Robberg Nature Reserve, South Africa
I don’t want to bury the lead on this one. Trish and I both agree that our day hike out on Robberg Peninsula was one of the best day hike locations that we have ever encountered. The penisula offers such a diversity of amazing scenery, that it was hard to beat. Oh, and it also offers great views of the Cape Seal colonies.
The Nature Reserve sits on Robberg Peninsula, right outside the town of Plettenberg Bay. This was roughly a 30-minute drive from Knysna, where we were staying to explore the Garden Route of the Western Cape. Like all parks in South Africa, there is a sliding scale entry fee based on your citizenship. Entrance for US citizens was the highest, but still less than $4 USD each person. This was a bargain compared to the entrance fees of many of the nearby parks running closer to $15-$25 for each of us.
We spent around six hours hiking here working clock-wise around the peninsula, but that included at least an hour playing in the Witsand dunes and beach and also sitting on the cliffs having lunch and watching the seals hunt in the surf. As I said, it was one of the best hikes we have had and was our favorite day along the Garden Route trip. Hopefully, the pictures below give you some idea as to why we loved this place so much.
Cape Seal colonies as seen from the cliffs above. BTW, you start to smell the seals way before you see them.
Lunch at the point where we watched both seals and people fishing in the crashing waves.
After lunch at the point, we headed along the south side of the peninsula where the hike became a game of climbing over and amongst these huge rocks.
Next, we came to the sandbar beach called Witsand which is very walkable at low-tide and has some HUGE sand dunes that Zach still had the energy to run up and down multiple times. We spent an hour playing here and could have spent the entire day with the surf coming from both directions.
