Cape Town to East London: 1 035 km, and why the last 278 km are not the N2

Cape Town to East London is 1 035 km and about 13 hours 45 minutes of driving. It is the N2 Garden Route as far as Gqeberha at 757 km — and then it is not the N2 at all. The last 278 km follow the R72 coastal road, and that is the part of this trip nothing else covers.

First, what this page is not

73% of this route is the Cape Town to Gqeberha lane. Sir Lowry’s Pass at 58 km, Houwhoek at 84 km, the Garden Route towns, the Tsitsikamma toll plaza — all of it is the same road, and all of it is covered properly on our Cape Town to Gqeberha corridor guide.

We are not going to write it twice. This page gives you the shared section in summary, and then spends its length on the 278 km that only appears here — plus the economics of running the whole thing in one go rather than stopping at Gqeberha.

The first 757 km, in summary

km	What
58 · 84	Sir Lowry’s Pass (452 m) and Houwhoek Pass (340 m) — both inside the first 84 km, laden, in Cape Town traffic
218–491	Swellendam · Mossel Bay · George · Knysna — the Garden Route, single carriageway and busy
556	Tsitsikamma toll plaza — the only one on the whole 1 035 km
757	Gqeberha — port, automotive plants, and the obvious place to break the trip

The last 278 km are the R72, not the N2

This is the finding, and it is easy to get wrong. Between Gqeberha and East London there are two roads: the N2 runs inland through Makhanda, Peddie and King William’s Town; the R72 hugs the coast through Alexandria, Kenton-on-Sea and Port Alfred.

Our routing profile takes the R72. That is not an opinion — it is measurable:

Place	Distance from our driven route	On which road
Alexandria	0.0 km	R72
Port Alfred	0.7 km	R72
Kenton-on-Sea	1.6 km	R72
Peddie	20.6 km off	N2
Qonce (King William’s Town)	30.9 km off	N2
Makhanda (Grahamstown)	37.2 km off	N2

Why it matters to a driver. The R72 is a provincial road, not a national one — narrower, largely single carriageway, and it runs close enough to the coast to carry holiday traffic in season. It is the shorter way and the routing engine prefers it, but “1 035 km on the N2” would be a wrong description of this trip, and a dispatcher planning national-road speeds over the last quarter of it will be late.

km	Where
789	Colchester
852	Alexandria
877	Kenton-on-Sea
901	Port Alfred — the last real services
1 035	East London — 134 km further on, the longest gap of the whole trip

One toll plaza in 1 035 km — and we still cannot price it

The whole route carries a single toll plaza: Tsitsikamma at 556 km. Its Class 4 tariff is not in our sourced SANRAL schedule, which covers 69 plazas across the N1, N3, N4, N17 and the KwaZulu-Natal N2 but not the Garden Route section. We are not going to estimate one.

For scale, the five mainline N2 plazas we do hold run R34 to R217 for a Class 4. Budget for it and confirm the rate — and do not read our silence as the road being free.

What a leg costs

Item	One way
Diesel — about 414 litres at the coastal wholesale list price of R25.64/l	R10 615
Tolls, Class 4	one plaza — rate not held
Fuel alone	≈ R10 600

Coast to coast the whole way, so this lane never touches the inland pricing zone — R25.64/l against R26.39 inland, worth about R311 on the fuel this trip needs.

The 2.5 km/l is an assumption, not a measurement, and it is a weak one here: two passes in the first 84 km, a lot of town driving through the Garden Route, and a quarter of the trip on a provincial road. Use your own figure. R25.64 is the wholesale list price, not a pump price. We do not publish a rate for this lane.

Break at Gqeberha, or run it through?

At 13 hours 45 minutes this cannot be a single shift. That gives you a real choice the shorter lanes do not:

• Break at Gqeberha (757 km). A port with automotive volume, at 73% of the distance — late in the day, but it is the one place on the route where you can realistically reload rather than just sleep.
• Break at Port Alfred (901 km). Closer to the end, but the last services before a 134 km run into East London, and nothing to reload with.

Fuel alone comes to about R21 200 for the round trip whether or not you have a load back. The compensation on this lane is that it strings together three ports — Cape Town, Gqeberha and East London — so the return is a routing decision rather than a gamble. Our Durban to Gqeberha guide covers the fourth road into the same network.

The cross-check

Gqeberha sits at 757 km on this route. Our Cape Town to Gqeberha corridor, computed separately, gives 749 km — an 8 km difference on the same road, which is the routing engine reaching a city centre versus passing it on the way through.

We publish that rather than smooth it over. A distance you can check against the same road measured another way is worth more than one that agrees with itself because nobody ever tested it.

Source and currency

Sources: distance, driving time and every kilometre marker computed on our own routing engine from the driven route, with towns placed by their position along that line. The R72-versus-N2 finding is the off-route distance of each town from that same geometry, quoted above. Passes are OpenStreetMap nodes intersected with the route; the toll plaza position likewise, and its tariff is deliberately not estimated because it is absent from our sourced SANRAL schedule. Diesel is the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy coastal wholesale list price for 50ppm, effective 5 August 2026.

Current as at 15 August 2026. Diesel changes monthly on the first Wednesday; tolls annually in March.

Running the Cape to the Eastern Cape?

List your truck on the Kweli Load Exchange and set this corridor against it. Three ports on one road means the return leg has three places to come from — which on a lane this long is the whole difference. See also Cape Town to Gqeberha and Gqeberha to Bloemfontein.