South Africa: Sleep Among Giants at Platbos Forest Gansbaai

South Africa: Sleep Among Giants at Platbos Forest, Gansbaai

🌿 Platbos Forest offers self-catering accommodation in an indigenous forest found on the Baviaanspoort Hills in Gansbaai. This ancient forest has trees that date back over a thousand years in age. This endangered and rare ecosystem is one of a kind and worth the visit.

It was time to say goodbye to Cape Town and point the car east along the cape towards the small coastal town of Gansbaai, roughly a two-and-a-half-hour drive away. We’d had a brilliant few days in the city, but there’s only so much Table Mountain and waterfront you can take before you start itching to see what lies beyond. Our route hugged the coastline heading south-east, skirting the most celebrated wine-producing regions in South Africa, centred around the historic university town of Stellenbosch, which was founded in 1679 by Simon van der Stel — the Governor of the Cape Colony at the time and, conveniently, the man the town was named after. The surrounding Winelands district grew steadily through the 18th and 19th centuries into one of the world’s most productive wine regions, with the fertile soils and mountain-sheltered valleys producing everything from Chenin Blanc and Pinotage to Cabernet Sauvignon of genuine international standing. There are dozens of vineyards scattered across the area, many of which have been welcoming visitors for well over a century, and the Cape Dutch architecture of the old manor houses — all whitewashed gables and thatched roofs — makes the whole area look as though someone went a bit mad with a set design budget. We had been thoroughly enjoying the South African wines throughout our stay, which is not exactly difficult when they’re this good and this reasonably priced, but we didn’t particularly fancy sitting through a formal vineyard tour. We thought we’d do a short detour to see what Stellenbosch town itself was all about, have a nose around, and get back on the road.

The day had started out as a proper beauty — clear blue skies, lovely light, the kind of morning that makes you feel glad to be alive and out of London. But as we travelled further east down the cape, the clouds rolled in with the quiet determination of a British bank holiday, and the sun disappeared behind a grey blanket that stubbornly refused to shift. By the time we rolled into the seaside town of Hermanus the sun had gone entirely, and there was a definite smell of rain in the air. Hermanus is a town with a serious pedigree when it comes to whale-watching. Sitting on the shores of Walker Bay, roughly 120 kilometres east of Cape Town, it has been a popular destination since the late 19th century when it was little more than a fishing village called Hermanuspietersfontein — mercifully shortened at some point to something the rest of the world could actually pronounce. Today it’s consistently rated as one of the best land-based whale-watching spots on the entire planet, and the New Harbour area still employs a traditional whale crier — quite possibly the only one in the world — who walks the town blowing a kelp horn to announce sightings to anyone within earshot. The southern right whale, Eubalaena australis, migrates into Walker Bay each year between June and December to calve and nurse its young in the sheltered waters, having travelled up from its feeding grounds in the sub-Antarctic. These are magnificent animals — the females grow up to 15 metres in length and can weigh 80 tonnes — and on a good day you can watch them breaching and lobtailing just metres offshore from the cliff-top paths. We were visiting in July, which is technically prime season, but with a grey-coloured sea merging into a grey-coloured sky and visibility somewhere in the region of disappointing, our hopes of spotting anything were not exactly sky-high. Predictably, that proved to be the case. Still, we weren’t going to let the weather beat us entirely. We pulled on an extra layer, jumped out of the car and took a walk along the beach, which has some genuinely lovely sand dunes that are worth the visit regardless of what the sky is doing. We stopped briefly to watch a couple of young boys skimming across the waves on boards — proper fearless beach kids who clearly hadn’t been informed it was overcast — before jumping back in the car and continuing on down the road towards Gansbaai.

🗺️ Finding Platbos (Which Was More of an Adventure Than Expected)

I had booked us into the Platbos Forest Cabins, situated about 15 minutes’ drive from the town of Gansbaai itself, tucked away within the Platbos Forest on the Baviaanspoort Hills. The name Platbos comes from Afrikaans and translates roughly as “flat forest” — a modest description for what is, in fact, something genuinely extraordinary. Platbos is Africa’s southernmost ancient indigenous forest, a relic of the more extensive forests that once covered much of the southern Cape before a combination of climatic change, centuries of human settlement and widespread timber felling reduced them to scattered pockets. The trees here are not young things — the milkwoods, boekenhouts, wild olives and Cape bush willows within this forest are estimated to be between 1,000 and 5,000 years old, which puts the oldest of them roughly contemporary with the Iron Age in Britain. The forest was privately purchased in 2003 by the conservation organisation Treesforlife, who have worked to restore and protect the ecosystem ever since, replanting indigenous species and managing the land with minimal human intervention. It is genuinely one of those places that makes you feel very small and very grateful to be standing in it. Luckily, the combination of GPS and Google Maps got us to the entrance of the forest without too much confusion, and from there we followed the signs through the trees. What the signs did not adequately prepare us for was the dirt road — a couple of kilometres of thoroughly rutted track with rocks sticking up at intervals that had absolutely no business being that large. We were driving a tiny hire hatchback with the ground clearance of a skateboard, and even at a crawl it was hard not to bottom the car out on something. I was going so slowly by the end that I think a tortoise overtook us. Eventually we reached an open field where reception was located, and we were able to collect our key, pick up the wood for the fire, and gather the kindling for the wood-burning water heater that would be responsible for our showers. A forest trail then led us roughly 100 metres through the trees to where our cabin was situated, in a small clearing with a fire pit and a separate bathroom block nearby.

Now, calling this a cabin was, it has to be said, somewhat generous with the English language. When most people picture a cabin, they imagine four solid walls, a roof and perhaps a door with a handle that works. What we had was rather more experimental than that. All four walls were canvas — proper roll-up canvas panels that could be unfurled to open the space completely to the elements, turning the whole structure into something between a very upmarket tent and a gazebo with ideas above its station. Given that the weather was doing its best impression of a damp November in Walthamstow, we elected to leave most of the panels down and simply opened one for a bit of air. The whole setup was entirely off-grid, which meant no mains electricity — just solar-powered LED lights that flickered on as the evening drew in, a gas hob for cooking, and a wood-burning stove inside for warmth. Getting the fire going was, shall we say, character-building, particularly after the wood heater for the shower had already made significant inroads into our supply of kindling. But once everything was lit and crackling away, the place transformed into something properly lovely. The wooden furniture was excellent — solid, well-crafted pieces that looked as though they belonged exactly where they were — and the space itself was far more generous than you’d expect, with proper room to spread out and feel settled rather than cramped. We made ourselves a cup of tea on the gas stove, watched the forest light fade through the canvas sides, and agreed that it was, in its way, rather wonderful.