I have said many times that I thought the Garden Route was over-rated and Mossel Bay certainly upheld this opinion. After the great times we had in Plettenberg Bay, Mossel Bay was a massive disappointment! Our hostel- The Park House Lodge, was great – a grand old house where we got a pretty big room to ourselves. The staff there was also great! The town just had a weird vibe. It lacked the South African friendliness and the ready ‘Howzit’ at every encounter. The only folks who were awesome (outside of the hostel staff) was the crew at the dive shop. Divers are generally pretty nice folk. The town itself was sterile, the streets quite empty…it just seemed to lack ‘something’ that we had found everywhere else thus far….
The old house was nice but had not air-con and it was very hot! We left the door open but a few of the other guests were way way out of line and behaving like selfish dolts. They would wait until the hostel staff went to sleep, raided the beer fridge, got wasted and were shouting until 2 or 3 in the morning. Both M.C and I gave them a piece of our minds to no avail （and i dont have enough spare to give！）This went on for the first two nights then one of the hostel managers stayed up and caught them and reamed them out and they were gone the next day. Also near the hostel there was all -night drag racing on one of the town roads…Add to that a general unfriendliness that was not seen anywhere before this and we were pretty unhappy with our time there!
One good thing was meeting a fellow in the hostel named Albert Frost who was known as the Jimi Hendrix of South Africa. It got me listening to his music which is pretty cool.
The best part of Mossel Bay was a visit from an old friend, Andrew B. who was in Cape Town on business and got up at about 5 am to drive the 5 hours to Mossel Bay to hang out with us for a few days before he blasted back to Cape Town to fly home to the U.K. We ate and drank at a lovely braai spot on the beach – the day was sunny, the beers were cold and the conversation was excellent…and the girls found kids to play with – a result on all fronts!
