There is no Fragrance Route in Great Brak


On 24 September it was Heritage day in South Africa.  My husband and I decided to take our cameras and go for a drive.  Great Brak River is about 25 km from our home in Mossel Bay.  I found a leaflet about Great Brak River at the Mossel Bay Tourism office with a bit of detail about the “Fragrance Route”.  Since we love to take photos of flowers, we decided to drive this route.  (There should be lots of flowers on a fragrance route…or so we thought)

The following picture shows the description of the fragrance route.  This is an extract out of the Great Brak River leaflet: 



What we experienced on our drive:

Firstly we could not find the Fragrance route.  We followed the vague map that was on the leaflet but nowhere along the route were any signs to give information or directions.

Secondly, there were almost no flowers along the route…or what we thought is the route.  It is a gravel road that was under construction.  All the plants next to the road were covered with dust and no flowers.  No lavender. No Fynbos.  No Proteas. No flowers.

We drove through Friedersheim and still saw no flowers.  September is the start of Spring and we definitely expected to see some flowers.  I know that there is a drought in the Western Cape but still we expected a few flowers.

While looking through our photos to select some for this post I found that we took photos of three flowers on the whole drive.

While we did enjoy the drive and JW loved seeing the horses and animals along the route we felt cheated by the information in the leaflet. 


There is no fragrance Route in Great Brak River. 

This is a marketing scam from the tourist office.  The only fragrance we smelled was dust.  









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