PEACE IN PONDOLAND
Zanine Wolf finds the bumpy ride is worth it to take her family to an off-the-grid piece of paradise on the Wild Coast
It had been nearly 10 hours since we’d left Cape Town. We opened the back of the Kia truck and our husbands and sons came tumbling out into the dusky Transkei light, stiff and claustrophobic.
As the crow flies, Mtentu Lodge is only about 24km south of the Wild Coast Sun in Port Edward but, not being crows, our transfer took three long hours. Rosie and I had been riding shotgun, oblivious to the bumpy ride our boys were enduring on benches in the back. Our husbands — bless them — had been trying to track our progress on Google Maps, partly to estimate how much longer the suffering would be, but the dot kept jumping off the map.
Mtentu Lodge is an off-the-grid piece of paradise perched above the estuary of the Mtentu River. Wild, remote and gobsmackingly beautiful, it’s a place to decompress. No calls, no data, no devices vying for our or our kids’ attention.
The area is dotted with waterfalls, one of which, in Mkambati just across the river, plunges directly into the sea. Finding them, we’d soon discover, is half the adventure. Mtentu is a place where you learn to enjoy the journey. Often where you end up is different from where you were aiming. “Head for the two trees, then turn down” or “Turn right at the shipwreck” was the extent of the directions we got from our hosts.
Once we set out, there were no signs, no arrows painted on rocks, just a maze of vague paths snaking through the grassy hills — which is how, one morning, headed for Paradise Pools, we found ourselves at Leopard Rock
Falls. It turned out to be a happy mistake — we spent a sublime morning sunning ourselves on the rocks above the falls, the gorge below us.
Swallowtail, we’d been told, was the mother of all waterfalls. So we set out on a 3.5km canoe trip up the estuary, headed inland at “the big rock in the middle of the river” and began our ascent up what we’d been told would be a two-hour boulder hop with kids (our guide, it turned out, had not actually been there himself, but that was a mere detail).
After 30 minutes of scaling giant boulders, Noah, my 6-year-old, stopped to admire a small pool teeming with insects, and announced that he wouldn’t be going any further. I thought for a minute – I could coax him up with a steady stream of treats (brought for that purpose), or follow his lead and pause to take in the beauty around us. So we clambered back down. I was envious that the rest of our party made it to Swallowtail, but it was a happy morning.
For the return trip, our driver promised to bring a mattress for the kids and a trailer for the luggage. But Dave, one of the dads, wasn’t convinced. “I know where I’d rather be,” he said, contemplating another ride in the back of a truck. He rose at sunrise to run the 20-odd kilometre stretch of deserted beach (and cross a few rivers) back to the Wild Coast Sun.
Running or driving, Mtentu is more than worth the effort.
Mtentu Lodge offers cabins, backpacking and camping. Cabins from R730 pps (based on two sharing). Rates include three meals per day. See http://mtentulodge.co.za/