Sand between your toes – South Africa’s best beaches

If you dig deep, you’ll probably find a memory of wiggling your toes into hot sand and watching rills of foam rolling towards you, toppling over and running up the beach in traceries of bubbles.

A later memory will be looking down seeing water flooding past your feet and curling up your ankles as a spent wave skids up the sand, stops and slides back again. Then there are ice cream cones, buckets, beach umbrellas and grit in your sandwiches.

Later, depending on your sex, there will be hunky lifeguards or eye-popping girls in colourful underwear legitimised by being called bikinis.

They’re clichs, of course, but food for memory. Where sea meets land is almost always spectacular and imprints itself indelibly on our impressionable young minds. Roaring waves slamming up against rocks or thundering up a beach, surfers hurtling down steep watery slopes, seagulls screeching, shipwrecks, sails drifting beyond the surfline – the stuff of reminiscence and romance.

South Africa has such an amazing coastline that it’s difficult to make a call about the 10 best beaches. So what we’ve done is to select our top 10. Subjective, maybe, but each has something special about it that makes for a great day at the seaside.

Cape Vidal, iSimangaliso Wetland Park
These days, Cape Vidal is known for its scything beaches, coastal forest, boundless birds. Here leatherback and loggerhead turtles haul out of the sea at night to lay their eggs.

In the early 20th century, its name conjured up images of gold. In 1898, an old wooden barque named Dorothea was wrecked there and word got out that part of its ballast was smuggled gold bars. Various expeditions were sent to retrieve it, but nothing was found and at least one ended in tragedy when a dive boat was overturned, drowning the crew.

Cape Vidal is part of iSimangaliso, formerly St Lucia Wetland Park, in South Africa’s wild and beautiful Maputaland. There are marked trails, great snorkelling and pools to goggle into. Web www.isimangaliso.co.za.

Ramsgate/Margate, KZN South Coast
The KwaZulu-Natal South Coast is the raucous cousin of the quietly sophisticated Cape and Garden Route coastlines. Filled with colour and vivacity and set against a shockingly green backdrop of estuaries, verdant forests and hillsides, this is one of South Africa’s favourite resort destinations.

It is packed to the gills with family entertainment. Margate and Ramsgate beaches are within a few kilometres of each other and are ringed with holiday accommodation, malls, restaurants and recreational facilities.

Light surf, soft sand and great lifeguard facilities make these two of the top South Coast beaches. Web www.margate.co.za.

Mdumbi Beach, Wild Coast
If you’re looking for a beach of dreams, one you wouldn’t mind getting marooned on or, perhaps, knocking together a cabin and living in peace and quiet, Mdumbi is the place. It’s not one of those beaches with a family hotel serving tea and crumpets just behind the dune line. It’s remote. But that’s its charm. You reach it by driving northeast from Coffee Bay towards the Mthatha River over rolling hills dotted with traditional Xhosa huts and sleepy cattle.

The beach is more than a kilometre long and maybe 100 metres wide. If you find a footprint, it would be unusual. The entire landward side is lined with milkwoods under which is intensely green, natural lawn. The waves curl into the bay from the west and you can ride them for, oh, 800 metres, easy.

Coffee Bay, Wild Coast
Coffee Bay isn’t much more than some shacks, a trading store, a camping site and a hotel. The main attraction is that the coast is gobsmackingly beautiful, the beach is untouched between surf and rolling hills and the place rings with birdsong.

The village is said to have got its name from a cargo ship that supposedly ran ashore there in the 19th century and spilled some of its coffee bean shipment. Local stories have it that some of these beans took root and grew into coff ee trees, but they’re nowhere to be seen today.

There’s excellent fishing, as well as spectacular walks through coastal bush. One of the must-see places nearby is Hole in the Wall, a geological marvel. There are various trails in the area, the best known being the Wild Coast Hiking Trail. Coffee Bay is an out-of-the-way place where you can swim, walk, fish, surf, scuba dive, ride a horse or play a game of golf. Web www.wildcoast.co.za/coffeebay.

