Having a giggle over the confusion of the poor desk staff trying to check us in certainly broke what was left of the ice (we'd been chatting on the bus as well), and the fact that they put the 4 of us in a room together cemented our unlikely little group.
In this case, the germination of new companionship came when I was one of a group of 4 backpackers who got off the bus at the same hostel, Nothando's, in Plett - amusingly, the names of the other 3 were Katherine, Patrick and Katherine. Plett, as it is known by pretty much everyone on the ground, has long been a seaside getaway for families from up in Gauteng province (the area around Jo'burg and Pretoria which was the heart of the Transvaal), and is quite a picturesque little place, flowing down the side of a hill into the beaches of the bay for which it is named.Īnd this, I have to say, is probably when my South African journey got a little easier and a little bit more sustained fun, as for the first time I met up with a group of people travelling the same direction at the same kind of pace and found myself a little mobile community. These are two of the 3 towns most often referred to when people say they have travelled the Garden Route (the other being Mossel Bay, which I skipped past), and are only an hour or so's drive apart. I left the story as I rejoined the Baz Bus from Knysna along the coast to Plettenberg Bay.
Hello again! Time to attempt one more entry in the journal.