I had a big day all planned out. Grab the girls, admire the donkeys at Dassiesfontein, look for wild horses in Rooisand, take a nice walk along the Kleinmond coast, treat the girls to an Overstrand lunch. The donkey admiring went perfectly well, but it was step 2 where things went a bit off of the rails. The approach to the Rooisand Nature Reserve is a long narrow strip of soft dirt road, and unfortunately for me, there was quite a bit of wetness, meaning that a quarter of the way in I opted to pull the plug and started reversing out.

Unfortunately for me though, literally as I was explaining to the girls why we were abandoning this leg of our trip, there was a short sharp drop and what I had feared happening had in fact just happened. I had dropped one side of the car into a ditch of soft wet mud and it was now completely and utterly stuck. Couldn’t dig it out, couldn’t find enough materials to create something solid under the wheels to gain traction, properly stuck. There was absolutely no other traffic on this route either and after more than a few minutes of scrambling about, I was a bit panicked, the girls scared, and the atmosphere needless to say a bit tense. Thankfully for us though, a local fisherman returning from his fishing expedition did eventually spot us in trouble, and with a strong push from him I was able to reverse out of the quagmire, making it back all the way to the main road.

Needless to say, the incident had shaken us all and thus the day’s original plan was now well and truly tossed aside in the bin. So instead, we calmed down and took a quick waltz around the achingly beautiful Kleinmond beachfront, lounging on its luscious green lawn, crossing over the murky lagoon waters via the twin bridges, and got our feet stuck into the soft beach sand while admiring all the colourful Spring flowers that were to be spotted all over the sand dunes.

Thankfully this stretch of then Hangklip Coastline never fails to disappoint in its beauty, so day saved (to a degree).

I’m still keen on making the trip down to the Rooisand Nature Reserve come another occasion, but I suspect it might only be in something a bit more suited to the terrain!

Related Link: Rooisand Nature Reserve | Kleinmond