Day 41
Today I'm in: Jeffrey's Bay, South Africa
To get between my two overnight spots today - Plettenberg Bay and Jeffrey's Bay - I had to cover a bit more ground (about 120 kilometers). So we got an earlier start, leaving Plett just after breakfast and heading up into the hills along the N2 highway. The highway outside of Plett is lined with some pretty touristy-sounding diversions - attractions with names like "Birds of Eden," "Monkeyland" and "Storms River Bungy" - but we headed to the Tenikwa Wildlife Conservation Center, which came highly recommended by the manager at our hotel.
Tenikwa is a wildlife hospital and conservation facility that nurses rescued animals back to health. Some are rehabilitated with the aim of releasing them back into the wild, but others (especially ones that are brought to the center while very young) are kept for conservation and awareness purposes. Those animals are quite tame (some were hand-fed as babies) and so on our tour we were able to walk right into their habitat areas. I was excited to see meerkats - they don't live naturally in the Kruger area where we went on safari.
From the meerkats we saw caracals (mid-size cats that look like lynxes), the leopard (pictured above), servals (larger cats about the size of a jaguar), and finished up with the two resident cheetahs. They're a brother-and-sister pair who were born at the center and are kept in about a ten-acre enclosure. Since they were never taught to hunt, they won't be released into the wild, but they seem pretty content where they are. I got my photo taken with the very somnambulant male, who at least picked his head up long enough to appear in the shot with me.
After Tenikwa and lunch in the neighboring beachfront community of Nature's Valley, we drove about half an hour down the coast to the Tsitsikamma National Park to tackle the Waterfall Trail. It's a portion of the much longer Otter Trail, a five-day hike that runs the length of almost the entire Garden Route. The Waterfall Trail is a much more manageable six-kilometer roundtrip along a particularly rugged stretch of coast. Just like the trail at Robberg the day before, however, we got tricked - it starts out with a nice, placid level walk through fragrant sage bushes and past tidal pools. Around the first kilometer, however, it got progressively rockier and rockier until we were scrambling up and over some pretty intense outcroppings, looking for the little painted footprints that signified the trail.
Along the way we passed colonies of the famous otters that live among the rocks on the coastline - they were pretty used to people and basically just sat there watching as we clambered over the rocks in front of them. We also spotted several pods of whales out at sea, slapping their tails against the water and blowing spray from their blowholes. They were fairly far out, so it wasn't easy to get photos of them, but I came up with a few decent shots.
It took about an hour to reach the waterfall at the end of the trail, which was more substantial than I expected and fell straight down into the ocean. Unlike the trail at Robberg, this was an out-and-back trail, which meant we came back the same way and got to repeat a lot of our rock clambering for the viewing pleasure of the otters. Needless to say, after two days of middlingly-strenuous hikes I've got a few sore spots. I'm really glad, though, that I bought those new shoes at Tekkie Town back in George - my old shoes probably couldn't have stood up to this kind of beating for very long.
By the time we left Tsitsikamma the sun was starting to set, so we hit the highway for the remaining one-hour to Jeffrey's Bay. Referred to as "J-Bay" by locals, Jeffery's Bay is the center of South African surfing culture and hosts the Billabong Surfing Championship every July. In the low season it looked pretty sedate - a lot of shops and restaurants close for the winter, and the few that were open were mostly full of locals. We're the only guests in our hotel. The beach is craggier than Plettenberg Bay, but there are six distinct surf breaks along its two-mile frontage, some of which are quite famous among serious surfers.
Tomorrow (well, today actually, since I'm a day behind in posting this entry) it's back to Johannesburg and then on to Brazil. Three weeks in Africa have blown by and the trip is now two-thirds complete!
Today I'm in: Jeffrey's Bay, South Africa
To get between my two overnight spots today - Plettenberg Bay and Jeffrey's Bay - I had to cover a bit more ground (about 120 kilometers). So we got an earlier start, leaving Plett just after breakfast and heading up into the hills along the N2 highway. The highway outside of Plett is lined with some pretty touristy-sounding diversions - attractions with names like "Birds of Eden," "Monkeyland" and "Storms River Bungy" - but we headed to the Tenikwa Wildlife Conservation Center, which came highly recommended by the manager at our hotel.
From the meerkats we saw caracals (mid-size cats that look like lynxes), the leopard (pictured above), servals (larger cats about the size of a jaguar), and finished up with the two resident cheetahs. They're a brother-and-sister pair who were born at the center and are kept in about a ten-acre enclosure. Since they were never taught to hunt, they won't be released into the wild, but they seem pretty content where they are. I got my photo taken with the very somnambulant male, who at least picked his head up long enough to appear in the shot with me.
After Tenikwa and lunch in the neighboring beachfront community of Nature's Valley, we drove about half an hour down the coast to the Tsitsikamma National Park to tackle the Waterfall Trail. It's a portion of the much longer Otter Trail, a five-day hike that runs the length of almost the entire Garden Route. The Waterfall Trail is a much more manageable six-kilometer roundtrip along a particularly rugged stretch of coast. Just like the trail at Robberg the day before, however, we got tricked - it starts out with a nice, placid level walk through fragrant sage bushes and past tidal pools. Around the first kilometer, however, it got progressively rockier and rockier until we were scrambling up and over some pretty intense outcroppings, looking for the little painted footprints that signified the trail. 
Along the way we passed colonies of the famous otters that live among the rocks on the coastline - they were pretty used to people and basically just sat there watching as we clambered over the rocks in front of them. We also spotted several pods of whales out at sea, slapping their tails against the water and blowing spray from their blowholes. They were fairly far out, so it wasn't easy to get photos of them, but I came up with a few decent shots. 
It took about an hour to reach the waterfall at the end of the trail, which was more substantial than I expected and fell straight down into the ocean. Unlike the trail at Robberg, this was an out-and-back trail, which meant we came back the same way and got to repeat a lot of our rock clambering for the viewing pleasure of the otters. Needless to say, after two days of middlingly-strenuous hikes I've got a few sore spots. I'm really glad, though, that I bought those new shoes at Tekkie Town back in George - my old shoes probably couldn't have stood up to this kind of beating for very long.
By the time we left Tsitsikamma the sun was starting to set, so we hit the highway for the remaining one-hour to Jeffrey's Bay. Referred to as "J-Bay" by locals, Jeffery's Bay is the center of South African surfing culture and hosts the Billabong Surfing Championship every July. In the low season it looked pretty sedate - a lot of shops and restaurants close for the winter, and the few that were open were mostly full of locals. We're the only guests in our hotel. The beach is craggier than Plettenberg Bay, but there are six distinct surf breaks along its two-mile frontage, some of which are quite famous among serious surfers. Tomorrow (well, today actually, since I'm a day behind in posting this entry) it's back to Johannesburg and then on to Brazil. Three weeks in Africa have blown by and the trip is now two-thirds complete!
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