Ride on the Wild Side

From the buz and glitz of the casino you walk south along the beach to the nearest river and cross it in a little canoe. Suddenly you feel far away from the tasteless material world of noisy one-armed bandits and you enter ‘real Africa’, full of small simple villages and subsistence living.

I love finding an adventure that nobody else seems to know about and The Amadiba Adventure Project seems to be a well kept secret. It is a horse-riding trek through the remote northern coastline of the Transkei. Run and managed by the local community, everybody gets a share of the income by providing horses, accommodation, food, bag carrying and any other services that might be needed.

A Proper African Adventure

As soon as you step in the little canoe that takes you and your saddlebags across the first shallow river mouth and you get on your horse, you know it is going to be a proper African adventure. There are no roads and you pass nothing more hand-tended fields of maize and the occasional scattering of family huts and sometimes a small village. If we were in a silver Mercedes instead of on a local pony, the reaction might be different, but on a horse we were welcomed with long stares, broad grins and shy hand waves.

The famously long deserted beaches of the Wild Coast were on the move in the unexpectedly strong wind and our hoof marks were the only imprints on the whispering sands, which were shifting under our feet. In just a few seconds a chiffon thin layer of sand obliterated any signs that we had been there. Giant shipwrecks took longer to disappear and a pointed steel hull provided a perfect perch for a fish eagle, who barely felt the necessity to move as we trotted by.

Women Work the Fields

Inland, the hills were not alive with the sound of music, but the terrain fitted the bill perfectly. So much impossibly green munchable grass yet very few grazing animals to make use of it. Dominoes of cultivated land were spotted with women hoeing the weeds from the loamy brown soil.