Port Elizabeth, South Africa

January 24^th, 2025

It was a very humid overcast day when we woke up in Port Elizabeth. We will be here for 2 days. I do love it when we have an overnight stay in a port, I wish we could do this more often.

Although the name of the city was changed to Gqeberha in 2021, everyone still seems to call the city by its previous name. This is good, as I find Gqeberha is quite difficult to pronounce. It is certainly more difficult than PE which is what we used to call it in the past.

We are usually the only cruise ship in port, although on occasion there has been another ship. This morning, I watched the Azamara Quest dock right behind us, and there is also an Aida nearby. It is a busy day for the port.

When I went to get my morning chocolate fix I was delighted to see that the panne chocolate pastries are now described as pain au chocolat. Yay! Is this a coincidence (most likely) or did someone read my blog, and got the name corrected?

Brian has a cousin, well actually a third cousin to be more precise, who lives in Port Elizabeth, and we planned to spend today and tomorrow with Hillary and her husband, Ian. We had arranged to meet them at the entrance to the port.

There is a shuttle bus that takes passengers from the ship to the city center, and we assumed that we could jump on the shuttle bus and get off at the port gate as we have done in other ports.

Not so here. We were very firmly told that we could not get on the bus and had to walk to the port gate, which is some distance away. So off we set in the general direction of where we thought the port gate would be. There wasn’t anyone to give us directions and there was no gate in sight.

We eventually saw what we assumed was the gate in the distance, and walked towards it. As we were getting closer, we were relieved to see Ian’s car coming towards us. We jumped into the car and headed for the port exit.

Ian had had difficulties getting in to the port. With 3 cruise ships in port, the local taxi and Uber drivers were expecting to do a lot of business. There is apparently not much love lost between the 2 groups, and a fight had broken out at the port gate. The police and port security had been called in to try to break up the fight, without much success.

Although Ian and Hillary were eventually able to get in to the port, we were unable to leave as the authorities had had to close the gate until the confrontation had subsided. Luckily there was another gate not too far away, so we were not trapped at the port for the day.

We drove along the coast to the lovely village of St Francis Bay on the banks of the estuary of the Kromme River.

The community consists of white houses with thatched roofs situated on a series of canals.

The nearby beach is beautiful. We had planned to swim, but it was quite rough and windy, but that did not deter several brave surfers who were battling the waves.

After our walk we drove to Cape St Francis for lunch at a great restaurant called Never Mind.

The restaurant was right next door to the Cape St Francis lighthouse

The food was great although we decided not to order the Fallow Deer Tartare for fear of a dental crisis related to bullet fragments.

We drove around the area in the afternoon, and then went back to Hillary and Ian’s house for dinner.

As we would be returning to the ship quite late at night we had tried to ascertain if there would be any problem getting through the port gates, and if we could be driven back to the ship. Initially no one had an answer, but during the course of the afternoon Brian received a voice mail that as long as we let the ship know what the license plate number of the car was, we would have no problems getting back to the ship.

One really great feature of our cruise cards is that they have the ship’s phone number on them. This had come in very handy when we were trying to find out where the ship was when we were in Zanzibar. So we thought it would be easy to call the ship and give them the information about the car.

Brian called several times, and each time got the message that they were helping someone else and the phone would disconnect. Finally someone answered. The phone line wasn’t great, and the person on the other end didn’t seem to know what we were talking about. She asked if we had embarked yesterday, and Brian let her know that we had embarked in Barcelona. That confused her even more. As the conversation continued it became evident that we had not got through to the Sojourn, but were talking with Guest Relations on the Pursuit, which was somewhere in the middle of the Drake Passage. This was not very helpful.

Thinking that this might have been a one time error, we called again, and sure enough even though the number on our cards had worked perfectly well when we wanted to get through to the Sojourn in Zanzibar, this number was now the number for the Pursuit.

We decided to abandon our mission to give the ship the car information, and to take our chances at the port gate.

Sometime later Brian got a call from our ship. The Pursuit had called the Sojourn to let them know that Brian was trying to contact them. We were then able to give the Sojourn the information. This all seemed terribly complicated, and we never worked out why we were talking to a ship in the middle of the Drake Passage.

There was a lovely sunset, and we had a great meal. I love the food we have been treated to on board, but sometimes a home cooked meal is just what you want.

When we returned to the port, nobody seemed interested in the information we had tried so hard to get to them. We were just waved through the gate and drove to the ship. There was no challenge at all. Hopefully things will be just as easy tomorrow morning.