Port St Johns, central to the Wild Coast

We planned to spend a few days in a town called Port St. John. We had read all about it in information catalogues from the tourist board so we knew that there were two or three restaurants there and a number of stores where we could buy groceries. We had booked into a self-catering chalet but did not bother to take any supplies with us as we thought it would be easy to buy things there. When we turned off the main road and headed for Port St. John we were amazed at just how poor a road could be. The Transki was also being blessed with an abundance of welcome rain but it was causing a lot of problems with the roads and it took us a lot longer to reach our destination than we had expected. We arrived at the chalets rather late but as we had eaten at a hotel along the road we were not hungry so were not concerned that the shops were closed by the time we got there and just planned to do some shopping in the morning. We had read in our tourist’s catalogue that there were a number of hotels in the town but we found that one of them had been burnt down so we realised that our catalogue was a little out of date. We did not know how much out of date, but growing in the middle of the burnt shell of the old hotel was a tree that must have been at least 10 foot tall so we thought that it must have been rather a long time since it had been updated.