Humewood and Kings Beaches, Port Elizabeth
Here’s a statistic worth quoting: Port Elizabeth averages seven-and-a-half hours of sunshine a day. Back when the city was just a village, its beaches were spectacular. Then it grew into a port, the stream coming out of Happy Valley disgorged more than water and flotsam smeared the beaches.

These days it’s all back to being beautiful. Three of the city’s beaches are Blue Flagged and Happy Valley is now a park with lush lawns, lily ponds, winding paths and children’s play areas – a great place for picnics. The surf off Humewood is described as ‘regional classic’, with fast, hollow waves which are good in all tides. A major beachfront attraction is the museum and oceanarium complex. Web www.portelizabeth.co.za.

Jeffreys Bay, Eastern Cape
Jeffreys Bay began as a trading store in 1849 on St Francis Bay’s shores. Until a narrow-gauge railway line was built from Humansdorp to Port Elizabeth, the only way to supply it was by coaster, which would offload onto the beach.

Those old traders would be aghast if they could have peeked into the future. Today Jeffreys is afflicted with a clutter of mansions in awful taste, but which do not detract from the fact that it has one of the most remarkable beaches in the world.

This was discovered some years back by youngsters riding boards made of Styrofoam and glass fibre – and doing it for an outrageously long time – on what came to be known as the planet’s best right point break.

These days, international surfers flock to catch the perfect waves in this paradise of sunshine, aloes, dolphins, shells, perfect points and classic reefs. It’s a seashore that has made names like Supertubes, Kitchen Windows, Surfers Point and Billabong legendary. Its beach has Blue Flag status. Web www.jeffreysbay.org.za.

Hermanus, Overberg
There is a tale about a man named Hermanus Pieters who, in the 1830s, made his way down an elephant path from the mountains and camped at a spring by the seashore. He so enjoyed the place that he returned again and again, and the spring became known as Hermanus Pietersfontein.

The last part of the name fell away and today Hermanus is justly world famous for whale watching and the signature white sand of Grotto Beach and other sandy stretches. There’s also a magnetic survey station there which has discovered that the planet’s magnetism is decreasing fairly rapidly – but don’t worry about that yet. Web www.hermanus.co.za.

Cape Town, Western Cape
Cape Town’s not a beach but a bunch of beaches which all rank up there among the best in the land. Clifton is perhaps the most famous, but others like the nudist Sandy Beach, and Muizenberg, Kalk Bay, Boulders Beach, Noordhoek and Camps Bay all grace this most beautiful toe of Africa

The city keeps getting chosen as one of the world’s top destinations and last year was ranked second after Sydney by the Guardian’s Top Destinations survey. Its beaches are among its favourite drawcards. Web www.cape.town.co.za.

Yzerfontein, West Coast
Yzerfontein’s beach just goes on and on – for more than 25 kilometres. Sand, rocky outcrops and surfable waves are washed by the cold Benguela Current. It’s named 16-Mile Beach, but that’s an underestimate. Surfing at Yzerfontein was pioneered by the likes of the legendary John Whitmore in the 1950s. He and his cronies would spend weekends surfing at Yzerfontein and partying at the Darling Hotel. Waves break over a flat slab of rock and then link with the sand bars onto the beach, the result being high-speed hollow waves.

The village offers plenty for the nature lover, with long walks along the beach to view whales, coastal birds and flora, fields of wild flowers during spring and visits to the West Coast National Park. Dassen Island, just offshore, is renowned for its colony of African penguins. Web www.heksie.com.

MacDougall’s Bay, Northern Cape
There’s not too much to say about MacDougall’s Bay south of Port Nolloth except that locals claim it has the whitest beach in the southern hemisphere. Port Nolloth, of course, is a quirky place where fishing trawlers, converted into giant vacuum cleaners, suck piles of grit and a few diamonds from the seabed.

MacDougall’s grew up as a cluster of holiday homes and B&Bs around a spectacular beach which sends shell hunters into ecstasy and where surfers with the tenacity to drive up the Northern Cape coast ride some cool big ones.

Late last year, the beach got Blue Flag status and now people are trying to find MacDougall’s on maps. It’s worth the search – and the trip. Contact the local info office at 027-851-1111.