Surfing South Africa

By our anonymous, resident, travel writer.

Jakes Australia

I surfed J-Bay today - I've been waiting fifteen years and I'm kind of excited, but I'll get back to that later. We've been in South Africa almost three weeks now - what an incredible country! I had a pretty bad dose of the flu for the first few days so I didn't even get in the water when we first arrived in Cape Town. But what a place to pass the time. To call it beautiful would be like calling Bin Laden evasive. But, it is kind of difficult being a surfer there. Being on a peninsula, there are LOADS of spots that work on all swell directions and winds, it is just a bit of a mission getting to them. Getting from Kalk Bay on the east side (mini-pipeline reef break near a pretty little harbour in the shadow of a mountain) to Kommetjie on the west side (outside reef/point that holds serious size and multiple quality beach breaks nearby - it was in Rip Curl's 'Blowing Up', big, green, shifty barrels ) takes up to an hour. We had a look at all the spots and there were never more than a handful of people in the water. The lasting impression of the area is laid-back sleepy villages, clean green water, beautiful surroundings and a surprise around every corner. From baboons breaking into cars in Cape Point nature reserve to ostrichs on the road, totally ignoring the cars. And the food - excellent cheap seafood and wine and everyone seems totally stoked to meet a foreigner - why has it taken me this long to get here?

So I was starting to feel better and the comforts of Cape Town were not turning me into the lean, mean paddling machine that I had expected. Time to hit the road, but what road? Sitting at the tip of Africa you have got two coasts to explore, both with a multituide of spots. The decision was made for us by Spike at www.wavescape.co.za - a big long range swell moving up the east coast with light off-shore winds predicted for the next few days. It was time to get wet!
First stop was a little bay about five hours up the coast. We had been told about it by an American in the parking lot at Long Beach. It is too small to be on the map but is at the beginning of what they call the Garden Route - a particularly pretty bit of coastline with lots of holiday towns and things to do. You drive down a tight little valley to get there, through thick bush, and you don't see the wave until you are right above it. My God, it almost took my breath away. Four to six foot smokers breaking along a rocky point and into a small bay, a handful of houses along the point and not much else - my idea of heaven. My first surf of the trip was my best so far. It wasn't very long but I got a few sets, kind of got barrelled and didn't kill myself coming in over the rocks. It was a bit big for my lady but, bless her heart, she was happy to sit on the point, getting chatted up by some locals and taking a few photos.

There was a grommet contest on that weekend so we were forced to move on. I think that this is going to be a common theme on this trip. We have got so much time that we can stay at places as long as we like. You get to know the wave, get friendly with the locals, get your own stool at the local bar and next thing you know you've spent a week longer than you had planned. Oh well - life is tough.

OK we are getting closer to J-Bay now. I am sure that it is different in the summer but I still can't get over how empty this place is. It is winter but the weather is still warm enough for T-shirts. It is also peak swell season - so where are all the surfers? Is it SARS? The war? The perceived crime rate in this country? Sometimes I have been looking for other cars in the parking lot just so that I didn't have to surf by myself.

Next stop was St Francis Bay - a coastal resort town for people with mega-bucks. It also happens to have a world famous surf break right in the middle. Bruce's Beauties was the right point that they found in the first Endless Summer film (the one that I've only watched fifteen times!) I have been desperate to surf it - it has kind of been a Mecca for me, somewhere that I've always felt compelled to visit. It didn't break in the three days that we were there. The swell was too southerly to wrap into the bay properly, but it was perfect offshore and one evening I sat on the rocks above it, mind-surfing perfectly lined up two footers snapping down the point, too shallow to surf but I went away fulfilled anyway.

The swell was just right for Seal Point, another long right point break, about ten minutes down the coast from Bruce's. What a place! The waves just kept coming and I surfed until my arms were jelly and my neck looked like it had been ravaged by an oversexed teenager. It is isn't an intense wave but it is long and lined up, and you can do turn after turn and maybe get barrelled on the slightly shallower middle section. Somewhere else that was difficult to leave.
Another half hour up the coast brings you to J-Bay. Now I've heard a lot about this place, good and bad. Ugly town, ugly locals, crowds of hustling foreigners - maybe I came to the wrong J-Bay? OK, the town is not going to win any beauty awards. It is a tacky over-developed holiday town that caters for the lower end of the market - that just happens to have the world's best right point break! It was flat for the first two days but that was probably good - I was beginning to feel a bit surfed out and the weather had turned cold and nasty. We hired a little apartment just above Supertubes and chilled out. We can see the famous boardwalk from our balcony and there was a continuous stream of surfy types arriving, checking out the waves and then leaving looking depressed, to return an hour later to repeat the process. J-Bay is the kind of place that has been know to jack from flat to head high in an hour. On the evening of the second day a bit of swell started to show and I surfed shallow Supertubes with a handful of other desperate foreigners. Every twenty minutes or so a pretty decent set would come through and I got a good one all the way through the parking lot section. It is not like point breaks that I've surfed before. The angle of the point is very flat - any less and it would be one big close-out. It is really rocky too so getting in and out is not easy - and the rocks are sharp and covered in barnacles. You could always paddle down to the beach but that is almost a mile down the point! This is a serious wave but still very surfable if you aren't Joe Pro. If you can get out and get one to yourself, you just get to your feet, aim down the line and go for it. Yeeeehaaaaa!

