Wake Up Call

Inexplicably, our day began at 5:30am with a wake up call. With no telephones in our rooms this consisted of someone knocking on our door. We did not request one. Later, at a decent hour, the hotel front desk informed me it was requested by our guide who, when confronted, denied the accusation. Anyway, this irksome event had a silver lining as it allowed us to be completely packed prior to 6:30 when the restaurant opened for breakfast. After all, we had to get an early start as our first activity of the day began at 10am, a mere 4 1/2 hours later and it was going to take at least 10 minutes to load the bus and drive to the dock. Aloe? Are we detecting a pattern here?

It had rained fairly heavily in the night and today's agenda called for a hike in an ecological reserve on one of The Heads. While we got a bit wet boarding the boat that would ferry us to the Featherbed Ecological Reserve (a privately owned for profit endeavour) the rain had stopped by the time we disembarked. The hundred or so people from the ferry were then directed onto cars to be pulled up to the top of the Western Head for a 2 km walk down through some of the reserve's walking trails. While the skies may have been a bit grey, our spirits were anything but as one minute we enjoyed tremendous vistas out to sea and across to the Eastern head, and the next we were admiring tiny delicate flowers blooming in the fynbos. The fynbos, a generic term used for the flora of uncultivated bush lands in South Africa, consists of more than 100,000 different species of plants which exist in varying combinations depending on each area's micro climate. The diversity is astonishing and I'm sure a square meter in this reserve would have hundreds of different plants in the dense growth.


















Back at the base camp we enjoyed our best buffet style meal yet.

Our next stop was the Garden Route National Park, also known as the Tsitsikamma National Park Storms River Mouth. Unfortunately there was no time to stop at the highest bungy jumping bridge in the world. We crossed over it, feeling a bit dizzy as we peered down into the gorge a couple of hundred meters below.

At the park the wind was up and the waves were crashing into the jagged rocks.


Several people delighted in dipping their toes into the Indian Ocean for the first time ever, the event duly recorded from several angles.


A suspension bridge spans the mouth of the Storms River and we followed a kilometre long path to reach it.


There were several cabins along the shore as well as campsites, although with the wind sending the spindrift ashore I couldn't help but wonder what it would be like to close up a salt encrusted tent assuming it had not been uprooted by a fierce wind. Once again my words cannot do justice to a wonderful place and these photos really only give you a hint of the power and the splendour.

Location:Port Elizabeth