pictures

cape cobra on our walk up to a cave

our shadows while walking up sand dunes

marian walk up the dunes

more sand

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part of a pride of eleven lions

Elephant at the water hole

the king of beasts

carting wine from Ernie Els winery

Vergelegen winery which is spectacular

our rondoval up at Waterberg plateau

Cape Agulhas

short note

We have been back in Cape Town for ten days and have been busy visiting friends and family here in South Africa. It has been a delight to get to know new family members and some of their friends as well as reconnecting with some of the Irish group who like to spent some of their winter here.

We have been joined by two of our cruising friends from Marmaris in Turkey back in 2007 who are English by birth and lived in Canada for ten years before moving to Sydney where they now live. Ray and Brenda have sailed their boats around the world a couple of times and are going to travel with us up to the Carribbean or to Europe as we still have not decided exactly where we are going. None of us has any time constraints so there is no need to make any definitive plans. It will all become clear once we are underway. We have most all the provisioning done and there are just a couple of small boat jobs to finish and we will be away up to Ludiwitz in Namibia which is about five hundred miles up the west coast of Africa. Then we will head for St Helena and will decide which way to turn from there. I think we have over two hundred bottles of good wine onboard right now so will not go thirsty.

Namibia

We are just back on Kilkea II after ten days up in Namibia. We had a great time having a holiday from our holidays. We flew into Windhoek and rented a VW Polo which was a great little car which did us very well. We drove for five hours up to the entrance to Etosha national park where we stayed at a very nice lodge which can accommodate a hundred and sixty people but being the rainy season there we just six of us there! We spend two full days in the park, just a very small part of it as it is huge, and drove on sandy roads through the savannah and saw just tons of animals. From lions to Elephants, giraffes, rhinos, and tons more. We had a good time sitting beside eleven lions who were sleeping under a couple of trees in the heat of the day (37C). Well we were in the car about five feet away from the nearest of them. They have no fear of the car but if you got out I think you would be lunch. The lions had just killed a juvenile Rino and were full of food so not too interested in us at all. We watched the carcase of the rino as all the animals came to take a look or to feed on it. Everything from the vultures to hyenas and all the other scavengers of the area. The weather was great all the time we were in Namibia with clear blue skies and the temps up in the high 30s.

We next went to Waterberg Plateau which is like table mountain in Cape Town with view for the resort our over the Kalahari bushlands which are flat all the way to Botswana and beyond. There we did some hiking early in the morning and spend the afternoon in our private rondavel with a dipping pool in front just reading our books and relaxing. After a couple of nights there we drove down to Sossusvlei which was a seven hour drive half of which are on dirt roads. This is the area you see in most of the books on Namibia with huge sand dunes that go all the way to the ocean. An amazing area and we spent two night just outside the park gates in a semi tented air conditioned room. We then moved forty k down the road to a very nice resort run by the same group as the one we stayed at in Kruger. Here we were spoiled with service and fun things to do including riding through the dessert on quad bikes. More on this with some pics latter.