Find Quiet In The Chaos

Goukamma Nature Reserve between Knysna and Sedgefield is free from crowds but still close to all the Garden Route hot spots. Nature is the priority, and that’s a good thing.

- JON MINSTER

It’s the middle of the school holidays, in the middle of the Garden Route, and there’s not a soul in sight.

Okay, it’s winter, but you should have seen Knysna! When I drove in to buy groceries, the place was packed. It was the annual Oyster Festival weekend and there was carnage in the aisles at Woolworths. People in trail-running tights bashed shopping trolleys as they decimated the shelves like locusts in a wheat field.

Even Buffels Bay, usually half asleep, was chock-a-block with holidaymakers. There was no firewood to be found in the Knysna Mall, so I went hunting in Buffels. To my mounting dismay, each house seemed to have a chimney puffing smoke. I finally managed to find a bag at the beachfront shop. It was the only bag left, probably because the plastic was ripped and half the wood had fallen out.

Now, safely back at Otter’s Rest in Goukamma, with a fire roaring, I look out of the big windows and count zero other people. The view of water and sky is only interrupted by a black-headed heron, high-stepping past a reedbed.

Goukamma Nature Reserve protects 16,5 km of coastline between two of the busiest holiday hubs on the Garden Route: Knysna and Sedgefield. The reserve extends all the way back to the N2 in places, but more importantly, it also extends into the ocean for one nautical mile (nearly 2 km). The marine protected area (MPA) is a safe haven for globally threatened turtles like loggerhead, green and hawksbill; and its offshore reefs are important breeding grounds for hake and red steenbras; not to mention the whales, dolphins, seals and sharks that regularly cruise through the MPA, or the African black oystercatchers that breed in safety on its empty beaches.