Monthly Archives: June 2014

South Africa

Day Trip to Cape Point (In Which We Hope to Find No Baboons on the Roof of Our Rental Car)

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Some of the top attractions in the Cape Town area – Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, Cape Point, and Boulders Bay – are not easily accessible by public transportation. In order to reach them, one must generally take a tour, hire a taxi, or rent a car. Having already familiarized ourselves with the rules of the South African road, we opted to rent a car for the day, which provided us maximum flexibility and minimum cost.

Kirstenbosch Botantical Gardens

Our first stop was the Kirstenbosch Botantical Gardens. Our guidebook proclaimed the gardens to be “among the most beautiful in the world.” It’s not hard to believe that to be true: the gardens are set among lush green lawns against the dramatic backdrop of Table Mountain. Approximately 9,000 of Southern Africa’s plant species are found there, ranging from the distinctive blossoms of the protea, South Africa’s national flower, to the welwitschia, a two-leaved plant endemic to only the northern Namib Desert that can live for up to 2,000 years, and including gardens dedicated to useful, medicinal, and edible plants.

Protea at Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, Cape Town
Protea preparing to bloom.

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10 Things We’ve Learned After Three Months on the Road

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Today marks the third month that we have been on the road! Here, in no particular order, are 10 things that we have learned thus far:

tent
Our home for most of last month.

1. How to set up and take down a tent in record time.

2. Toast prepared over a campfire is far superior to toast prepared in a toaster.

3. Fall in Southern Africa is much, much colder than you would ever expect.

4. An American accent sounds like chewing (or, at least, it does according to our waitress at Joe’s Beer House in Windhoek).

5. Vervet monkeys are surprisingly nimble grapefruit thieves.

6. Even though you might think the honey badger is a worldwide sensation, it is not. (Your enthusiasm for the honey badger is generally appreciated, even if not fully understood.)

7. If you visit Victoria Falls during early June, when the water is close to its highest point, you will not just get wet, you will get SOAKED.

8. How to make s’mores using a fork, pink marshmallows, and dark chocolate-dipped biscuits.

9. A group of giraffes is called a tower, and a group of warthogs is called a sound.

10. In Zimbabwe, US$2 bills are alive and well, if not of a very tired appearance that would quickly cause them to be put out of their misery and taken out of circulation in the United States.

South Africa

Climbing Cape Town’s Table Mountain

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Climbing Table Mountain is one of the most iconic things to do in Cape Town, and it was high on our list of must-dos.1 Our visit to Cape Town was punctuated by occasional drizzling rain and fog, and, because climbing the mountain is a multi-hour outdoor endeavor, we put off our climb until the forecast showed little chance of precipitation.

table-mountain-cape-town-pano
Panorama of Cape Town from Table Mountain.

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Programming Note

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A note on programming:  The farther along we get on our trip, the more difficulty we are having locating cheap, reliable internet.  In the interest of keeping this blog up-to-date and posting what we think our readers are most interested in (animal pictures!), we’ve decided to pare down the size of the photos and some of the practical details (e.g., URLs) we had been including in our posts.  We think this change will make the blog more enjoyable (and more quickly updated), but, as always, if you have any practical questions (or want higher resolution shots of lions), leave us a note in the comments!

South Africa

Tourism-Lite in Cape Town

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Ever since we announced our plans to travel in Africa, people have been singing Cape Town’s praises. Nearly every person we met along the way – including South Africans from other parts of the country – effused over Cape Town, promising us that we were going to love it. We had heard so much about Cape Town, in fact, that I worried the city wasn’t going to be able to live up to its reputation.

Happily, I was wrong.

cape-town-balcony
View of Lion’s Head from our apartment balcony.

After having logged 5,192.7 kilometers across three countries, it was a bittersweet moment when we dropped off our Toyota Corolla at the Avis location in downtown Cape Town – it left like a lifetime ago when we first picked it up at the railway station in Johannesburg. To a certain extent, the car had become our one constant over the course of the past thirty days, and it was strange to suddenly be without it. We quickly adjusted, however, and returned to our roots of urban exploring on foot, which is honestly the best way to experience nearly any city. Continue reading Tourism-Lite in Cape Town →

South Africa

Tasting the Cape Winelands

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After we left the berry farm in Swellendam, we moved to a vineyard in Stellenbosch. (I know, we were really roughing it in South Africa.)

Our drive along the Garden Route and through the Western Cape had been a constant stream of activity (there were beaches to explore and ostriches to ride!), and we were looking forward to a few leisurely days in Stellenbosch in the Cape Winelands. We splurged for three nights at a hotel located on a vineyard – in a room with a view overlooking the surrounding hills, no less.1

devon-valley
View from our room at Devon Valley.

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