After the Sanlam Cape Town Marathon: Garden Route and Safari

The Route: Cape Town → Wilderness → Knysna → Plettenberg Bay → private reserve near Gqeberha → fly home Logistics: A one-way hire car east on the N2, dropped at Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth) airport. Around 750 km in total, broken across four nights. Book the one-way drop-off when you book the car: the fee is significant and worse if arranged late. Marathon Month: May Duration: 4 nights

Cape Town ──> Wilderness ──> Knysna ──> Plettenberg Bay ──> Eastern Cape reserve
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                                                    Gqeberha Airport ◄┘

This is the long version of the Garden Route, and the reason to do it is at the end: the private game reserves inland of Gqeberha are malaria-free, which removes the prophylaxis question entirely and makes a safari practical in the week straight after a marathon. The driving is split into short legs, none of them more than about three hours, so it works on legs that are still recovering.

Late May is autumn along this coast and early winter inland. Days are mild, mornings and evenings are cold, and game drives at dawn in the Eastern Cape are genuinely cold: reserves supply blankets and you will use them.

Nights one and two: Wilderness and Knysna

Wilderness is about four hours from Cape Town, a small place behind a long beach where the N2 drops down to the coast. The lagoon and the Touw River behind the town have flat walking trails and canoe hire, and it makes an easy first night after a drive.

Knysna is an hour further east, on a tidal lagoon with two sandstone headlands at its mouth and the largest surviving indigenous forest in South Africa behind it. Take a boat across to the Heads, walk a short forest circuit at Diepwalle, and eat lagoon oysters at the Waterfront. Detail on all of it is in the two-night Knysna itinerary.

Night three: Plettenberg Bay

Half an hour on again, Plettenberg Bay has the open beaches the rest of the route lacks. The Robberg Nature Reserve peninsula has three marked walks of increasing length, and the shortest is short. Southern right whales move into the bay through the winter and the first of them sometimes appear from late May. From Plettenberg Bay it is around three hours to the reserves, mostly on the N2 through Tsitsikamma and the Storms River bridges.

Night four: the Eastern Cape reserves

Shamwari and Amakhala are the two best known of the private reserves in the malaria-free belt north-east of Gqeberha, both within about an hour and a half of the airport, and there are several smaller neighbours. All of them work the same way: full-board lodges, two game drives a day in an open vehicle with a guide and a tracker, dawn and late afternoon.

The Big Five are present. Sightings are not guaranteed in the way a zoo guarantees them and the reserves are honest about that, but two drives across a single night gives a reasonable chance of most of the list. The cost sits well below the equivalent standard of lodge at Kruger or in Botswana, which is the trade this end of the country offers.

One night is the minimum that makes sense, because a night buys you an afternoon drive and a morning drive. Two is better if the budget stretches.

Where to Stay and Eat

Where to stay: Guesthouses in Wilderness, the Waterfront or Leisure Isle in Knysna, and anywhere central in Plettenberg Bay. The reserve lodge is full board and chosen when you book the safari.

Where to eat: Knysna for oysters, Plettenberg Bay for seafood on the beach. Once you are in the reserve, all meals are included and the kitchen is the only option for miles.

Getting Home