My 2 Day Gravel trip to Ballito ...............
Posted: Tue Jan 04, 2022 9:37 am
Two Day Gravel trip from Jhb to Ballito …………..
To share with you all my little experience that I been wanting to do for a while and this December lent itself to the perfect opportunity, Some of my family opted to head strait to Ballito while my eldest and I plotted our route using Garmin connect (this is the cycling / sports app and allows the selection of Gravel roads as a cyclist. I don’t have a fancy Garmin with T4A ) to utilize as many gravel roads as we could .We chose to stay over at Muller’s Pass as it looked like halfway and on the plus side found nice accommodation right there ( Moorfield farm ).
So will share what I can remember as it was a brilliant little trip:
Day 1 – 356km – 8h06min driving – avg speed 43.9km/h
I have estimated the Dirt at 241 km and all tar sections combined at 115 km .
We started from the Vale and headed towards Brakpan where we hit our first dirt stretch at 32km , was a bit of a challenge to find this as it looks like a new water pipeline was being laid so at one point I was on the wrong side of the long deep dug trench and had to get to the other side to get back on route, never the less we managed and from that point the navigation become super easy ( I used my cycling Garmin GPS that I had uploaded the routes to a 510 as I don’t have a fancy smacy off-road jobby )
From this point we did 14km of what was not much off a road due to all the rain and then hit a tar stretch that took us to Nigel where we connected to dirt again and pretty much did not see tar except for small connecting patches here and there to link up the gravel. We spent allot of time in what I call no man’s land as I did not go through any towns till we popped out at the back of Memel.
I filled up and did about 3km on tar again then back on gravel to Muller’s Pass. The day was awesome and for me made more fun because of all the rain as it made the roads muddy and fun.
Moorfield Farm was such a treat, old, rustic and peaceful where we did a little hike to the local waterfall of 40m high and then chilled around a fire.
To give an idea of the basic route of places we went close too or through:
Brakpan
Tsakane
Nigel (through)
Hallgate
Greylingstad
Gruisplaats
Memel (through)
Mullers Pass (overnight)
Pics of Day one and Day 2 report to follow ……………………
To share with you all my little experience that I been wanting to do for a while and this December lent itself to the perfect opportunity, Some of my family opted to head strait to Ballito while my eldest and I plotted our route using Garmin connect (this is the cycling / sports app and allows the selection of Gravel roads as a cyclist. I don’t have a fancy Garmin with T4A ) to utilize as many gravel roads as we could .We chose to stay over at Muller’s Pass as it looked like halfway and on the plus side found nice accommodation right there ( Moorfield farm ).
So will share what I can remember as it was a brilliant little trip:
Day 1 – 356km – 8h06min driving – avg speed 43.9km/h
I have estimated the Dirt at 241 km and all tar sections combined at 115 km .
We started from the Vale and headed towards Brakpan where we hit our first dirt stretch at 32km , was a bit of a challenge to find this as it looks like a new water pipeline was being laid so at one point I was on the wrong side of the long deep dug trench and had to get to the other side to get back on route, never the less we managed and from that point the navigation become super easy ( I used my cycling Garmin GPS that I had uploaded the routes to a 510 as I don’t have a fancy smacy off-road jobby )
From this point we did 14km of what was not much off a road due to all the rain and then hit a tar stretch that took us to Nigel where we connected to dirt again and pretty much did not see tar except for small connecting patches here and there to link up the gravel. We spent allot of time in what I call no man’s land as I did not go through any towns till we popped out at the back of Memel.
I filled up and did about 3km on tar again then back on gravel to Muller’s Pass. The day was awesome and for me made more fun because of all the rain as it made the roads muddy and fun.
Moorfield Farm was such a treat, old, rustic and peaceful where we did a little hike to the local waterfall of 40m high and then chilled around a fire.
To give an idea of the basic route of places we went close too or through:
Brakpan
Tsakane
Nigel (through)
Hallgate
Greylingstad
Gruisplaats
Memel (through)
Mullers Pass (overnight)
Pics of Day one and Day 2 report to follow ……………………
