Days 82 thru 84

(Dan’s comments are italicized)

I’ve often wondered what has made me the way I am; for example, I NEED a stock of food/toiletries/whatever (when COVID hit, I had enough toilet paper to keep us and neighbors supplied for at least 6 months 😂) I put it down to being raised in a poor family where we often had the go without. And I think that had a bearing on sculpting my oddities…but so did living and traveling in Africa (and similar places)! Here, you can’t trust that you can buy something when you need it, or that things happen on time, or that buses go where they say they’re going etc. So I’m not quite sure why we expected things to go smoothly when we went into East London on Friday to visit the museum and change money.

What was supposed to be a fun day was frustrating! I’d checked on the museum before leaving our lodging, and it said it was open. But, upon arrival, we found it closed because of some holiday! Not to be deterred, we thought we could still change money and have something to eat; nope!! The banks were closed, as were all but McDonald’s and KFC! Thank goodness having a reserve is one of my quirks as we have enough cash for a week!

But, on our return to our beach, frustration quickly turned to joy…

It was then goodbye to our beach as we move toward Cape Town. But we were passing Addo Elephant Wildlife Park so we had to go! There were many different animals…

And then there were the elephants…

But the most joyous moments for me was watching the baby elephants! One of the babies was no more than a day or two old. His family surrounded him at all times and one or more often held onto him or guided him with their trunks…it was fascinating to see. Infants don’t know how to use their trunks, so you often see them whipping their heads around to wildly swing their proboscises.

I’m not sure how these amazing creatures can walk so closely together without tripping over themselves! Some of us would have fallen flat on our faces in no time at all!

The southern coast of South Africa is spectacularly diverse. We have passed through the South Coast, the Dolphin Coast, the Wild Coast, and now we can add the Garden Route to our experience. The name comes from the diverse vegetation contained in this coastal area.

We chose to drive the scenic R102 (kind of like Route 66) road for most of the route as opposed to the N2 highway. This meant that we would wind our way into canyons and look up at the highway bridges.

The Garden Route has a LOT of hiking trails, so we chose to do a hike on a well developed path called The Big Tree trail.

And at the end of the trail was a tree that could aptly be described as ‘Big’. The big trees in South Africa are called Champion Trees. This Outeniqua Yellowwood is over 1,000 years old! It makes me smile that place names are simple descriptions here in Africa; Big Tree is a big tree and Great View is just that!

I often hop out of the car and leave the door open. Rhia continually reminds me that there are monkeys in this part of the world…

Luckily I listened this time…

This monkey tried her best to break into our (rental) car, but fortunately she didn’t succeed. Dan had walked down a short path to see the view while I took photos around where we’d parked. This monkey waited for me to be far enough from the car before trying to open every door and trying to pry open every window. I was clicking away, thinking that Dan would never believe this…but, thankfully, he came back in time to see it for himself! The cheeky monkey (the one clinging to the outside of the car…not Dan!)

And of course there were just some beautiful skies and scenic views.

We stopped for the night at the end of the Garden Route at Mossel Bay. We’ve stayed in a mish-mash of places; some bad and some great. We didn’t have high expectations for our $31 place in Mossel Bay. However, it was a whole apartment, and it was beautiful!

Our fingers are crossed for the place we’re going to stay in for the next 10 nights in Cape Town…we’ll find out tomorrow 🤞