The swell arrived this morning and I surfed for three hours. I counted forty-three people in the water but that was stretched out across four sections, from Boneyards at the top of the point through Supertubes, Tubes and down to the Point (which is actually near the end of the wave). The locals came out in force as you would expect after a flat spell. But they are not the locals that you would expect. There is no dole or social security in this country so the work-shy starve. There is not a lot of work in the area anyway so the locals that crawl out of the woodwork on a weekday morning are older, balder and scary in a kind of "if you snake me, I will hire someone to kill you" kind of way. They still paddle past you and take the best sets, surfing them really well, if a little stiffly. If you don't get snaked and get a wave then they won't drop in on you. I only saw one blatant drop in today and that was one local on another - the exchange afterwards suggesting that the two have got a long and violent history - "I'm going to kick your ass like I did in the winter of '86!"
I got a few good ones including two proper sets, one because someone didn't make a section and the other because I was sitting wide and an extra big set caught everyone else out of position. It was not classic J-Bay but would be have been the session of the decade at any of my local breaks back home. I didn't really surf the wave, I survived the drop and just tried to make it down the line without getting clipped. It is the fastest that I have ever travelled on a surfboard and if I wasn't on a budget, I would be down at one of the surf shops right now buying a 7' 2" pin-tail for tomorrow when the swell is supposed to peak. Maybe I will....

South Africa is such a special place. There is so much going on there, so many cultures rubbing up against each other as they just try to get along and make a buck or two. I saw wealth like never before and poverty that I hoped I would never see. But there is something else, some underlying energy to the place. Don't get me wrong, I am no mystical fruitcake but you can almost feel it in the air. I have spoken to other travellers and we decided that it has got to do with the country's past. The people have got through so much, years of oppression by the apartheid government, cut off from the outside world for a whole generation, years of violence and racial and political upheaval. Now that there is peace and a common purpose people are just so stoked to be free and so amazed that you have travelled across the world to see their country. And the waves - I could write a whole book about that but that would just get boring. I have to tell you a bit about.

To continue where I left off - J-Bay fired for a couple of days but the news must have got out because it got seriously crowded. I'm not sure where everyone came from but I guess that they must have been holed up all along the coast keeping an eye on the webcams and jumped in their cars when those lines started to show. God bless the internet.

So it was back in the car and north again. A long drive with a couple of days out to do touristy things (how many of you can say that you have ridden on the back of a bird?) We had stopped off for a bit in East London, which could not be more unlike London, England if it sprung a giant volcano downtown. East London is home to a rather infamous surf break called Nahoon Reef. If the name doesn't send tingles down your spine then you probably haven't seen the video clip that is all over the internet of the kid getting attacked by two Great Whites. That was Nahoon Reef, and no we didn't surf it.

A big, disorderly swell began to show and we headed north looking for somewhere that could handle it. I guess that this is one of the last frontiers of world surfing. It is called the Wild Coast, and that is not just some cheesy marketing gimmick that some suit in Cape Town thought up - its been called that for as long as anyone can remember. You will excuse me if I do the history teacher thing for a minute - I'm into this kind of thing. The area that we were headed into was formerly known as the Transkei - the stoners among you might have heard of Transkei Red - well this is where it comes from. Back in the dark days of Apartheid, this area was classed as an 'Independent Homeland' which was very convenient for the government because it meant that it didn't have to govern it or spend any money on infrastructure - but they could take full advantage of the cheap, unskilled and uneducated labour that spilled from the rural communities in search of work. If you wanted more from life than herding cows, you either grew dope or headed to the cities to work in a mine or a factory for near-slave labour rates. You had no rights in South Africa because you were classified as from the Transkei. It is no wonder that many of the stalwarts of the ant-apartheid movement, Nelson Mandela included, were born and raised in the Transkei's grassy hills.

It has been over a decade since the Transkei was absorbed back into South Africa, but except for a bit of road maintenance, not much money has been spent on bringing infrastructure up to the level of the rest of the country. To put things in perspective, out of the 400km of coastline, there are only two tarred roads that lead from the inland highway to the sea. We took one of these and found ourselves at Coffee Bay, deep in the Wild Coast, 1000km from Cape Town to the south and 300 km from Durban to the north. At first glance it doesn't seem like much, a tiny little village with a few mud huts, chickens in the heavily pot-holed road and near-naked kids waving at us and doing impromptu dances on the side of the road. There are a couple of hostels on the beach and we checked into one of them, a bit dubious of the mud hut that was going to be our sleeping quarters. Up to then we had been staying in pretty luxurious bed and breakfasts and the spiders in the thatched roof and the burn marks up the wall would take a bit of getting used to. Its amazing how you can relax with a full belly and a cold beer in your hand. The hostel had its own bar - well a mud hut with a huge fridge, a ragged pool table and every inch of the wall signed by what seemed like every backpacker to have set foot in Africa. It was the best bar we have visited so far! It turns out the owner of the hostel is Dave Malherbe, a name that sounded really familiar until someone mentioned that he won the world amateur surfing title a few years back. The next few days are just a fuzzy warm blur of mellow surfs, walks along pristine beaches with just a few cows for company, and late nights around the fire. Coffee Bay - I will be back!

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