Great to hear from you! We hope you do get to visit Africa some day. Cape Town is rich and affluent beyond our wildest expectations. Some of the grocery stores are as good as Whole Foods, they have malls, etc. Kind of reminds of San Francisco Bay Area with lots of towns up and down the coast. They also have a lot of crime here, and some extremely poor areas. Robberies reportedly occur at night near our hostel as well as other areas, though we have felt pretty safe walking during the days. The Ashanti hostel has a great bar with pool table and music, so we have been there every night enjoying the international crowd and drinking it up ! Whew! Cape Town is perhaps maybe only a little more dangerous than parts of Washington, DC at night, but we are staying in and not taking chances. We could take a taxi out like most are doing but have not.
The most "dodgy", as the British staff person calls it, experience we have had was navigating the train station and taking a train to the old naval base/ tourist heaven of Simontown, complete with a waterfall in town! We got a private tour of the Boulders national park penguin refuge by Alex, a German student we met in the bar who has an internship there. Quite a great job and very modern park, with raised walkways through the dunes among the penguins! They were fascinating, and Alex pointed out an albino one and the various stages of young penguin. We also saw a seal swim in a wave at the shore, apparently looking for penguin dinner. Seals and whales are the frequent predators of seals. Alex also tooks on a walk along to what we said was rated one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, now annexed as part of the national park but still accessible for swimmers. We met a woman who has lived there most of her 80 plus years and swims in the fairly cold water every day. The penguins are late arrivals and have cause problems for the people in the beautiful seaside community, making nests in their gardens and pooping aroung. The houses will be eventually all be bought and raised and the alien shurbery replaced with native plants. By the way, cappucino and lattes are availble most places in tourist areas so we have predictably splurged.
Yesterday we visited the awesome Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden. Cost us a large taxi ride but the young India heritage taxi driver filled us in on current race relations and other topics. He waited the three hours we toured and bird watched (so colorful, these birds!) and then took us back in his old toyota taxi. We saw guinea fowl like the ones our neighbor had at Smith Point, but we also saw two types of curved beak nectar feeding birds among others. We were ecstatic to get to see two Cape Mongooses, so sinister looking with their beedy eyes and human looking ears, larger than a squirrel but smaller than the Clawless Cape Otter we had hoped to see.
Of course we could have held out for a newer safer Taxi company but his was cheapest, and he was there to take us back into town when we were ready to go. We saved money over taking a tour from the hostel but arranging our on transport.
It was cold and rainy last night and this morning but we made ourselves get us earlier to start getting ready for leaving South Africa and our next adventure. Read emails and will visit Wild Bird park today at Nadxi and Jerry's suggestion. They were here before traveling together with us in Zimbabwe 5 years ago. Hope to visit South Africa with them next year!
We head out next morning for the desert country of Namibia on top of a huge green loud safari truck for almost no cost for a nine hour journey to the Namibian border area, since it is traveling back empty after having transported overland tourists from Kenya! We met Andy, the Australian driver here at the hostel, and this is a new job for him. Should be an adventure! There are much more comfortable ways to travel, by the way , but depends on your money..... We will probably get a bus from there to Windhoek, the modern capital of Namibia. Namibia is larger than Texas, and we eventually must cross it to get to Zambia where we fly home. We hope to visit there fabulous huge red sand dune area and the amazing Etosha national park for the wildlife viewing.
Hello to all and love all! Wish you were here!
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