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Phase 6 - The Garden Route

2:31 pm Filed under: Travel

East of Cape Town along the coast is a tourist area called the garden route, just to the North of the start part is the Stellenbosch wine area.

Stellenbosch is the biggest wine area in South Africa, Pinotage is a hybrid variety unique to SA it’s a cross between Pinot Noir and Hermitage, it makes a nice big dry red with plenty of fruit, a bit like a Shiraz Merlot blend.

We only had one day for wine tasting and had to make it all the way to Knysner so didn’t have a hell of a lot of time, so we picked only 3 wineries and had a bottle and a bit of a snack platter at each.

Had really nice day, there is a lot more to have a look at in Stellenbosch.

This is what I call the Goat tower of terror, it’s at this really cool winery with a strange goat fetish "Fairview".

The goats seem to like it, walking around the tower up into the dens.

This wasn’t actually the same day, but still along the garden route, here Zett’s gearing up for the worlds largest bungie jump.

If you look very carefully see Zett plunging from the bridge, she poo-pooed the experience, said she gets more thrills from motorbike riding.

This was our vantage point, we sipped on a few pints and watched the proceedings on the closed circuit TV.

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Phase 5.5 - Langebaan

9:10 pm Filed under: Travel

This was a huge day, starting with lunch at this seaside restaurant about an hour north of Cape Town.

When I said "sea side" restaurant I meant literally right by the ocean, not fancy roof or doors here just a bit of webbing to keep the sun off.

This was the bar, which we frequented a lot.

One of the ornaments laying around.

No fancy cutlery either, just a paper plate and a muscle shell.

One of the 7 courses we had.

Fish.

Little mini damper like bread things.

Crayfish.

As we ate it.

Eating sea food and drinking wine in the sun, tough living.

Lamby about to get assaulted by an angry mob of sea gulls.

This is where things started to get a bit loose, after our great seafood feast and many bottles of wine we grabbed some roadies and headed back towards town. On the way we decided we needed to find a nice spot on the beach to watch the sunset.

This is the girls horsing around near the water.

This is the girls after Sambo crash tackled Zett into the ocean.

This is the sunset the girls missed while they were getting changed into dry cloths.

About this time hordes of people started turning up with huge boxes of fireworks, it was guy fox night and we’d happened to stubble upon the beach where everyone comes to let off their bangers.
We managed to smuggle a few beers out of a bar not far from the beach and were treated to the largest un-choreographed fireworks display I’ve ever seen, it looked like the d-day landings!

It seemed anyone on the beach trying to light a large firework was fare game for anyone with bungas, I still don’t know how no-one got hurt.

The odd one of these failed to launch, exploding where it lay showering the crowd with sparks, it was LOOSE!

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Phase 5 - Cape Town

8:38 pm Filed under: Travel

Despite everyone being hung over and having had bugger all sleep we still managed to arrive safely in Cape Town and have a bit of a look around.

We stayed at this awesome hotel called "Daddy Long Legs" were each room has been designed by a different local artist. Ours was called photo booth and had the walls covered with hundreds of black and white photos that combined to make a larger portrait.

Sam and Lamby’s had wallpaper made from photos of sunsets and mirrors on the roof.

This was the first time I’d had a good look around Cape Town, Long Street where we stayed reminded me a lot of Melbourne’s Chapel Street, with a mix of drugos, weirdo’s, artists and places to go out. Something I haven’t found in Pretoria as of yet.

Our photo booth room.

A close-up of the individual photos, must have taken ages to lay it all out.

Sam and Lamby’s sunset room, this pic doesn’t really do it justice.

We were fascinated with the wooden shanties in the outskirts of town, they sort of look like they’re half built on top of each other. Much nicer than the crappy tin sheds you see most other places.

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Phase Intermission

11:58 pm Filed under: Travel

As we approached Pretoria at the end of our road trip from Balito we realised that we weren’t that far from WP and Celeste’s place in V-Town (Vereniging), so instead of heading home we stayed at their place for a quick catch up.

A catch up that turned into quite a little party.

I was sensible and pulled the pin around 1am seeing I was driving the next day, we had to be up drive to the airport by 5am. When I did get up and stumbled into the bar area half asleep I was greeted by a very drink Sam and Celeste who had not yet been to bed.

Sambo had a tough day ahead of her.

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Phase 4 - Blotto in Balito

11:42 pm Filed under: Travel

The call went out early that we weren’t going to do much in Balito other than have a few drinks and take it easy, and that’s pretty much how it went. Balito was the last stop for the first half of the holiday, two nights of taking it easy, then the big drive home via Durban.

Boogying to a pretty bad DJ that dressed a bit like a pirate.

Getting Blotto in Balito.

