of a South African dawn, I stand in front of the Hole in the Wall — an island rock arch, sacred to the Bomvana people of the Eastern Cape. Listening to waves squeeze through the hole is like putting my ear to a shell. With the rhythmic boom and hush of surf, it’s easy to understand why the Bomvana regard the arch as a portal, a place where they can speak to ancestors who live beneath the sea. In the Xhosa language, they call it esiKhaleni, meaning “the place of weeping”. For me, it’s the beginning of a journey up the Wild Coast — a dramatic, storm-whipped littoral named for its freak waves and shipwrecks.

I wander through a beachside grove of milkwood trees. My guide, Div de Villiers, points out ashy remains from sacred rituals, and the plaintive call of a trumpeter hornbill. He explains how the Bomvana used to live further north in Pondoland, which is where we are headed. De Villiers talks about their folklore, and a belief in semi-human, ocean-living deities that have flippers for hands and feet: “Even now, after 40 years of working here, I’m surprised by what this landscape holds. People look at the Wild Coast and think it’s as quick and easy as a line on the map. It’s anything but.”

The previous day, we’d made the four-hour drive from East London to stay at a nearby backpackers’ lodge where drummers played in the bar at night. En route, we stopped in the village of Qunu at the gates of Nelson Mandela’s home, which he built after 27 years in prison. This was the landscape in which he was born and buried. “Nature was our playground,” wrote Mandela of his childhood here. “From these days I date my love of the veld, of open spaces, the simple beauties of nature, the clean line of the horizon.”

Over the next five nights, our route will wind up the Wild Coast, which begins at the mouth of the Great Kei river and continues along a rugged shoreline for almost 300km until the Mtamvuna river, the border of KwaZulu Natal. Our complete 750km journey will include stays at Umngazi, a family-owned resort 20km south of Port St Johns, and GweGwe Beach Lodge, new in late 2024. For me, GweGwe is the main draw — the only place to stay in a private 5,000-hectare concession tucked inside the larger Mkambati Nature Reserve, which in turn is the only formally protected area on Pondoland’s coast. This biodiversity hotspot has more than 200 plant species found nowhere else in the world. Our plan is to finish up at the luxurious Oyster Box in Durban, eating the hotel’s famous curry in view of the city’s scarlet-tipped lighthouse.

From the Hole in the Wall, we head off through rolling hills crested with rondavels, the region’s traditional round huts, which these days are painted in bubble-gum pinks and arsenic greens. A few are still roofed with thatch, most with corrugated iron. I enjoy the textured context an overland trip can give — the opportunity to stop for a photograph of an elegant horseman, or to buy fruit from a roadside seller — but we also have to stay vigilant, travelling only in daylight. While there are South Africans who self-drive this route, I’ve taken advice that a professional guide is the way to go for an outsider like me. De Villiers explains how much has changed in this “troubled land” over the past 20 years — forest destruction, unlicensed building, a rise in crime syndicates — and how urgent it is to value what remains: “A lot of idealists would like to see the entire Wild Coast conserved. That’s not going to happen.”

De Villiers, 62, knows what he is talking about. He was formerly employed by the South African government in environmental management, led an environmental crime unit for 16 years and now works as an environmental consultant, author and activist. The Wild Coast communities not only want to benefit from their resources — including titanium, and offshore oil and gas — but to protect the marine life (including their ocean-living deities) from seismic blasting. “The people here have a history of always sticking up for their land, against colonialism, and now challenges from big business,” he says, “I find that inspiring.”

With de Villiers’ candid talk of growing up in the apartheid years, we head for a museum in Mthatha — a succinct, movingly curated chronology of Mandela’s life. When I look in the visitors book, only nine foreigners have come in the past month. Then a group of schoolchildren arrive in red bow ties. Their teacher reads Mandela’s words from an exhibit: “There are few misfortunes in the world that you cannot turn into a personal triumph if you have the iron will and the necessary skill.”

We follow the N2 highway, then slip off for the coast where the veil of mizzle has lifted to reveal a lagoon. The water reflects a herd of Nguni cows with their long, lyre-shaped horns. The white-sand foreshore is so long it blends with the haze of surf.

Umngazi, which dates back to a 1906 trading station, is made up of sun-drenched guest cottages immersed in gardens brimming with agapanthus. We use it as a base to hike to nearby villages, through guava fields where sunbirds hang from trees like jewels. A journey upriver reveals African fish eagles, and black-and-white pied kingfishers balancing on reeds. I head out to breathe the salted air on a beach walk — a gentle preamble, it turns out, to the highlight of this Wild Coast journey: GweGwe Beach Lodge.

