No way! We’re not going home today. Let’s do something new. We woke up in Knysna and although we can easily reach our home town Stellenbosch from here, we are still in the mood for more adventure. We usually plan most of our tours to the day (otherwise you end up being disappointed) but, nowadays, we leave some room for ad-hoc activities and stay-overs. We are now in the part of the tour that has no plan. And that is exciting!
We know Mossel Bay actually quite well because we frequent Hartenbos, our favourite summer holiday place, a lot. Many days we will just drive over and enjoy a coffee, ice cream or seafood platter at one of the many places in Mossel Bay. But because we never stay in Mossel Bay (except for one or two cases which were many years ago), we have little experience of the town from that point of view. So we decide to give it a go.
Anette does most of our bookings and on-the-road navigation (we do our planning as a team), and she is quick to realise that, due to Covid, many of the upmarket places to stay in Mossel Bay are quite cheap. These accommodations are actually focussing on foreign tourists and they are currently nowhere to be seen. She finds a nice, affordable place named Lavandula Manor up on the hill with a great view of the bay.
We drive from Knysna to Mossel Bay on the N2, passing beautiful places like Sedgefield, Wilderness, George and Groot Brakrivier. We know most of these places quite well from our summer holidays but I find the small town of Groot Brakrivier particularly sweet. The Groot Brak River runs through town and forms a lagoon where it runs into the ocean. The river has its own island with a number of beach houses on it and an old bridge connecting it to the town. It’s got a nice beach as well. Many of its houses are built on the green hillsides surrounding the river and overlooking the older parts of town. The town has a number of restaurants of which we visit the Die Ou Pastorie tea garden a lot.
We book into Lavandula Manor and our host, Lize Pretorius, makes it really easy for us to settle in and feel at home. Now remember, when we left Klaarstroom 2 days ago, it had started to snow on the Swartberg mountains. We always visit the Mossel Bay area in summer, so we are totally surprised as we walk out onto the patio with the view of the bay and actually see snow on the mountains behind the bay (that is not even the Swartberg mountain range but mountains between that and the ocean)! We didn’t know that it could ever snow there. So even to us who visit Mossel Bay regularly, this is something new and we are really glad we have decided to stop here.
Our accommodation is luxurious and with the cold outside we immediately make a fire in the fireplace and eat some take-aways we bought earlier. Then to bed.
We get up, do our morning coffee ritual whilst enjoying the view, and then decide that this is a very nice place and that we will stay another day. This is the advantage of travelling without an itenarary. Lize has no problem with giving us another night. During the day we try the Krotoa and the Carola Ann coffee shops opposite each other in Marsh Street. Both are recommended. We spend the evening enjoying seafood at the Kingfisher which is on the beach close to the lighthouse. We visit them at least once a year and it is delicious as always.
We are already in bed and still we do not know where we will go tomorrow. But this does not bother us – we are now in the ad libitum part of this tour. Who knows what tomorrow will bring…?
