November 09 WILD COAST trip

our route: Kakamas/Springbok/Kamieskroon/Garies [where we turned West and left the map and hugged the coast!] but we eventually ended up in Clanwilliam. Total road trip around 1000 miles.

On Tuesday evening, Willam and Gerda, our neighbours who live the other side of the Augrabies road to us arrived to discuss and plan our three day road trip down the Wast Coast, to Lamberts Bay...the purpose of this trip was to show us something o0f the wild west coast also known as the "diamond coast". Much of this land has, until recently been known as "Sperrgebiet" meaning a diamond area that was prohibited for public access, only recently has it been opened.
Willam is a fervent crayfish man, and there is a festival or "kreeffees" in Lamberts bay on Friday to celebrate the opening of the season.

whoops..wrong pictures of Willam cray fish hunting

We were given instructions to get ourselves licences from the Kakamas post office before we left on Thursday.And as we are not "campers" we were given a list of what to borrow and a list of food and drink to bring with us.
Thursday at 2.00 pm saw us loading up Willam`s overstuffed bakkie and heading off to Springbok, where we purchased HUGE quantities of ice for the three large ice boxes. We travelled the familiar Cape Town route but turned off after three hours at a place called Garies...this is right in the middle of the most deserty section, and we found ourselves on a dirt road heading towards the sea and a place that doesn't even appear on a map, called Groenriversmond [Green river mouth]. Turn off from the main highway at Garies onto the gravel road.



Either side of us, rolled semi scrubby desert and bush, which after about an hour turned into sandy hills with the cold blue Atlantic on our left.

We drove on this kind of track for 160 kilometers!

The track we were driving changed from loose gravel to pale sand and soon we saw the glint of the sea...it was by now around 6.00 pm and we knew that we had an hour of light before the sun went down.

I was quietly fretting over having enough time to erect the tent before the light left us..as it had been loaned from a friend who assured us that all the bits were in it and that it was very easy to put up so I hadn't done a practice run!!!!

It is difficult to explain quite how remote this coastland is...but from the moment the terrain changed to sea immediately to our right and gorsey dunescapes to our left...we saw NO houses at all...the very occasional tent nestled on the many sandy coves...But still we thundered on....Willam seemed unaware that we were no longer on a tarmac road...and Gerda and I were suffering from a roller coaster ride in the back.

Finally Willam started to shout "WE found it...SILVERDOSE!!!!" there on the edge of a deserted cove was a wooden shack....and we turned off the sand road into the dunes and parked next to the shack. One of Willams friends has been quietly [and illicitly] building this shack for the past 10 or so years...its made of driftwood and beach combed building materials and it meant that Bossy was OFF THE Hook on the camping front!!!!!!

" The beach at SilverDose"