Hanging out at Marloth Park

Mobile Blogging from here.

We've been here for a couple of days now and have seen four of the big five ... we're off for a night drive later; hopefully see a leopard then.

(Still licking my wounds ... we wuz robbed!)

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Loads to say about PE ...

... but I've run out of time for now. Enough to say we had a mini-school reunion:

It was like old times for David, Craig, and Gavin and I ... we all agreed that none of us had changed a bit after 30 years!

On to PE!

The last day of our Garden route trip took us from Plettenberg Bay to Port Elizabeth:

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View of Robberg nature reserve from Plet:

We visited Storms River Mouth in the Tsitsikamma national park:

Its a long, long road!:

Garden Route

Next day (after stopping at the post office tree to send postcards) we headed off to Plettenberg Bay:

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Had lunch at Knysna heads and then split up since David's lot went straight to PE, and then on Grahamstown to meet up with friends and we were going to Plettenberg bay to meet Dave and Carol Pitt.

Both Yin and I know David and Carol from England in the early 90s, and David and I went to high school together.

Off to PE

We broke the journey to PE into three, heading to Mossel Bay on the first day via the (somewhat) famous Route 62:

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... had an excellent lunch in Montagu and headed across the little Karoo to Oudtshoorn. Got there too late to do both the caves and the ostriches so we split up.

We really took advantage of the birds:

1. Fed them
2. Stood on the their eggs
3. Sat on them
4. Rode them
5. Ate them as biltong!

They are farm animals and Highgate ostrich show farm incubates thousands of eggs and culls 150 animals a day to produce all sorts of things (including feather dusters!):

We've got excellent videos of me, James, Angela and Yin riding birds.

England vs. Algeria

Best not focus on the play and the result, but rather tell you about the amazing atmosphere in Cape Town on match day.

We arrived early and walked across town ... 2.5 km of partying from the station to the stadium:

Once again the England fans owned the stadium. There are a load of South Africans who have adopted the team too:

Wine and Cheetahs?

When I was at UCT we went on an annual rampage around the cape vineyards inevitably visiting the Spier estate near Stellenbosch.

They've been making wine there since 1692 ... but they've stopped producing the port we used to buy by the gallon and have gone very up-market.

They also now host a Cheetah sanctuary:

It seems the animals are spoiled by human contact and can't be returned to the wild. Strangely, the money they make from tourists goes to a program of purchasing Anatolian sheep dogs.