Cape Town to Plettenburg Bay
Trip Start
Mar 24, 2005
1
3
21
Trip End
Jun 23, 2005
Plettenberg Bay,
South Africa
Thursday, April 7, 2005
The following day we booked our overland tour (starting from the 17th Apr), before getting a hire car & heading out of Cape Town later in the afternoon
Herdy & I on the Robberg Penninsular
. Having said that, first of all I had a fairly feisty argument with a particularly irritating guy at the car hire company (after he changed the agreed price!)... luckily we managed to find a good price elsewhere & after some great service were on the road pretty quickly - I think the argument was entertaining for Herdy - his first experience of seeing me getting proper lairy with someone! ... Onto the travels, we headed to Simonstown on the Cape, which was pretty quiet before going down to the Cape of good hope itself on Friday morning... That was unsurprisingly a pretty bleak, windy place - not helped by the fact I had a grim cold & was feeling a bit on the rubbish side... Saw loads of baboons roaming around, but apart from that there wasn't really much wildlife either. To get over that, first of all we went to Boulders Beach on the way back out of the Cape - the home of some of the largest colonies of South African penguins... As many of you know, that was one of my main things to do, so I was a bit over excited as we started seeing loads of them around the place - very cool to see loads nesting all over the brush at the back of the beach as well as lounging around on rocks in between swims (see pics/movie I'll try & add).
After that we started the 4 hour or so drive up to the garden route - where our first stop was a small town called Wilderness
Wilderness beach...
. Its main asset is an amazing, massive beach with rolling waves crashing in, seems like it goes on forever... Apart from that, the town wasn't massively exciting & the backpackers was quiet - only notable event in the evening was me beating Herdy 3-2 (come back from 2-0 down unlike Saints the following day!!). Just spent a bit of time in the morning lazing on the beach before going for a bit of an epic walk along it later in the afternoon - that before heading to the fairly ropey 'Bongo bar' to watch the Saints game early in the evening (I'll say no more about that one)... Anyway, the following day we spent 2-3 hours doing a really lovely walk up through the Wilderness National Park - along a riverside & up into the hills to a very cool waterfall - saw a few nice birds, but not a huge amount of other wildlife ... We then headed onto Plettenberg Bay, further east on the Garden route, a pretty cool town with stunning landscapes around it... Highlight of the area was doing the walk around the Robberg Penninsular, stupidly the first time I managed to go out without my binoculars (and typically we saw loads of amazing wildlife). Highlights include the seal colonies along the base of the cliffs, also saw loads of birds, a group of small mammals (which were a bit ferretlike), and then very cooly saw a pod of dolphins go past which stretched for about 150 metres, must have been loads of them. We also sat for about 10 minutes watching a seal catch & throw around a fish, with the seagulls circling above - amazing.
Another highlight was spending a few hours going up the Keurbooms river in a canoe, first time I'd been in one since school ! The landscape was stunning as we headed inland a few kms, I even saw my first red parrot which was great & got some good pics along the way. The following day we took the recommendation of the owners of the backpackers & went to a fairly small game reserve nearby (called Rhino Base camp), it was very cool & had loads of animals as well as some amazing landscapes - we went for the horseriding option so spent about two and a half hours going all around the reserve - we saw loads of zebra, giraffe, antelope, springbok, plus black rhino & even a lion (although we saw him creeping down on the inside of the enclosure rather than within striking distance of us & the horses!)... Absolutely stunning & really wet the appetite for the rest of the trip...
