"I don't have a bag of peanuts!"

A bit late on this post, but here is our final day and some loose ends :)

Table Mountain is amazing. Like really, really amazing.

But it's a looooooong way to the top.

And an even longer trip down (Taylor was very brave).

The view was incredible, and we really started to enjoy ourselves once we got away from the throngs of jackass tourists who think that the only 2 rules - "stay on the path" and "don't feed the wildlife" don't apply to them.

Had we more time we could have taken a trip out to Robben Island, used for many purposes over time, most notably as a work camp for political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela and others.

 After surviving the descent it was time to go find the penguins in South Africa!

Penguin selfie!

In addition to having penguins, Boulder's Beach has BIG ASS NASTY spiders.

We decided to take the scenic route back to Cape Town rather than retracing our steps. It's a narrow, windy road along the western coast of the cape that reminded us at times of driving on Maui, but Maui doesn't have roads where the hillside hangs over you, or ceilings with giant stacks of bricks on top of them, resting on top of pillars at awkward angles..........

"We survived Chapman's Peak" selfie.

For our final morning, we checked out the Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden. We took hundreds of photos here, but will spare you :)

Wouldn't have thought we would find a Chief Seattle quote this far from home:

And, in typical South African fashion, we found signs that were a bit more blunt.

The King Protea is the national flower of South Africa. There are hundreds and hundreds of varieties of this plant, and the diversity is incredible. Unfortunately the Kings weren't in bloom, but many, many others were.

We started the journey home by going over in great detail all of the items in my suitcase at security. Over and over again my suitcase went through the scanner with more and more items removed and repeatedly re-scanned. That was a fun start to 30 hours of travelling.

This was an amazing trip. I could get all philosophical here and go on for many paragraphs, but I suspect you would prefer that we end with some other fun facts:

Don't EVER mess with a mama Egyptian Goose. 

South African vehicles made me feel like I was in the middle of a Stephen King alternate dimensions story. Back home, this particular vehicle is known as a Four Runner.

The closest relative to the Dassie or Rock Hyrax is the African Elephant. I know you don't believe me, I will wait while you Google it.

Speaking of elephants:

We thought the ports here had big boats. We were really, really wrong. The port in Durban can handle boats more than twice the size of this monster that is much larger than any boat we have ever laid eyes on.

Some things shouldn't have to be said...

But their signs tend to be a bit more blunt than we are used to:

And, finally, we unwittingly named our car after the largest fast food chain in South Africa...

Cape Town is one million billion trillion times better than Durban

Yesterday before we left for Cape Town we checked out the Shark Board tour of the coastline. These dudes change each net every two weeks (if they don't they become a breeding ground for sea-life and will actually end up attracting sharks):

It was fun to listen to a South African woman on the tour ask a bunch of questions ("so wait, there are no nets out right now?! Sharks could swim in?!") and attempt to not sound panicked.

Then we hopped a flight to Cape Town. Soooo excited to be heading out of Durban. Why the hell did no one say "stay the fuck out of Durban"? Okay, we are glad we went so we can say we went, but it makes Cape Town look like Paris. But actually, even without the comparison Cape Town is really nice. It's very cosmopolitan and Bohemian, and most everyone seems pretty happy and the city is gorgeous:

The Gardens in the middle of town were originally vegetable gardens set up to produce supplies for ships passing around Africa. Now they house lots of plants and statues:

We toured the Castle of Good Hope. It's more of a fortress than a castle, complete with moat and torture chamber. It's about 350 years old, and the oldest surviving structure in South Africa: 

(our precious guide, similar to a tiny Richard Sherman  - he was hilarious!)

It's also windy as fuck. Like so windy it actually blew us in to the road - it moved our feet, like black magic!! They also love their food and wine here, so we're fitting in quite nicely: 

The Malay/Muslim Quarter (Bo Kaap) is beautiful! They obviously take a lot of pride in the facades of the buildings here:

(We also found a mosque on Church Street, which made me chuckle.)

Oh yeah, we watched a political rally for the ANC (Mandella's party). It was LOUD and there was a bunch of singing, chanting, and dancing:

But if one is to witness a political rally in Africa we were in about the safest place to do so.

V&A Waterfront is kind of like Scandinavia threw up all over the coastline, but it was very pleasant, and we split a bottle of South African Riesling here:

Posing like a total dumb-ass is our new thing - we've discovered that lots of tourists pose like this but it's NOT a joke:

Tonight we're headed out in our hotel's neighborhood (which is luckily in the heart of everything) to find some delicious grub. Tomorrow is Table Mountain and (hopefully) a penguin siting on the cape!!!

Razor wire and vervet attacks

Durban is...... rough. We're both totally glad we got to see the city, but we're excited to be heading to Cape Town tomorrow. Our hotel is so awesome that it's shocking it's in Durban. It's old world charm (aka British colonialism) on a small, terraced piece of land. We have a pool, decks, courtyards (one off our room) and a self serve 'honesty' bar that Trish and I are loving (surprise, surprise):

Our room is pretty cool:

It's also completely gated off, with razor wire and an electric fence, and a 24 hr security guard. So, yeah..... that's Durban for ya. We had originally planned on wandering around the city on our own, but after getting here - helllllllll no. It's like Tijuana but way scarier, and there are no Americans, just a very small amount of white people that I'm not positive are racist or not (sorry mom, I know I'm scaring you right now). 

But the Indian food is beyond belief. Like seriously the best thing we've ever eaten (except for pho).

