Cape Town to Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth): the 749 km N2, two passes and one toll plaza

Cape Town to Gqeberha is 749 km and about 10 hours of driving on the N2. It is the shortest of South Africa’s four major freight lanes, it has one toll plaza, and it is the only one that puts a laden truck over two mountain passes before the driver has been on the road ninety minutes.

Why this corridor exists

It links two ports and the agriculture between them. Cape Town is the deciduous fruit and wine export gateway; Gqeberha is the automotive manufacturing coast. Between them the Overberg and the Southern Cape produce grain, fruit, dairy and timber — and the towns strung along the N2 consume everything a retail supply chain sends them.

That makes this a lane with real two-way volume, but a seasonal one at the Cape end. Deciduous fruit concentrates the westbound export flow into a few months; the retail and manufacturing flows run all year. An operator planning this road on an annual average is planning for a year that does not happen.

The road: 749 km, and a town every 30 kilometres

km	Where	What it means
0–43	Cape Town → Somerset West	Urban. Slow in peak, and it matters more here than on other lanes because of what comes next
58	Sir Lowry’s Pass — 452 m	The climb out of the Cape Flats, 58 km in
83	Houwhoek Pass — 340 m	The second one, 25 km after the first
111–217	Caledon · Swellendam	The Overberg. Grain country, and the road opens up
299–386	Riversdale · Mossel Bay	Back to the coast. The Garden Route proper begins
427–487	George · Wilderness · Sedgefield · Knysna	The busiest stretch: towns, tourist traffic, single carriageway
519–577	Plettenberg Bay · Storms River	Forest and gorges. The road crosses them on bridges
551	Tsitsikamma toll plaza	The only one on the route — see below
665–678	Humansdorp · Jeffreys Bay	Out of the forest, into the Eastern Cape
749	Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth)

Two passes, and they come early

Sir Lowry’s Pass (452 m) is 58 km from Cape Town. Houwhoek Pass (340 m) is 25 km after it. Both sit on the driven route — our geometry puts them 0 m and 69 m off the line.

Neither is high by South African standards. What makes them matter is where they are. On the N3 a driver meets Van Reenen’s at 304 km, with three hours of highway to settle the load and check the mirrors. Here the first climb arrives while the truck is still in the Cape Town commute, fully laden, on a road that carries heavy car traffic.

• Eastbound they are climbs — slow, hard on cooling, and a genuine drag on your average speed for the first hour and a half.
• Westbound they are descents into a metro, at the end of a 700 km day, on the approach to the busiest urban section of the route.

Further east the road meets the Storms River and Bloukrans gorges. The N2 crosses these on bridges rather than descending them — our data places the old Bloukrans pass road 666 m off the driven route, which is the measurement of how much climbing the bridges save you.

One toll plaza, and a figure we will not invent

The route geometry returns exactly one toll plaza: Tsitsikamma, at 551 km.

We do not hold a verified Class 4 tariff for it, so we are not publishing one. Our sourced SANRAL schedule covers 69 plazas across the N1, N3, N4, N17 and the KwaZulu-Natal N2 — the Garden Route section is not in it. That is a gap in our reference, not a suggestion that the plaza is free.

What we can tell you: it is one plaza in 749 km, it is a mainline plaza on the through route, and the five mainline N2 plazas in our sourced schedule run from R34 to R217 for a Class 4 vehicle. Budget for it, confirm the rate, and do not let anyone tell you this route is toll-free.

For the lanes where we do hold the full schedule, the plaza-by-plaza working is on the Durban to Gqeberha, Johannesburg to Cape Town and Johannesburg to Durban pages.

What a leg costs

Item	One way
Diesel — about 300 litres at the coastal wholesale list price of R25.64/l	R7 682
Tolls, Class 4	one plaza — rate not held
Fuel alone	≈ R7 700

This is the cheapest leg of the four major lanes to fuel, and simply because it is the shortest. It also runs coast-to-coast, so it never touches the inland pricing zone: at R25.64/l against R26.39 inland, the same 300 litres cost R225 less than they would on a Gauteng-based lane.

The usual two caveats. The 2.5 km/l is an assumption, not a measurement — and on this lane it is a weaker one than most, because two climbs in the first 83 km and a lot of town driving are exactly the conditions that pull consumption away from a highway average. Use your own figure. And R25.64 is the wholesale list price, not a pump price.

We do not publish a rate for this lane.

The short lane that is not a quick one

749 km in about 10 hours is an average of 75 km/h — and that is the routing engine being generous. This road spends its middle third as single carriageway through Garden Route towns, in traffic that includes a lot of people on holiday.

The practical consequence is that this is the one major lane where distance flatters the trip. A dispatcher who plans it on kilometres alone will be late; one who plans it on the two passes, the town sections and the George–Knysna stretch will not.

Fuel alone comes to about R15 400 for the round trip whether or not you have a load coming back — and the shortness of the lane cuts both ways. The empty-return penalty here is the smallest of the four majors in rand, and the hardest to excuse, because both ends are ports with real two-way volume and the turn can be done inside a week.

Heading inland instead of along the coast? Our Gqeberha to Bloemfontein corridor guide covers the 665 km route that joins the N1 at Colesberg — and carries no toll plaza at all.

Running the full length instead? Our Johannesburg to Gqeberha corridor guide covers the 1 060 km lane — three toll plazas at R732, every rand of it paid before Bloemfontein.

Carrying on past Gqeberha? Our Cape Town to East London corridor guide covers the full 1 035 km — and why the last 278 km run on the R72 coastal road rather than the N2.

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. Passes are OpenStreetMap pass nodes intersected with our route geometry, with the off-route distance stated. The toll plaza position is from OpenStreetMap coordinates against the same geometry; its tariff is not in our sourced SANRAL schedule and is deliberately not estimated. 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 Garden Route?

List your truck on the Kweli Load Exchange and set this corridor against it. It is the shortest major lane in the country between two ports — which means the return leg is not a long shot, it is the difference between one paying trip and two. See also our Durban to Gqeberha corridor guide, the other coastal road into the same port.