The Durban surf guide

Welcome to Durban

Surfing in Durban

Durban is the other South Africa, and the reason the country has no off season. While Jeffreys Bay waits for the Southern Ocean and Cape Town waits for a winter storm, this coast runs on the Indian Ocean and warms up as the others cool.

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The water is the headline. The country figures on the guide above are the Eastern Cape's, seventeen degrees in winter, and they understate this coast badly: the Agulhas current runs south along KwaZulu-Natal and keeps Durban in boardshorts for most of the year. That single fact is why somebody who cannot face a 4/3 books here rather than at the point.

Addington, on the city beachfront, is the sheltered one: sand, lefts and rights, best on a rising low tide, and it is where a first week happens. March is its month, with three clean days out of thirty and twenty-four too small, and the small days are what a school runs on. Umhlanga, twenty minutes north, is beach and reef together, with rocks and a line-up that belongs to people who live there. June gives it twelve clean days out of thirty, which on this coast is a lot.

The beaches here are netted and lifeguarded, which is the local answer to a question asked more often about South Africa than about anywhere else. It changes how a week feels more than it changes what you do in it.

And Durban is a city, not a surf town. The beachfront promenade runs for kilometres, the food is the best argument for the place after the water temperature, and the evenings do not need planning.

Welcome home.

Explore Durban

• 2 spotsSurf spotsThe waves worth the trip
• Seasonal guideWhen to goMonth by month
• PracticalGetting thereFlights and transfers