Elands Bay surf shack

Elands Bay — 'Elandsbaai' to locals, 'E-Bay' to surfers — is a small fishing and surfing village on South Africa's Cape West Coast, about two and a half hours north of Cape Town. The village sits on a broad Atlantic bay under the shadow of Baboon Point, a striking sandstone bluff carrying some of the oldest San rock paintings in southern Africa. It is famous for two things: one of the best long left-hand point breaks in the world, and prices that are still low enough that a working surfer can genuinely buy a house here.

This 60 square-metre shack is unpretentious in the best sense. Two bedrooms, a small bathroom, a functional kitchen-living room, plaster over brick walls, a corrugated tin roof, a wooden deck with a place for boards, and a fenced yard big enough for a bakkie and a fish smoker. It needs a fresh coat of paint, some roof attention and a modernised bathroom — nothing structural, nothing scary. Municipal water and power are connected; a solar-plus-battery setup is common up here.

The walk to the beach and the point is about a minute and a half. On a clean south-westerly winter swell, the Elands Bay point produces mechanical waist-to-double-overhead lefts that can peel for a hundred metres or more; when the wind switches, the inside bay reforms into gentle beach-break peaks perfect for longboarding and beginners. North of Baboon Point the coast opens into hours of empty beach, seasonal salt pans full of flamingos, and eventually the mouth of the Verlorenvlei — a Ramsar-listed wetland teeming with birdlife.

Elands Bay itself has a well-stocked spar, a hardware store, a bakery, a hotel with a bar and restaurant, a decent coffee shop, and a strong community of surfers, fishermen and West Coast farmers. Lambert's Bay, twenty minutes north, has a small airfield, a bigger supermarket and the famous Bird Island gannet colony. Cape Town International is a straight drive down the R27. Foreign buyers face no restrictions on freehold ownership in South Africa. If you want your own house on one of the world's great surf points for a fraction of what a similar wave in California or Australia would cost, Elands Bay is very close to the last of the honest bargains.