It’s a long afternoon’s drive from Umngazi and on our approach, the hills flatten out into rolling grasslands. As we cross a ford into the Mkambati reserve, de Villiers points to gorges fringed with clinging palms. “Tomorrow,” he says, “you’ll see what this place should look like without human impact. With every [river] bend, there’s another spectacular waterfall hidden in the forest. It’s like turning the pages of a picture book.”

There’s a reason for the lack of settlements: from 1922 until 1959, Mkambati functioned as a leper colony. After a cure was found, the hospital became a tuberculosis clinic. In 1977, the coastal section of Mkambati was declared a nature reserve and restocked with fauna, including alien species like oryx and giraffe, and tourists came on hunting safaris. This proved unsustainable and ended in the 1980s with the reserve being managed for ecotourism by the Eastern Cape Department of Nature.

As part of the restitution process post-apartheid, seven of the Mpondo communities originally forced out by the leper colony had their land returned, a process finalised in 2004. Those seven communities pulled together and elected to continue running Mkambati as a protected area, using tourism to generate jobs and income.

Colin Bell, co-founder of Natural Selection Safaris, which now has 26 lodges and camps in South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, won the tender to develop a small hotel, though it has been a long process. “23 years ago, I made a promise to the community,” he says. “I’ve been trying to get GweGwe up and running ever since, which because of complex red tape — to align the private sector with government and communities — was far more complicated than just building a lodge.”

I settle into reading beside a fire in my cottage, which is one of nine strikingly elegant, glass-fronted suites. In June and July, the ocean in front boils with the sardine run — a migration that allows other species to spawn, attracting humpbacks. I’ve arrived in a November storm, but while the unsettled weather may conceal any breaching whales, it brings its own mood, including a ghostly palette against which any colour — a blaze of Burchell’s zebras, the hot pinks of blooming bugle lilies — pops with a strange luminescence. “Never forget our people were removed from this landscape,” says Mthembu Ntsekeni, chairman of the Mkambati Land Trust, who gives me the local history. “We’ll always believe our ancestors are living in the water, caves and forests. It is part of who we are.”

The next day, the eland and hartebeest we hope to see are hunkering out of the weather. We decide it’s too wet to hike to the KwaDlambu gorge — the Super Bowl, as this natural amphitheatre is known, fringed with yellowwoods and mahogany. Nor can we kayak the Mtentu river mangroves. We head instead for Mkambati waterfall. From this horseshoe brink where freshwater plunges into the ocean, I look for the line between river and sea, between sea and sky. The blurring reminds me of the uncanny sensation I get on the west coast of Ireland: this is a thin place, where the spiritual feels near.

We follow our local guide, Anelka Ntsikelelo, into the riverine gully behind. Aloe spears and trembling palms burst up like shuttlecocks, the growth so abundant, it’s as if I can hear the leaves groan with growing. It’s too wet to see the green and red wings of a Knysna turaco high in the canopy, but the deeper we hike into the greening, the stronger the feeling of stepping back in time. Ntsikelelo shows me a creamy-budded plant. “We call this impepho. We burn it as incense to raise our ancestors.” He picks some wild berries — “num-num”, which GweGwe’s chef, Sanele Duma, will later use to make a delicious, fragrant cheesecake.

We scramble into a complex of sandstone overhangs. A cave floor is scattered with crushed shells from rituals, one side open to the river five metres below. Ntsikelelo urges me towards the edge to see more of the cascading Strandloper Falls. With the grace of a bird, he leaps into the black water below, startling a chorus of whistling frogs.

The next evening, we explore the other end of the reserve and a stone manor house belonging to the priest who once cared for the lepers. When I put my face to the rain-washed windows to peer into the interior, de Villiers tells a story of when he stayed here in 1996. In the night, he heard footsteps and jangling keys. Thinking it was the caretaker, he walked to the kitchen. The footsteps stopped, but only momentarily. So he crawled down the corridor on his belly to investigate further, but there was no-one there. The next day, when he signed the visitors’ book, two earlier entries recorded the same noises echoing down the passage.

I turn in for the night at GweGwe, my last before our Durban curry. I listen to the waves, aware of everything this journey is revealing and concealing. I wonder what kind of traveller might come all the way out here, given this isn’t the glitzy big five safari South Africa is better known for, but an experience more complex and historically nuanced.

I watch a film about Wild Coast activists who took on (and defeated) plans for seismic oil and gas exploration. I consider the layers that lie beneath the alluring name — the Wild Coast — which drew me here in the first place. I think of the blurred line on the horizon merging land and water, of the ancestors in the ocean. When I turn off my light, I’m not scared of the ghosts, but profoundly comforted by where I am. In this ruptured world, it’s a beautiful thing to find hope where people and place are still tightly bound, where sacred nature is still hanging on.

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