Final Days in South Africa

Hello from the Cape Town airport!  We are headed home on an overnight flight later today!  But first, rewind to last Tuesday ....

We headed off to Tsitsikamma National Park for a ziplining canopy tour.  The national park system in SA is wonderful, we bought the "Wild Pass" which gained us entry to all of the parks.  This was a good decision as we hit many of the parks during our stay.

While we waited for tour we observed a small Troop of Baboons near the road.

The ziplining was fun (of course), 10 zips of various lengths/speeds.  They gave us a glove to brake but, as usual, I am unclear on that concept - I was always coming in HOT! LOL

Some of the trees in this forest are upwards of 600 years old! 

After ziplining we grabbed lunch at a 60's themed restaurant - think Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, and headed to Stormsriver to hike to the suspension bridges.

The suspension bridges span the mouth of Stormsriver on the Indian Ocean.

Just kidding - that is not the real bridge! I call this one the "Indiana Jones" bridge.  This one was closed - obviously! LOL

Here is the actual suspension bridge -

another angle - you can see one of the bridges and the mouth of the river -

The whole area is breath-taking! We found a "wisdom" of wombat along the trail. (who gets to decide these group names? - i love them!)

It was a lovely day with a lot of hiking, we were all quite tired at the end of the day. We had energy only for a game of cards and some wine at the end of the day.

Wednesday morning started off with "load-shedding" - this basically means we had no electricity.  We had been told this would happen on our trip but have had very good luck until now.  We managed and walked to a cute little French Cafe for breakfast.

We then headed to Robberg Nature Reserve to checkout a pre-historic site.  Our first hike was to Nelson Bay Cave.  Evidence of human inhabitants dates back 120,000 years.  The exhibit, in a dark cave, showed basically a pile of rubbish they use to date and determine the diet of the people who lived in this area.  

For example, this cave was not near the water until about 8,000 years ago when ice melted and the sea level rose.  Prior to this time they did not have any seafood in their diet - so the bottom of the pile has bones, etc.  Higher up in the pile there are shells and other evidence of a seafood diet.  It was a very interesting exhibit.

Our second hike of the day took us along the scenic coast to The Gap.

Our next stop was Andelomi Forest Lodge in Stormsriver.  Cute little place but in addition to load-shedding they had a line go down so limited power and water until bed then nada. Oh well ~ we survived!

Up and out the next morning for a long drive to Addo Elephant National Park.  

PSA - always have some local currency - we needed to get gas and, due to load shedding, we could not pay with credit card.  We had R200 ($10) enough gas to get us to a gas station farther away with power.

Once in Addo we did a self-guided tour of the Park.  Basically, this means that instead of getting in a safari -style vehicle with a guide, we just drove our little car around.  Carsten did a great job driving - we would yell "STOP" when we saw an elephant, warthog, zebra, tsessebe, kudu, impala, or anything else of interest.  The speed limit was 25mph and we were in the park about 5 hours.  Here are some pics:

The zebra were running along the road, we were super close to them.

This was a nice day with many sightings of animals.

Final night was in Port Elizabeth - Greek for dinner and a final game of cards before repacking and bed.

In the preview blog Carsten and I stated our Top-5 going into the trip.  Here are the final Top-5 at the end.

Top 5 SA: elephants 🐘 trumpeting, giraffe 🦒 fighting, hippo breakfast, George house, wine train. Honorable Mention: hot water bottle in bed at Rukiya, and in general how they cared for us.

Top 5 CA: wine train tasting, large giraffe encounter in Excellence, white lion crossing road 3 meters from our vehicle, George cliff house spotting whales and dolphin, elephant trumpeting at us.

Shout out to Falk & Svenni, our best travel companions!  We love spending time with you and seeing the world! Love you both!

As Falk says, "the end of one trip means the beginning of the planning for the next!"  Next summer - Ireland, Scotland!

Headed home - happy!

Sheri & Carsten