The Garden Route - Part 2

Our first stop on the second half of the Garden Route was Knysna, pronounced “Nice Nah”. The town is famous for its forests which used to be home to around 400 elephants, but now only around 4, so needless to say we didn’t see any whilst we were walking through! As well as the forest, Knysna is home to a massive lagoon which exits into the Indian Ocean through a narrow gorge called the Heads, and a beautiful 5km long white sandy beach, which is backed by huge vegetated cliffs, and littered with jelly fish!

Our next stop was Mossel Bay, which claims to be one of the best places to go shark diving in the world. It is also said that it has some of the best swimming beaches in the Southern Cape – we’re sure the sharks would agree! The beaches were lovely but the water is freezing cold; the only reason we didn’t go swimming, absolutely nothing to do with the sharks...!

Mossel Bay is also home to some large sand dunes which stretch along the coast from the town, on which you can sandboard. We tried two types of board, one which you either sit on or lie on, and then a snowboard, which obviously allows you to board down the dunes standing up. We started with sitting on the first board and flying down one of the smaller dunes into the bowl below. Our ‘instructor’ then taught us to sandboard on the snowboard. This wasn’t quite as easy for some as sitting on the board, especially at the base of the dune when the sand levels out – needless to say Carrie’s bum is nicely bruised! After we’d snowboarded down a few more times we moved up to the largest of the dunes, which has a run of 350m. For safety reasons they don’t let you snowboard down this one, they just suggest you go head first on the smaller board at great speed – obviously better! Boarding down was brilliant, especially as you could really get up speed. Unfortunately going down 350m means you have to come back up 350m, and this isn’t quite so much fun, and far from fast! We managed to struggle back up and flew down again, but after the second mammoth dune climb, we called it a day! A pretty fun one though!