Shining Waters Wilderness

So we drove from Mossel Bay to Wilderness and called into a shopping mall en-route for some proper shampoo and deodourant! We arrived at Wilderness 'The Beach House' and found ourselves booked into an 8 bed dormitory with a beautiful deck balcony overlooking the ocean. Once showered and refreshed,we booked ouselves in for dinner which was fire oven pizza cooked to your liking,, it was yummy! Whilst at the Beach House we took ourselves on a canoe trip ...

... town to check on emails and to do some shopping, the town was quite busy. The weather was quite cloudy and there were lots of new arrivals on camp, mainly fishermen many of who brought boats with them. By midmorning the camp looked quite crowded as there were so many arrivals and although the pitches were marked out you can have up to 8 people on each pitch. So that meant on some of the pitches there were 3 or 4 units and ...

... the hotel. All tours cost at least €35 and we were not willing to part with so much. We have found that a lot of these tours are just such a rip off and fake that we were sure we were being over charged for something that just existed for tourists. So Alan, Heidi and I decided that we would not go on a tour but Manon decided she would.

On Saturday morning we got up early and the owner of the hotel brought us to a local market where you could buy second hand books and the ...

... Oudtshoorn (an hour or so away), where they have lots of big cats, cheetahs, lions, white tigers, white lions and a few cubs. They have a world first where you can get in to a cage and go in to the crocodile pool. I watched someone do it. It didn't seem that bad as the crocs just didn't take any notice. I finally got a photo of a Meercat doing it's thing, which I'm really chuffed about. We then went on to the Cango ...

... of the calves and mothers have already left by December to make the voyage to Antarctic Waters for the summer. We were told that if we were lucky we might see some stragglers, but in any case we wanted to explore this part of the world and if we saw whales that would be a bonus. We weren't disappointed. We had heard from the owner of the guesthouse we were staying at in Hermanus that there ...

... of the road. Walter and I just sat around watching the events of the day unfold. In retrospect I think Walter just wanted to sit around and drink since it was market day the Zulu women were out with their homemade Zulu beer. After an hour of sitting around with a bunch of old Zulu guys who didn't speak a lick of English, but were more than happy to keep passing me the beer jug, Walter and I started our walk through the village. It really wasn't much of a village ...

Our next stop was Wilderness. It does what it says on the tin. It's a wilderness-like area. We chose to stay at the oldest house in the town. Little did we know this would also mean there was no electricity. There was supposed to be, but the builders who were working on the property had buggered something up. The reason we stayed there was predominantly because Bart read in the book that they had dogs. So that was that. There was also a ...

... verandahs.It sells biltong, preserves, biscuits, meats etc. We had one of the best meals we've ever had. A salad of honey chicken and vegetables. It was delicious! We also tried some chutney flavoured corn. We meandered around for a while after lunch, then drove back to Venessa's for a nice evening. I think we went for a jog around the lake.

Well I found a job!... at a backpackers inn in a small town along the Indian Ocean on the Garden Route. It was supposed to be at another inn owned by the same people called the Beach House and it was beautiful, great view of the ocean but noisy since the ocean is quite wild here... too wild to swim in ...

... better weather. The sun was shining with a slight easterly breeze not worth mentioning. As the tide started shifting and the rocks slowly started disappearing to an ever increasing rise in the water, we decided to make our way to Inanda dam. (Chanelle) Inanda dam is situated in the Valley of a Thousand hills below Hillcrest. Unfortunately you do need to drive through the township of Indanda in order to reach the dam. The road is a treacherous winding ...