Hey, sorry to all of those people who have enthusiastically looked at our blog to find nothing new there. We had some internet connectivity difficulties but here at last is some news.

We have had a lovely week based in Somerset West near Cape Town at my mother's house, catching up with a couple of friends and driving up to the West Coast National Park to see the amazing floral biodiversity, and a good amount of wildlife too. The mountainous scenery of the Cape is spectacular and it is home to an entire plant kingdom, one of just 7 in the world, so is incredibly diverse (and threatened by climate change as it is a small area of Mediterranean climate vulnerable to the winter rains shifting south into the southern ocean).

Richard and I also enjoyed ducking out a couple of times on impromptu dates in Stellenbosch where a number of great new restaurants, ice-cream parlours etc have sprung up since we last visited. We found a very interesting shop which sells fantastic bread, coffee and biltong - we have stocked up on enough Eland and Beef biltong to last us the entire visit, though Richard doubts this! (For those who don't know about the marinated and dried meat national dish of South Africa - shame on you - Google "biltong"). Anyway, you may also get a chance to taste some as Richard managed to sweet talk the butcher into disclosing her secret biltong recipe (yes, she. Katryn is not your regular butcher. She studied agriculture then did a masters in meat science researching pastrami in Italy with a view to working for a major food processor. "But one day I had my arms in a bucket of meat and thought, no, THIS is what I really love... so I opened this gourmet butchery processing locally grown meats," she explained. And just to complete the picture, she is no butch butcher but a stunning blonde model!)

 

Flying on the top deck of the A380 and catching up on screen time!

 Snow capped mountains and fertile valleys as we arrive in the Cape of Good Hope

 

Elephant made out of wire and beads - Cape Town Airport on arrival - we were all exhausted

 

The "Cape Dutch" houses and views where my sister lives on a wine estate (grapes in foreground)

 

Visiting a bushman village up the West Coast

Our next trip to South Africa September 2013

We left Canberra on a beautiful Spring day on Saturday and drove to Sydney in a hire car.  The children were very excited to find out that we would be sitting at the top deck of the Singapore Airlines A380 plane that we were taking for the flight to Singapore.  Unfortunately this did not mean that we had been upgraded as there are some economy class seats on the top deck, however we felt it was special anyway.  The trip to Singapore went well, but then reality hit that we still had another 12 hours of flying to get from there to Cape Town!  For the next flight we did not have top deck seats and we realised again how difficult it is to get any sleep sitting upright in cramped conditions.  Our youngest got the most sleep on that flight, but the rest of us were feeling rather shattered by the time we arrived in Cape Town.

It was a beautiful day on Sunday when we flew from Johannesburg to Cape Town (on the same flight we had caught from Singapore).  We dropped some passengers off in Johannesburg, so had a lot of leg room and were able to move easily around the plane to look at the views which were spectacular.  There has been a recent spate of very cold weather in the Western Cape and a large dump of snow on all the taller mountains. Flying over these snow-capped mountains we realised again how small our Australian mountains look in comparison.  It was a very good welcome to the Cape.  We would have loved to have enjoyed the rest of the day out and about but were unfortunately all too tired to go anywhere other than the cosy beds and couches at Mom's house in Somerset-West.

We have some photos to add, but will add these when we have worked out our technology.  Have fun reading the rest of our adventures over the next few weeks.  We will enjoy having them.

Other earlier photos from travels in South Africa

In order:

School in Midrand, Gauteng (where friend teaches)

Zebra crossing

Elephant

Walking over Bourke's luck Potholes

Hyena

Giraffe

(All animals were seen in the Kruger National Park)

Birthday Adventures in Oudtshoorn

Kids in Africa

Max's Birthday adventures.  Riding an Ostrich and exploring Cango Caves.

Some websites to look at

Willowdale lodge - http://www.willowdalelodge.co.za/

 Information about Kokstad with photos of area  http://www.drakensberg-tourism.com/kokstad.html

The Adventure continues

Since our last entry, we headed off to another camp in the Kruger Park called Berg-en-dal, right near the southern gate of the park.  It is a far more mountainous area but very beautiful and we got to walk right around the perimeter of the camp looking at animals and birds both inside and outside the camp.  We saw a few crocodiles just beyond the fence who were fortunately quite small.  There were also a lot of monkeys and baboons in the camp who were fun to watch, but we were warned not to feed them or go near them as some of them were quite fierce.  There were lots of baby monkeys holding onto their mothers - they hang onto their mother's tummys while the mothers run along.  The mothers are often looking through their youngster's fur to see if their are any ticks or other bugs hiding there and when they find them they eat the bugs!

We saw a lot of great animals in this part of the park including lion, wild dogs, rhino, elephant, giraffe, hippo and lots of impala.  The kids enjoyed swimming in yet another swimming pool at the camp and the grown ups went on a guided night drive with one of the rangers where they saw a leopard, which was very exciting. 

We were sad to leave the park, but on the way out on our last day it was like all the animals were coming to say goodye as we saw a great variety.  The best sighting was of a rhino mother and youngster very close to the car and just behind them one of the largest elephants we have every seen just behind the rhino.  We also saw some giraffe right next to the car and it is only when they are that close that you appreciate how tall they are. 

After leaving the park we got to travel through Swaziland which is a country bordered on 3 sides by South Africa and on one by Mozambique.  It was fun to be able to travel through a whole country in a few hours and get the stamps in our passports to prove it. 

We spent the next two night with friends at a beach side town called Zinkwazi on the Kwazulu Natal north coast and also visited some relatives who lived on a nearby Sugar Cane farm.  The farm was beautiful, overlooking a beautiful river.  They also had a nature reserve on their property, which we explored on their golf cart, which they use for getting around the farm.  Unfortunately the cart stopped working at the furthest point on the drive, so most of us had to walk back to the house. 

From Zinkwazi we went drove to a town called Kokstad, which is slightly inland in the South of Kwazulu Natal.  It is the most beautiful area surrounded by lush green hills and slightly further away, the majestic Drakensberg Mountain Range.  We had fun visiting another relative's Dairy farm with their own trout dam on site and we got to watch the cows being milked and the children all got to have a ride on a very friendly cow called Jug. 

We stayed in great accommodation on another farm called Willowdale Lodge where we were fed scrumptious meals and finished our stay here with sundowners on top of a mountain with our relatives (The Feys - surname just like our daughter's first name). 

Tomorrow we head on to Outdshoorn - the heartland of ostrich farming.  We are hoping we may get to see some ostriches up close there.

Hope all is well with everyone back home - heard there has been a lot of rain - we seem to have brought the rain with us too, as it has rained almost everywhere we have been so far.