Walking through Xhosa villages on the Wild Coast

The path drops into the valley before you can see the village

We arrived at Coffee Bay by shared taxi from East London, three hours on a road that the maps show as a provincial route and that turns to loose gravel twenty kilometres before the village. Coffee Bay is the northernmost practical base on the Wild Coast for walking toward Hole-in-the-Wall, a natural arch in the coastal headlands that is the most photographed site on this section of the Eastern Cape coast.

It was the second week of January, which is high summer on the Wild Coast: warm, humid, with afternoon rain most days and mornings that were clear and bright before the cloud built. This is not the conventional wisdom for visiting — most travel guides suggest the Wild Coast is better in winter — but the summer brings the grass to full height and the hillsides to a green so saturated it looks implausible from a distance.

Our guide for the three days was Themba, a Xhosa man in his mid-thirties who had grown up in a village above Coffee Bay and who now runs walking tours for the small number of travellers who find this part of the coast. He charged ZAR 400 per day per person, which included guiding, introductions to the homesteads where we slept, and interpretation.

What community-based walking tourism looks like here

The Wild Coast walking trail economy is genuinely community-owned in a way that distinguishes it from most of what goes by that name elsewhere. The homesteads that accommodate walkers — typically one or two spare rooms with basic bedding, meals cooked by the household — retain the income directly. There is no agency layer, no head office in Cape Town or Johannesburg distributing a percentage. Themba charges for guiding. The families charge separately for accommodation and food. The amounts are negotiated locally.

This matters because the alternative model — the one that operates on the more developed sections of the South African tourism economy — involves a Cape Town-based operator booking all accommodation, retaining the margin, and paying local partners a fixed daily rate. On the Wild Coast specifically, where road infrastructure is so poor that formal tourism development has not yet arrived at scale, the informal model is what exists. It is worth supporting deliberately.

We stayed two nights in homesteads and one night at a community-run backpackers lodge near Hole-in-the-Wall. The homestead accommodation was basic in the functional sense: a mattress, a blanket, a bucket shower, meals of umsila wengulube (oxtail) or umngqusho (samp and beans) cooked over wood. The back porch of the second homestead faced east over a valley where cattle moved through the late afternoon light and the sound was entirely livestock and insects.

The walk itself: three days, thirty-five kilometres

Day one runs from Coffee Bay south along the cliffs above the Mdumbi mouth. The path drops into the Mdumbi valley, crosses the river at low tide — you remove your shoes and wade; there is no bridge — and climbs through hillside mealie fields to the village above the mouth. The Hole-in-the-Wall is visible from the headland east of Mdumbi, about six kilometres distant, in the late afternoon.

Day two is the section most guides describe as the Wild Coast’s finest: the coastal walk from Mdumbi past the shipwrecked MV Jacaranda (which ran aground in 1971 and whose hull has been gradually consuming into the sand for fifty years) and around the headlands to the Hole-in-the-Wall itself. The arch is sixty metres high and was formed by wave erosion through a dolerite dyke. The Xhosa name for it — iziKhalaMtwayi, meaning “the place of the roaring” — refers to the sound of surge through the arch at high tide.

Day three is the return to Coffee Bay, partly inland through pineapple plantations and maize, partly back along the coastal path.

The ethics of village walking tourism

Themba raised this himself on day one, before we asked. He said he had previously worked with tour operators who brought groups through villages as the equivalent of a walking zoo — where the economic logic was extractive and the villages received nothing except intermittent, unpredictable visitors who photographed people’s homes and children. He had stopped working in that format.

His model requires advance communication with the homesteads. We were expected, not a surprise. The families had agreed to host us, understood the rates we would pay, and were not obligated to entertain us — they were running households that we happened to be sleeping in. The distinction is meaningful and easy to lose in travel writing that frames any community engagement as automatically enriching.

The Wild Coast is one of the places in South Africa where the gap between “community tourism” as a marketing phrase and community tourism as an actual economic arrangement is visible. The walking model here is at the functional end of that spectrum.

What changed for our planning advice

The Wild Coast is not easily accessible by the standards that most international visitors expect: the roads are poor, the accommodation is basic, and the region requires time that the typical Cape-Kruger itinerary does not have. For visitors who can dedicate three or four nights to it, we recommend the Coffee Bay to Hole-in-the-Wall walk with a local guide — not a Cape Town operator with a local partner, but a guide like Themba who is resident in the community, can make the introductions that matter, and retains the economic benefit locally. Finding this type of guide requires a call to the Coffee Bay community backpacker lodges, who know who is operating locally. It cannot be booked through a mainstream platform.

A structured Wild Coast multi-day tour from Jeffreys Bay is an alternative if you want logistics handled — note that this is a longer, more packaged format than what we described above, but it does access the coastline.