On night there was a pretty good lightning storm out over the ocean in front of our apartment, Sambo took a heap of shots and eventually snagged some great ones.

Lamby pretending to see a whale from our prime whale spotting position in a restaurant/bar right next to the ocean.

The whale spotting was a brilliant fluke we happened upon, they were breaching and tail wagging all arvo.

We went there for brunch and didn’t leave till after dinner, suffice to say many Jager bombs and bottles of wine went down that arvo.

Whale watching, Balito style.

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Phase 3 - Hluhluwe/iMfolozi

11:15 pm Filed under: Travel

After a few days spent underwater we headed to Hluhluwe (pronounced shoo-shloo-ey)/iMfolozi game reserve to dry out a bit. I say dry out but game driving (spotting animals from your own car) always involves an eski full of beers and plenty of dried meat products.

Not much point saying too much else the pictures say it all.

We took this about 30 seconds after we got in the gate, I’d not see such a big herd of Buffalo before, as we were to find out Hluhluwe/iMfolozi is known as the Buffalo and Rhino park, for obvious reasons.

One of the “big 5″ down in the first minute.

Here’s a buffalo up nice and close, they’re not just an ordinary cow.

Female Kudu, these are quite common at the parks we normally go to, but here they were very scarce.

iMfolozi camp This was our first nights accommodation in iMfolozi, technically it’s a tent but with proper toilet, shower and kitchenette it’s hardly roughing it.

Normally where you stay the whole camp area is enclosed in a game fence (8 foot high and electric), these tents weren’t and as we found out later a lot of different animals come past in the night.

Initially we saw a couple of big bush-pig (which we only found out later can be pretty dangerous) while we were playing cards and having a night cap, as I was brushing my teeth later on I saw a leopard scoot past Lamby and Sam’s tent, suffice to say we made sure the tent was properly zipped up before we slept.

Here’s leopard print we found out the front of our tent the next morning, there was quite a big thunder storm during the night and the rain washed away all the earlier prints, we obviously had more that one visit during the night.

These little bastards are what happens when tourists start their own rogue domestication projects (as mentioned in the last post), this “raiding party” came and terrorised us while we were having breakfast. The bread they’re eating was only half a loaf of white bread we had left… we were forced the eat Sam’s “arse scorcher” bread from then on.

It took many rocks to eventually shoot them away, well away from our camp to someone elses, little pricks!

Prior to that Zett and Sam had a face-off we a similar group of monkeys on their morning walk, lucky Zett was there to face them, Sam hadn’t quite learnt the golden rule when being attacked by animals “DON’T RUN!” as she hightailed it out of there.

This is a Male Nyala, probably not that noteworthy but I hadn’t seen them before.

This is us roughing it at the restaurant in the second camp back up in Hluhluwe, we’d had a few solid days game driving in the car so just sat back with a few bottles of wine enjoyed the view and birds of prey that were all around.

Once again silly tourists were start their own rogue domestication projects putting out bits of their lunch on the lawn and watching the birds swoop down and catch it. It was all fun and games will one woman had here toasted sandwich snatched out of hand by a yellow billed kite as she went to take a bite.

While we were hanging about an elephant came up beside the restaurant and started having a mud bath.

It’s pretty cool to think this is a wild animal, and you’re standing about 10 metres away at a restaurant!

This is us heading out on a night drive, you have to be in you accommodation’s camp by sun down in all these game reserves, so if you want to see the nocturnal animals (leopard and lion included) you have to go on an organised game drive with a ranger.

Unfortunately we didn’t have much luck on ours, so we didn’t see anything very noteworthy… we did almost hit a rhino with the troopy though.

Usually elephant are quite abundant but this was the only other one we saw.

These are Red Buck/Impala or as we refer to them “Rats of the Bushveld”, your see them everywhere.

This was one of the best shots I got the whole trip, that horn was almost a metre long. Apparently the females tend to have the long horns as the males sharpen theirs for fighting buy rubbing them down.

This was a warning sign at a designated spot where you’re allowed to get out of your car, still not all that safe apparently.

Last but not lease the humble Zebra, you see them everywhere and they’re just a dressed up donkey but I still recon they’re pretty cool.

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Phase 2 - Sudwana Bay

11:02 pm Filed under: Travel

At this point Zett joined us, we hired a car and headed off early in the morning east to Sudwana Bay for some SCUBA diving fun.

The we had two days of diving, the first of which we only did one dive due to the swell making Sambo and I both chuck our guts up. Sam’s in sub aquatic fashion through her regulator, creating a spherical plume around her head as we did our 3 minute safety stop. Mine more wallowing in my own vomit at the surface while we waited to get back on board the boat… not pretty.

The second day was much better, with no regurgitating incidences reported… in our group anyway, there was another guy who got a bit queasy on the way out and foolishly decided to wait in the boat while we dove… he was not a good colour when we got back.

