Rare gem ripe for a visit
Explore SA’s most glorious tourism bouquet this holiday: the Eastern Cape’s Border region
THE END-OF-YEAR holiday season is finally upon us. Two weeks from now, traffic volumes on the roads, railway lines and air space will increase exponentially with teeming multitudes headed for different destinations for much-deserved rest, play, reflection and reconnection with long-last-seen friends and loved ones.
South Africa is endowed with unique natural and human-made spaces for any of these pursuits. Consider our agreeable weather during this period and for the most part sunny with occasional rain, a diverse flora and fauna, the roaring seas, majestic mountains, hills and plains, and the many historical sites that bear witness to the titanic struggle that was the midwife of our freedom.
Little explored by fellow nationals and citizens from the rest of the world, Buffalo City is arguably one of South Africa’s rarest tourist bouquets.
A bustling city with modern amenities and a bucolic rural landscape, its 68km coastline is renowned for vast expanses of breathtakingly turquoise water and unpolluted beaches.
Driving along this coastline and witnessing the expansive ocean with its constant back and forward formation of gigantic, multi-storey waves of blue and white bubbles and strands can be truly therapeutic and meditative.
Buffalo City is steeped in a wealth of ancient and recent history which opens up vistas to our understanding of the human species and the natural world more broadly.
In 1964, for example, human fossil footprints that are thought to be more than 200 000 years old – the oldest in the world – were discovered at the Bat’s Cave in the Nahoon Point Nature Reserve.
The municipality has built a boardwalk atop a dune forest of indigenous vegetation from where visitors can enter the coves or otherwise watch dolphins, an assortment of birds and the occasional sea traffic at a comfortable distance from the coastline.
During June and July, the coast is witness to a festival of gannets, sharks and whales that come to feed on unsuspecting families of sardines on their annual run.
Also in the city is the country’s oldest aquarium, the East London Aquarium, established in December 1931, home to 400 species of marine and fresh-water life. Whale watchers fraternise on the aquarium deck to watch the wonder of the migrating Southern Right whales.
Another of the city’s and the country’s heritage sites is the East London Natural History Museum.
Established in 1921, it features the natural and, of course, aspects of the Eastern Cape and wider national colonial history which, at the time of the museum’s founding, would have been considered as natural as the environment on which it is built.
It houses the only known dodo egg in the world and a specimen of the coelacanth fish, previously thought to be extinct.
The modest East London airport hosts between 20 and 30 flights a day. Well-known hotel and BnB brand names are on the increase as are affordable lodges that provide greater privacy in and outside the city.
An hour’s drive away, south-west of East London, is King William’s Town, the former missionary station which became the British military headquarters in 1835 and a centre for German settlement.
It paved the way for the establishment of East London, which began with the port – and remains South Africa’s only river port – after the frontier war of 1846-47, the so-called War of the Axe.
At the town’s entrance is the Steve Biko Garden of Remembrance, formerly known as the Ginsberg cemetery, where the Black Consciousness leader, alongside victims of the September 1992 Bisho massacre and many other residents of the town, are interred.
A stone’s throw away is another historical monument, the burial grounds of other eminent activists, Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge, both murdered by the apartheid regime in the 1980s. The Garden of Remembrance is one of the must-go-to places to pay respects to our Struggle heroes and heroines.
In the town, you will also come across bits and pieces of tired but interesting vignettes. Take, for instance, the immortalised story of Huberta the Hippo, whose taxidermied body was mounted at the Amathole Museum in the town.
Huberta was believed to have left the uMhlathuze lagoon in Richards Bay in November 1928, eventually reaching East London, 1 600km away, three years later in 1931. A month later, she was shot dead by a group of farmers, who were arrested and fined £25 for shooting “royal and protected game” following a public outcry occasioned by a jazzed-up report in the Natal Mercury on November 23,1928.
Huberta’s body was sent to a taxidermist in London and would be greeted by more than 20 000 people on its return to East London, en route to the Amathole Museum, where she remains mounted to this day.
From King, you can take an hourand-a-half’s drive to Makhanda, formerly Grahamstown, named after Lieutenant-Colonel John Graham.
Makhanda was one of the first towns established by the British in South Africa. It was around there that the Fourth Frontier War of 1811-1812 was bitterly fought, with Graham mercilessly butchering thousands of people in January and February of 1812 and displacing another 20 000 after driving them across the Fish River.
Along the way are signposts directing you to forts, places where military garrisons and signal towers once stood. Obey the signs and call on them.
On your return, you will have gained more knowledge about our country, and be refreshed and more energised to take on the new year.
If you can’t make it this month, you have the rest of next year to make amends.
Buffalo City is arguably one of the country’s rarest tourist bouquets