Everything in the guidebook says to not venture out after dark, and it gets dark here at about 5:30/6pm. Luckily Vincent (the hotel manager who does basically everything here and is awesome) snagged some Indian food for us last night. Durban has the largest Indian population of any city outside of India, and is where Mohandas Ghandi spent a lot of his life. As you can imagine, this adds even another layer to the cultural melting pot here. Though I'm not sure how much of a melting pot it is. Overall the different ethnic groups seem to get along, but they pretty much stick to themselves. To put it bluntly there are virtually no people of mixed race - you're African (Zulu primarily), Indian, or European/Afrakaaner. 

Today we headed out to the Golden Mile - Durban's holiday coast, very much like Venice Beach. Trish swam in the poop water (the ecoli and echinococcosis ratings were only 'moderate' so hopefully she doesn't get pink eye) but I was lame and did not. Here she is:

And here is some cool sand art:

The black sand you can see in the rhino sticks to your feet and is freaky looking!

Then we did a 3 hour double decker bus tour. The speaker system was shitty though, so we had to make up a lot of the narration ourselves ;) 

The highlight of the day was sitting by the pool watching a vervet monkey run past Trish. As we watched it disappear another one lept over her shoulder (shortcut!) chasing after the other one. No pictures of the vervets ;( 

Tonight is gin and tonics and more Indian food at the hotel. Tomorrow we're gonna go on a boat tour to find sharks then we're heading to Cape Town!!

"And the baby hippopotamus got shat upon."

Friday we had another early start, heading out for our rescheduled half-day safari at Hluhluwe-iMfolozi. We left a little earlier, the weather was great, and it was a holiday so there was little foot or car traffic, making the drive much better (it was only slightly scary). 

We keep talking about things being awesome but this preserve is incredibly spectacular – over 96,000 hectares of land, nearly a third of which is by law only accessible on foot and the biodiversity is astounding. It first became protected land in the early 1800’s because it was King Shaka Zulu’s favorite hunting grounds and any who made the mistake of hunting there were hunted by his warriors! This protection brought the white rhino back from extinction. They were assumed to be long gone, until a dozen of them were found at this park. The population is going in the wrong direction again though thanks to poaching – last year more than 1,000 of the 18,000 white rhinos were killed for their horns. The horn is worth up to $12 million/pound because you are a total badass if you have a knife with a rhino horn handle and you will have many babies if you sprinkle this in your tea?

We booked a tour at Hluhluwe because our private reserve does not have lions, so one of the biggest bummers of the trip is that we didn't end up seeing any. We were both pretty bummed for a bit, then told ourselves A) this is a total first world problem B) if it’s that important we can see a lion at the zoo, and C) we’ll just have to come back to Africa and do another safari at some point J

We did end up seeing a ton of other animals though, including lots of prey:

vultures:

Baby rhinos and elephants, and we had a fun encounter with a large bull elephant right on the road. He was pretty sleepy and just munching along until he wandered into the road.

A driver of a passenger vehicle was made uncomfortable by the approaching elephant and started backing up. Wrong choice! Apparently elephants get a kick out of this sort of dominance game, and that car could well have spent hours backing away from the elephant J

It was really fantastic seeing these animals in a space that allows them to be who they are; they cannot be allowed to roam freely as there is mutual danger if they interact with humans, but this park is so large that I suspect most of them never realize they were penned in.

We drove in to St Lucia again, had some lunch and got grumpy because we were having internet troubles here too (again, first world problems). We also discovered that South Africa really isn't so different from the USA.

We headed over to the loading area for our river tour, and found art. This piece is the least likely to keep you up with nightmares (and it was one of the few made with flesh rather than metal so that tells you how creepy the rest were!)

In the late afternoon we did a river boat tour to check out crocs:

Lots and lots of hippos including this hungry guy in the first of 3 pods. This was the smallest family group, we saw well over 100 hippos:

Rare birds such as the African Fish Eagle (looks familiar, eh?):

A Pied Kingfisher:

A rare Mangrove Kingfisher:

and much flora. This was a really cool tour where we poked around a bit along Africa’s largest estuary that runs in to Lake St Lucia.  Every evening the hippo pods come out of the river and graze on the delicious lawns of the St. Lucia residents. You and I say hello to make sure everyone knows we are around, hippos swish their tails while they poo so that their scent is spread far and wide  - even if said poo will land on their baby ("And that baby hippopotamus just got shat upon" said our guide at one point). It was seriously like shit hitting the fan. I am REALLY glad that Holly doesn’t do this…

On our drive home we saw a genet that we weren't fast enough to take a pic of and an endangered African Spotted Owl:

On Saturday, our last day on at Zulu Nyala, our guide Amon went out of his way (as usual) to make the trip special for us. He found the rhinos playing:

The mama with her baby that we hadn't yet seen:

The elephants (that he always seems to be able to find!)

He found the baboons we wanted to see:

And we got to ask him a bunch of final questions. He’s only about 5’2” and wears an adorable safari outfit (complete with hat) but is a total badass. We also learned he teaches other guides (and went to school himself for three years to become a guide). His specialty is butterflies, which we didn't find out until this evening!

Zulu Nyala does their best to make sure that the guests stay in the same group as much as possible. We had an absolutely amazing group!!! Left to right we have Henry and his wife Ing with their adorable girls Viola and Thalia, with Tim and his awesome wife Cindy on the other side. They were quite the group and this trip would not have been the same without them!

While planning this trip that began with a spur of the moment wine-induced purchase we often said “this is the only time we will go to Africa so we should definitely xyz” but we are already contemplating where our next safari location will be.

Tomorrow we’re off to Durban and where we plan on exploring the largest port city in Africa, enjoying some of the most beautiful beaches in the world, taking in a shark tour, and eating too much good food!

Thanks for following along with this crazy adventure J