There’s not much development around the Sudwana Bay area, the main beach is in a National Park what development there is is a few ks away. All in all a very nice spot to get away from it all, without having to rough it.

This was our accommodation, it was pretty nice, plenty of space for us all. We had some trouble with the pay TV which we preceded to make worse by mucking about with the aerial.

Disregarding our warnings, Sam started her own monkey domestication project one morning, feeding some of the local monkeys some of our bananas… later in the trip she came to realised why.

There’s no fancy dive centre on the beach here, just a bit of shade, plastic chairs and some rusty tractors.

After convincing Sam she’d fit into a smaller sized wetsuit and the hilarious results that ensued as she attempted to squeeze into it, Zett decided the one she had wasn’t too bad a fit.

The water temp was a balmy 22-24 degrees, so it didn’t matter too much.

Sambo’s seemingly indestructible and water proof digital camera came through with the goods with this shot of the whale shark we were fortunate enough to spot and snorkel with on our way out to the last dive.

Otherwise we saw plenty of nice big honeycomb moray eels, rays, white tip reef sharks and schools of other fish.

These were the boats they take you out through the surf with, it’s quite a ride heading in and out through the breakers, they ramp the boats flat out up the beach and push them back in with the tractors.

The dude in front is Farnie, he did a great job looking after us for all the dives.

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Phase 1 - Out and about in Pretoria

11:04 pm Filed under: Travel

Sam, Lamby and I spent a few days checking out Pretoria while Zett was finishing up work, it was also a good opportunity for the Lamberts to shake off the jet lag before the holiday started in earnest.

First up was a day trip to the Voortekker monument, which is a pretty cool building built up on one of the hills over looking Pretoria to honour the Dutch pioneers (Voortekkers, Zett’s Afrikaans ancestors) who cracked it with the poms back in the day and headed inland for greener pastures.

The inside walls of the monument tell the story of their journey, they had a tough time crossing the Drakensberg mountain range and had many fights with the indigenous people and the poms to stake their claim.

Possibly the coolest part of the building is this hole in the roof that on the 16th of December each year shines sun on a tomb looking thing at the bottom, to commemorate the battle of blood river. The cultural significance of this battle is that the Voortrekkers made a vow to God that if they won the battle they would build a church and commemorate the day from then on, somehow 500 odd managed to defeat 10,000 Zulu.

This probably explains why they tend to be a bit more religious around here, that and all the crazy shit going on around them all the time!

That’s probably enough history for now, on to some nature… believe it or now the large rat type creature you can see in this pic is the closest relative to the elephant, something to do with bone structure and digestive system apparently.

It’s called a Rock Dassie, and there are heaps of them in the park lands around the Voortrekker Monument.

The next day we took the mountain bikes for a loop around our favourite local ride Groen Kloof.

As you can see we were lucky enough to get up nice and close to the Giraffe, we also saw plenty of Zebra and a few others and hit some sweet single track.

We go there almost every weekend, it’s always nice.

Sam and Lamby soaking up the atmosphere at Shovels, our local Boerkie (South African Afrikaans, usually clad in Khaki and sporting a moustache) pub.

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Multiphase Holiday Causes Workplace Depression

10:00 pm Filed under: Travel

I can’t vouch for anyone else but I’ve certainly struggled to get back into work mode this week, 3 weeks of fun and frivolity all over South Africa with good friends will do that to you I guess.

On the subject of work, things have finally settled down with the scheduling project all up and running, there’s plenty of little updates to go one with but there’s no overbearing deadlines looming anymore, so expect blog transmission to ramp back up.

First on the list is a series of posts on the trip, check back tomorrow for phase 1… Out and about in Pretoria.

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Reitvlei Dam

9:06 pm Filed under: Travel

Last weekend being the last we’ll spend together for a month Zett and I spent some quality time together.

The quality time consisted of a couple of loops around our favourite mountain bike spot “the Kloof”, dinner out at a dodgie restaurant (which was slightly ruined by some drunk poof banging on his recent breakup), Sunday morning lay-in with home made breakfast, loop around our local single track where we found a tortoise (which we almost kept as a pet).

As a grand finale we packed an eski, popped the top off the jeep and headed to Reitvlei Dam, a nature reserve about 20 minutes down the road, we had a great afternoon sipping on a beer in the open air spotting animals, even managed to snap a couple of decent picks with the old Fuji (Euan’s got me thinking about upgrading to a full SLR, maybe for Christmas).

Enjoy!

The Veld

Eland on the run

Eland and Blessbok

Mumma and child Rhino

Big daddy Rhino

Ostridge (aka “Rats of the Reitvlei”)

Zebra

More Zebra

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