Port-Elizabeth Travel Guide
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763km (473 miles) E of Cape Town; 1,050km (651 miles) SW of Johannesburg
The approach to Port Elizabeth, referred to by locals as "P.E." and by a slightly desperate marketing team as "The Friendly City," is somewhat depressing. Factories alternate with brown brick houses on the freeway into town, the ocean breeze is colored by the stench of smokestacks, and a network of elevated highways has effectively cut the center of the city off from the sea.
There is enough here to keep visitors entertained for a couple of days, but for most, Port Elizabeth is simply an entry or departure point -- usually for a trip up or down the Garden Route. If you have a day to kill, take a township tour that covers some of the capital's political history, or amble along the Donkin Heritage Trail and take in P.E.'s settler history. If you don't have the time to visit another reserve in southern Africa, spend the day driving around the Addo Elephant National Park, where you'll find the world's densest elephant population, or Shamwari, a Big 5 reserve that's a mere 50-minute drive away.
The 1820 Settlers: Deceit, Despair & Courage--The Industrial Revolution and the end of the Napoleonic wars created a massive unemployment problem in Britain. With their underpopulated colony in southern Africa under threat by the indigenous tribes, the British authorities came up with the perfect solution: Lured by the promise of free land and a new life, 4,000 men, women, and children landed at Algoa Bay in 1820, more than doubling the colony's English-speaking population. Many were tradesmen and teachers with no knowledge of farming, and they were given no prior warning of their real function: to create a human barrier along the Fish River, marking the eastern border of the Cape Colony. On the other side of the river were the Xhosa (pronounced ko-sa). The settlers were provided with tents, seeds, and a few bits of equipment, and given pockets of land too small for livestock and too poor for crops. Pestilence, flash floods, and constant attacks by the Xhosa laid waste their attempts to settle the land, and most of them slowly trickled into the towns to establish themselves in more secure trades. Thanks in no small measure to their stoic determination, Port Elizabeth is today the biggest coastal city between Cape Town and Durban, and the industrial hub of the Eastern Cape, with road, rail, and air links to every other major city in South Africa.
