Port St Johns, Wild Coast

In my family, the beach means holiday. My mom enjoys splashing in the waves and my dad has always been an avid weekend fisherman. My grandparents had a holiday home in Kleinkrantz near Wilderness on the Garden Route, so that’s where we spent most December holidays. When I was seven years old, however, my parents decided to take my sister and I on an adventure to a place we’d never been to before: Port St Johns in the former Transkei. Family from Cape Town, Calvinia and Durban came together to spend two weeks at a resort right on Second Beach. The adventure started long before we even got to the beach. It was pouring with rain and water was lapping one of the bridges close to Port St Johns, making it unsafe to cross, so we had to go the long way around, cross further upstream, and take a gravel road detour. The rain thundered down as we hit the dirt in our convoy consisting of my family’s Conquest, a Toyota Liftback, a Toyota Camry with a trailer and a Golf. We saw big 4x4s turning around – the drivers said the road was too muddy to continue. But we hadn’t driven all this way just to turn around! The final 40 km to Port St Johns took us six hours. We had to push the vehicles up even the gentlest inclines. I learnt valuable life lessons during that ordeal, like how to use rubber floor mats for traction and how to push a car barefoot in deep mud. When we eventually got to Second Beach, the windscreens of the vehicles were the only parts not covered in a thick layer of sticky mud. The sky cleared the next day and we ended up having the most fantastic weather. The beach was just across the road and the Bulolo River flowed right past. The water was warm and inviting, unlike the freezing Atlantic Ocean that I was used to. I splashed around in the shallows for hours with my big sister Lee-Ann and my cousins Amy, Deleen and Natlee. (That’s me in the middle in the photo above.) I can still remember the smell of the ocean, and how local fishermen were always trying to sell us fresh fish and enormous crayfish. We lived in our swimming costumes and I stayed up late with the bigger kids, jumping on the trampoline and playing games at the resort clubhouse. According to my mom, the rondavel we stayed in was “very basic”, but to me it seemed like five-star accommodation. – Shelley Christians