Sunday 20 Oct 2013

L: Well it was great to sleep in the roof-top tent for the first time in over six months, I had missed it!! But, golly, I must say, it was chilly. We are now using a blow-up mattress on top of the rather thin roof-top tent mattress, but I always find that they are cold due to the air underneath you getting colder at night.

I was up early and went to explore and find all the birds, I had a great time and even found some baby birds being fed by the parent birds. Always such a pleasure to watch. When I got back to camp Steve had made coffee, so it was coffee and a couple rusks as we decided to head into Oudtshoorn later and have breakfast. Some of the campers were having a morning church service so we had the background worship songs, in Afrikaans, to pack by.


We found the Wimpy for a quick breakfast and filled up and headed out at 10-ish.


S: We left towards Willowmore and found a huge tortoise along the road and then another 3 dotted along the road. Obviously a load of ostriches of all ages as you travel past all the farms. We then started encountering warthogs and stopped in Steytlerville for a brief time to see the sights and travelled over the old bridge. There is a display of painted old farming implements which was interesting as well as the local families family crests and names in the main street.


From Steytlerville we turned off onto a single lane concrete road which went on for over 40kms. It is the longest concrete road that I have ever travelled, there is another one, which is the old road between Oudtshoorn and Calitzdorp, but that is a two-lane road.


Half way along the concrete road, we pulled off to make lunch which was tea and Provita and tuna. Lo and behold, we found some vervet monkeys in the trees and continued to see them with their babies all the way along the road on the way to Kirkwood.


We arrived at Addo Elephant Park where we had booked for a couple of nights as everyone said that it fills up quickly. We set up camp, put up the ground tent, as we were staying for longer than one night. After a braai for supper we walked up to the viewing point over the water-hole where we stayed for a few hours. We were fortunate enough to see 2 hyena, a buffalo and a rhino. There was also a very brave, or dumb, Egyptian goose, dodging the hyenas.



It had drizzled a bit, off and on, and rained a spot or two during the evening. We got into bed and exactly 3 minutes later, it started to rain and poured throughout the night,