Rounding the Hope

I'm still working my way through the Cape Town retrospective although finding it hard to seperate into post-size bites - life is a journey and separating beginnings from ends is hard at the best of times but this holiday felt so much like a continuous thread it's doing in my head. Solution: blog the journeys within the journey instead of trying to collate, compile and contrast. So this is the day we drove round the Cape........

We start at Kalk Bay - a fishing port where you're supposed to get great fresh fish but since we were at the wrong end of the day we had brunch at the Olympia Cafe and some of the best breakfasts/pastries I've tasted. Although I live in Portugal which also has some of the best pastries I've ever tasted...... life is tough ain't it?!First stop on the tourist trail is Boulders Beach where the penguins try to live their lives on the beach under the glare of the paparazzi (or play up to the crowds to get their cut of the tourist rand). A few years ago you were free to share the beaches with the penguins but be warned that nowadays you will pay and end up packed like sardines onto a wooden deck with a multitude of other tourists - it's a fine line here between conservation and profiting. Luckily there were a few penguins taking a break from the main stage (or were they trying to lure us into the queue and out of our R25?!) so we could photo them and get on the road again before a 6 year old jumped the wall and went to 'play' with them.

False Bay taken from Cape Point

Don't feed the baboons. Seriously. They half-killed an 8 year old while we were in CT and thats kinda normal for that time of the year when tourists decide to ignore the warnings. Mind you we also got half killed here when all the tourists decided to hit the brakes to take some photos. The view for Cape Point. Next stop: Antartica (or the end of the world if you still believe it's flat). For some reason while there were German and British tourists packing the steps up to the point, the point itself was held by a French family who had prime position and weren't moving. I'm sure thats not a metaphor for European relations?!I always get a little buzz when going to famous places, iconic places, places you've read about in books and seen in movies a hundred times. The buzz is greater when it's a place you've read about but never seen. So this is the actual, real life Cape of Good Hope which I grew up reading about in "adventure" novels with sailing ships having to round the Cape on their way to shipwreck themselves somewhere exotic - but I didn't actually realise it's a seperate point from Cape Point itself? Arrrr, back to the treasure map me hearties......To round the cape we headed up the west or Atlantic side of Cape Point through the less affluent side of beachside living. Also since this side has a slightly higher energy depostional environment (i.e. the waves are stronger) the road is a little closer to the water, or built on the side of a cliff. Since Nature usually doesnt like doing things like defying gravity the Chapman Peak road was closed for a couple of years after some rockfalls. Luckily we have engineers in the world who can design roads to cope with unstable slopes.........and the view over Hout Bay from Chapmans Peak is worth all the engineering (and the toll):Journey end: fish and chips (and ice-cream) on the beach in Hout Bay. This day was one of those days where the scenery speaks louder than any words I can write, so much so that it's an effort to only show a few photos and instead feels like I'm telling only half the story.

Progress

Some days I get the feeling I'm more like the guy with the pointy hair than I would like to be...

But while the storms keep us inside and insane at least they make for interesting skylines:

The Big Five (and other animals)

Following New Years we headed out east of Cape Town to the Garden Route Malaria Free^TM Game Lodge to see the Big Five in a Malaria Free^TM environment. The Big Five are:
Leopard - no photos. "Oh you never see them" said our ever helpful guide, completely contradicting all the marketing.


Buffaloes - no photos either. We drove through the bushland/long grass where they usually are but apparently they're very difficult to see. I would have thought they aren't hard to miss but I wouldn't know since I've never seen a buffalo. Anyway - since we didn't get a full set I'll round out with some photos of other cute animals we saw, which didn't make The Big Five
(I don't know what it is with titlecase in SA, but it's important).

I love this photo of the kudus against the skyline - like an puzzle it takes a second to work out how many shapes are ears and how many are trees... As you can tell a Malaria Free^TM environment isn't actually a very natural environment - it's a farm converted into a reserve where the antelope, bontebok, springbok and kudu roam and the elephants push over the telephone poles because it's fun. You might be able to tell from the size of the eles and the giraffes that the farm doesn't have much capacity for large animals and so is restricted to a pair of young adults of the smallest breed/type. The lack of trees means the giraffes spend most of their time head down munching through the bushes to get enough food.
Getting enough food wasn't such a problem for the humans - as you can see above we were able to eat our way through half the contents of the reserve. We were also treated to a traditional dance from the local school children - the payments from these concerts and donations from tourists have helped this school buy a new bus along with other resources. I wonder what sort of resources the other schools get left with who haven't got the opportunity to raise funds. There are plenty of people in South Africa trying to help break the poverty cycle but while every little bit helps isolated actions can only achieve so much.


While I'm on my soapbox: the Garden Route Game Lodge and other reserves in South Africa help by rescuing lions (and other animals) from canned hunting and other types of cruelty. Canned hunting is a vile practise where animals are raised in captivity to be targets for "hunters", normally in confined areas, and often their dependence on humans is abused to make them easier prey. The lions here are unable to fend for themselves - they will kill an animal but have no comprehension that they need to kill for food. So more game reserves like this are needed to resettle animals at risk and ensure they are cared for and have a happy life (and they are happy here - the fact that they've bred attests to that). As much as busfuls of tourist may seem repellent they can bring much good for the ecology as well as both for the community.