South Africa: Cape Agulhas – Africa’s Southernmost Point

🌍 South Africa: Cape Agulhas – Africa’s Southernmost Point

🔥 Morning at Platbos — Fire, Coffee and the Great Escape

It was distinctly nippy when we woke up inside our little shelter deep in the Platbos Forest, which, as it happens, is one of the southernmost ancient Afromontane forests on the entire African continent — a fact that felt entirely appropriate given where we were headed that day. Platbos, whose name means “flat forest” in Afrikaans, has been growing in this corner of the Western Cape for thousands of years, and there’s something rather humbling about lying in your bunk inside it listening to the birds kicking off at first light. I lay there for a while, doing what any self-respecting sixty-year-old Londoner does when faced with a cold morning — absolutely nothing — and then decided to leap into action.

My first job was to get the donkey boiler going. For those who’ve never encountered one, a donkey boiler is a wood-fired water heater, a technology so ancient and straightforward it makes a kettle look complicated, and it is absolutely standard kit in the more rustic corners of rural South Africa. You stuff it full of wood, you set it alight, and eventually — given enough patience and dry kindling — you get hot water. I got a roaring fire going in there and then wandered back to the campsite to start a second fire, which I’d earmarked for sitting beside with our breakfast, because frankly two fires are better than one and I was feeling ambitious. By this time Karen was up and in full organisational mode, which meant the packing, the snack preparation and the breakfast were all happening simultaneously and at considerable speed.

Soon enough the coffee was ready. Now, the first coffee of the morning is always the best — this is not a controversial opinion — but the first coffee of the morning taken sitting next to a crackling campfire in an ancient forest on the southern tip of Africa is in a category entirely its own. Highly recommended.

⛽ The Great South African Petrol Quest

A little later than planned, we finally pulled out of Platbos Forest, our first mission being to find a petrol station, because adventuring on an empty tank is the sort of thing that sounds exciting in a book and is deeply stressful in real life. South Africa’s load-shedding — the rolling programme of scheduled power cuts that the country’s troubled electricity supplier, Eskom, has been implementing since 2007, at various stages of severity, to prevent the national grid from collapsing entirely — had been making itself felt throughout our trip, and this morning was no exception.

We took the road out to the small coastal town of Pearly Beach, which we’d passed through on our first day in the area and which we’d optimistically assumed would have a working service station. The GPS directed us to a spot where apparently a petrol station existed, or had once existed, or perhaps existed only in the GPS’s imagination. What was actually there was a security guard. After what I shall diplomatically describe as a brief discussion about the respective merits of asking for directions versus consulting the GPS, Karen went and had a word with the security guard, who pointed us towards a local shop attached to a nearby resort. We duly headed there, only to discover that they had no power — load-shedding had got there first — so no petrol. The very kind lady behind the counter suggested we try Kleinbaai or Gansbaai, where the service stations were more likely to have generators running.

We decided on Kleinbaai, and right next door to the Marine Dynamics building — the very spot where, just the previous day, we had clambered into a cage and been dangled in front of several Great White sharks, which is the sort of activity that puts a petrol shortage firmly in perspective — there was indeed a service station with a generator humming away. We filled up with great relief and set our sights on Oudtshoorn.

🗺️ Detour to the End of Africa

Our plan for the day was not to drive directly to Oudtshoorn, our next overnight stop some 400-odd kilometres away across the Langeberg mountains. Instead, we’d built in a detour that we’d been looking forward to since we first mapped out this leg of the trip: Cape Agulhas, the official southernmost point of the African continent, sitting in the small coastal village of L’Agulhas — which is, by that logic, also the most southerly village in Africa. There’s something wonderfully literal about the whole arrangement.

The name “Agulhas” comes from the Portuguese word for needles — agulhas — and was given to this stretch of coastline by early Portuguese navigators in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, most likely because of the treacherous submerged rocks and reefs that made the area so lethal to shipping. It is reckoned that more than 250 ships have been wrecked along this coast over the centuries, earning it the grim nickname of the “Graveyard of Ships.” The Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias, who in 1488 became the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope, is believed to have sailed along this coastline — though it was later navigators who began properly charting the dangers of these particular waters. The meridian of zero magnetic declination — the line where a compass needle points to both true north and magnetic north simultaneously — once ran through Cape Agulhas, giving Portuguese sailors an unusually reliable navigational fix at this precise spot, which may well be another reason the name stuck.

The drive took us about 90 minutes from Kleinbaai, which was, as it turned out, exactly long enough for the clouds that had been sulking overhead all morning to make up their minds and part, letting the sun through just as we arrived. Timing, as they say, is everything.

🌊 The Boardwalk, the Tortoise and the End of the World

We entered the Agulhas National Park — which was proclaimed a national park in 1999 and has been expanding steadily since, now covering around 20,959 hectares of coastal fynbos and wetland between the towns of Gansbaai and Struisbaai — and parked up alongside the rocky shoreline. Despite the sunshine it was distinctly brisk in the wind coming off the ocean, which at this latitude has had an uninterrupted run from Antarctica and makes absolutely no effort to be pleasant about it.

We set off along the boardwalk, which winds out through the low-lying coastal fynbos of the Agulhas Plain. Fynbos — the name means “fine bush” in Afrikaans — is one of the world’s great botanical treasures, a shrubland unique to the Cape Floristic Region that contains more than 9,000 plant species, the majority of them found nowhere else on Earth. The particular stretch we were walking through reminded us very much of the heather moorland of the North York Moors back home — that same sense of wide, windswept, low-growing vegetation stretching out to the horizon with a certain bleak magnificence to it. Beautiful, in other words, especially with the rugged rocky shoreline and the deep blue of the ocean doing their best to upstage it.

As we were walking along the boardwalk, I spotted a small tortoise trundling about right next to the path, apparently entirely unbothered by the two Londoners looming over it with a camera. The leopard tortoise and several other species are native to this part of the Western Cape, and the park is home to a healthy population. Karen was absolutely delighted — we had already encountered tortoises earlier in the trip and she had not tired of them in the slightest. She may, in fact, never tire of them.

🔱 Where the Oceans Meet

Eventually we arrived at the monument marking the southernmost tip of Africa — the precise point, at latitude 34°49’60” South, where the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean officially meet. Now, it should be said that oceanographers have a slightly more nuanced view of where exactly the two oceans divide — Cape Point, Cape Agulhas and the 20° East meridian all have their supporters — but Cape Agulhas is the designation accepted by the International Hydrographic Organisation, and it is the one on the sign, and frankly that’s good enough for us. We took our photos, had the obligatory moment of geographic wonder, and then wandered a little further inland to one of the most impressive pieces of public art we encountered on the entire South Africa trip.

The monument here is a striking carved stone map of the entire African continent, a circular installation with a circumference of 30 metres that incorporates both the outline of Africa and the design elements of a traditional compass rose. Built to mark this precise confluence of oceans and continents, it gives you a genuine sense of the scale of Africa — you can stand at the southernmost tip and trace your finger all the way up through South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt to the Mediterranean coast, and the sheer size of the thing suddenly becomes viscerally real rather than just a fact on a map. We had a proper look at all the countries we had visited on this particular trip, which felt rather satisfying in a “we’ve come a long way” sort of way.