How long does the Garden Route actually take?
6 minute readLavish Travels & Tours
Three days is the answer most itineraries give. Here is what you give up, and what the drive looks like when you allow a week.
You can drive from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth in a long day. You can see the headline stops of the Garden Route in three. Almost nobody who does it that way enjoys it, because the compression forces you onto the N2, and the N2 is a motorway with trees.
The route's character is in the passes and the detours: the Outeniqua and Robinson passes over the mountains, the old road down to Nature's Valley, Route 62 through the Little Karoo, the lakes at Wilderness. Every one of those is a deliberate turn off the fast road.
A five-day itinerary gets you the coast properly. Seven adds two things that materially change the trip: a night in Oudtshoorn and the Little Karoo, which is a completely different landscape from the coast, and two nights at the eastern end for Addo Elephant National Park.
Addo is worth planning around if you are travelling with children. It holds over 600 elephant plus the rest of the Big Five, and it is malaria-free — which removes the prophylaxis conversation entirely and is the main reason we route families here rather than to the lowveld.
The other argument for a longer trip is the whale coast. From June to November, southern right whales calve in Walker Bay at Hermanus, and the cliff path there gives you land-based whale watching as good as anywhere on earth. It costs you one night at the start of the route.