Durban to Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth): the 941 km coastal corridor, and the one toll plaza on it

Durban to Gqeberha is 941 km and about 12 hours of driving — the N2 as far as East London, then the R72 coastal road for the last 300 km. Tolls for a Class 4 vehicle are R162 — one plaza, in the whole 941 km. It is the coastal lane, it has no mountain passes, and it is by a wide margin the cheapest major road in South Africa to put a truck on.

Why this corridor exists

It is a road between ports, and there is a third one in the middle. Durban is the busiest container port in sub-Saharan Africa; Gqeberha sits beside the country’s automotive manufacturing cluster; East London, at 641 km, is a working port with vehicle plants of its own.

That shapes what moves. Southbound runs components, steel, packaging and imported material off the Durban quay; northbound runs finished product, containers and agricultural freight back up. Automotive manufacturing is unusually good freight to carry: it runs to a schedule, it is repeat business, and it does not stop for a season.

The lane also exists as the alternative to going inland. Freight between Durban and Gqeberha can route via Bloemfontein on the N3/N1, and plenty does. This road is longer in hours than the map suggests and shorter in cost than anything else on offer — which is the trade-off this page is really about.

The road: 941 km, and one toll booth

km	Where	What it means
0–64	Durban → Amanzimtoti → Scottburgh	The South Coast. Dense, built-up, slow out of the city
115–118	Port Shepstone · Oribi	The only toll plaza on the route
194–248	Harding · Kokstad	The road turns inland and climbs away from the coast. Last full services for a while
326–420	Mount Frere · Mthatha	The interior stretch. Mthatha is the largest centre between Durban and East London
504–537	Dutywa · Butterworth
641	East London	Port, vehicle plants, full services. The natural overnight
783–835	Port Alfred · Kenton · Alexandria	This is the R72, not the N2 — the coastal road. The N2 runs inland via Makhanda, 37 km off this route
941	Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth)

One plaza. R162.

km	Plaza	Class 4
118	Oribi (mainline)	R162
	Total, one way	R162

Umtentweni, at 112 km, is a ramp plaza — charged on the on/off movement, not on a through run. The other N2 plazas you may have heard of (Mtunzini, Mvoti, oThongathi, Dokodweni, Mandini, King Shaka) are all on the N2 north of Durban, toward Richards Bay. None of them touches this road.

What that actually means

Lane	Distance	Class 4 tolls	Per km
Durban → Gqeberha (N2 + R72)	941 km	R162	R0.17
Johannesburg → Cape Town (N1)	1 397 km	R1 115	R0.80
Johannesburg → Durban (N3)	571 km	R1 274	R2.23

You will pay more in tolls driving Johannesburg to Durban — 571 km — than driving Durban to Gqeberha and back twice. On a per-kilometre basis the N3 costs 13 times what this road does. Anyone carrying a single toll assumption across their whole fleet is mispricing both lanes badly, and in opposite directions.

No passes, and what that is worth

There is no mountain pass on this route. Of the four major South African freight lanes it is the only one without: the N3 has Van Reenen’s, the N1 has Hex River and the Huguenot Tunnel, and both cost brakes, fuel and time.

That does not make it an easy road. It is 941 km of two-lane national road for most of its length, it runs through 23 towns, and the section between Kokstad and East London is the least-served stretch of any major coastal lane in the country. What it means is that the difficulty here is traffic, distance and the road itself — not gradient.

We do not hold verified weighbridge data for the N2 south. Our sourced traffic-control-centre list covers the N3, N1 and N4. Do not read that absence as “no weighbridges” — read it as us not knowing, and confirm locally.

What a leg costs

Item	One way
Diesel — about 376 litres at the coastal wholesale list price of R25.64/l	R9 651
Tolls, Class 4	R162
Fuel and tolls	≈ R9 800

The coastal price is the right one here, and that is worth noticing. This is the only one of the big four lanes that starts and ends at the coast, so it never touches the inland pricing zone. At R25.64/l against R26.39 inland, the same 376 litres cost R282 less than they would on an inland lane — small per trip, real over a year.

Two caveats, as always. The 2.5 km/l is an assumption, not a measurement — use your own. And R25.64 is the wholesale list price, not a pump price: diesel in South Africa is regulated in every component up to the wholesale level, but the retail margin is not.

We do not publish a rate for this lane. We have no verified rate data, and a number invented here would become the anchor in your next negotiation.

The return leg, and why this lane forgives less than it looks

Fuel and tolls come to about R19 600 for the round trip whether or not you have a load coming back. Empty back, and the outbound load carries all of it.

The cheap tolls make this lane look forgiving. They are not the point: tolls are 1.7% of the fuel-and-tolls bill here, against 17% on the N3. Almost everything you spend on this road is diesel and time, and neither is recoverable by routing cleverly — only by having freight in the trailer on both legs. On a lane where running the N3’s toll rate over this distance would have cost R2 098 instead of R162, and the empty-return penalty is R9 800, the second number is the one that decides the month.

The compensation is that both ends are ports and there is a third in the middle. East London at 641 km means this is one of the few long lanes where you can break the trip and reload rather than run one end to the other.

Heading down the Garden Route instead? Our Cape Town to Gqeberha corridor guide covers the 749 km N2 — Sir Lowry’s and Houwhoek passes inside the first 83 km, a town every 30 km, and the single toll plaza at Tsitsikamma.

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.

Corrected 15 August 2026. This page originally described the whole route as “the N2”. That is right for the first 641 km, Durban to East London. The last 300 km follows the R72 coastal road through Alexandria, Kenton and Port Alfred — our route geometry places all three within 1.6 km of the driven line, while Makhanda on the inland N2 sits 37 km off it. The distance, tolls and costs on this page are unaffected; the road number was wrong. Found while building the Cape Town to East London page, which runs the same coastal stretch.

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. Tolls are the SANRAL Class 4 schedule effective 1 March 2026 (3.12% increase, gazetted 5 February 2026); plazas were identified from the route geometry, with ramp plazas excluded and the N2-north plazas confirmed as off-route. The absence of mountain passes was checked against OpenStreetMap pass data intersected with our route geometry — nothing within 4 km. 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. Tolls change annually in March, diesel monthly on the first Wednesday.

Running this coast?

List your truck on the Kweli Load Exchange and set this corridor against it. With three ports on one road, the return leg here is a routing decision rather than a gamble — and on this lane the return leg is worth more than every toll you will pay. See also the Johannesburg to Durban and Johannesburg to Cape Town corridor guides.