Our recent visit to St. Lucia was a stop along the way to the final destination of our KwaZulu-Natal road trip: Mtunzini, a coastal town off the N2 highway, where we spent five days hanging out on near-empty beaches and wandering through tropical forests.

Mtunzini (the locals call it Zini) means “a place in the shade” in isiZulu. It’s so-named for obvious reasons: The town is full of lush, tropical greenery, which helps keep things cool during the area’s sweltering summer months. We were there in late winter — just the right time to enjoy the beach and the greenery without the super-hot temperatures.

Unlike St. Lucia, a major destination with lots of tourist facilities and activities aimed at international travelers, Mtunzini is more like a locals-only beach town. We were lucky enough to stay in the home of Thorsten’s friend Jeremy, a fellow architect and Zini resident, who provided a comfortable place for us to live like locals ourselves.

What to do in Mtunzini

The main tourist things to do in Mtunzini seem to be: 1) going to the beach; 2) walking in the forest, often combined with walking on the beach; 3) birdwatching; and 4) relaxing.

I was mostly into #4 on this trip and didn’t do much else. But here are a few photos and notes on the things I did do.

1) The Beach

As in St. Lucia, the beaches in Mtunzini are wild and unguarded. Also like St. Lucia, Mtunzini’s beaches are on protected land, in a provincial park called the Umlalazi Nature Reserve.

Thorsten and his kids love the beach and spent lots of time swimming in the surf (which was a bit too rough for my taste) and burying each other in the sand.

I’m more of a beach-walker and took short walks, admiring the ubiquitous driftwood, while the others swam and performed sand burials.

Note there is an entrance fee to access the Umlalazi Nature Reserve. Unfortunately I forgot to ask how much it costs — we were using Jeremy’s local pass and didn’t have to pay — and I can’t find that information anywhere online.

The Forest

Walking in the forest was my favorite thing in Mtunzini. Thorsten and I did one longer hike — the 10-kilometer “Mtunzini River and Beach Trail”, which we found on the AllTrails app — and a shorter forest-to-beach hike that Jeremy showed us. We also walked through the Raphia Palm Monument but I’ll say more about that in the birdwatching section.

The longer hike started at the boat launch parking lot and wound through some tropical forest and an interesting mangrove forest, complete with slimy mud, then along the river estuary (where there was some unsightly litter but only in one small part) and out onto the beach. The AllTrails app was a little confusing — it kept telling us we had veered off course when we hadn’t — but it was useful for figuring out where to exit the beach and get back to the parking lot (there was no sign).

Our shorter hike was a quick, two-kilometer walk through a “dune forest” (which I assume is the source of all that driftwood) and out onto the beach via the Siyaya Coastal Trail, which has an entrance at the main beach parking lot.

For more information about the hiking trails in Mtunzini, read this informative blog post.

Birdwatching

Mtunzini is very popular with birders. I have zero pictures to show for it but we did spot some really interesting birds, including the hilarious-looking trumpeter hornbill (many of them), a giant kingfisher, and a possible sighting of Mtunzini’s most famous bird — the palm-nut vulture. There are only about 40 (!) palm-nut vultures in South Africa and most of them live in and around Mtunzini. We saw a huge, black-and-white bird fly off in front of us during our first forest hike, which could have been a vulture, but we didn’t get a close look and it also could have been a fish eagle.

We did, however, walk through the Raphia Palm Forest National Monument, which is where palm-nut vultures often hang out because they love to eat raphia palm nuts. Raphia palms, which are really ginormous palm trees, are quite a thing to look at in their own right.

Note: You’ll find a sign pointing toward the Raphia Palm Monument just outside the entrance to the Umlalazi Reserve. The sign points down a muddy road that is only accessible via 4×4, but there is also a boardwalk just up the path to the right that you can follow to get to the forest on foot. It only takes five to ten minutes.

Mtunzini has a couple of nice restaurants. We went to one, a Portuguese joint called Vista Lagoa, and I loved it — affordable, tasty seafood in a quirky setting. Unfortunately I was relaxing too much and forgot to take pictures.

Shout-out to Zini local and 2Summers follower Jess Lawrie, who reached out to me while we were in Mtunzini, gave me tips, invited the whole family for sundowners, and even gave us sugarcane and macadamia nut oil from her family farm. Jess is currently doing a really cool adopt-a-dog campaign on Instagram — please check it out.