South Africa so far

It's been a lot of fun travelling since leaving China. To summarise, we started at Laura's house in Polokwane, in Limpopo province (in the north east of the country), headed to Marakele nature reserve where we camped and saw lots of very African animals, then took a two day drive south to the coast where we stayed at the beach house, visited Grahamstown for the festival ("Fest" as the cool kids call it), went to Addo elephant park, visited Laura's Grandpa in East London, and then embarked on a journey along the garden route towards Cape Town. We're currently in Plettenbuerg Bay.

I've managed to see 4 of 'the big 5'; I've seen elephants, buffalo, rhino and lion (leopards being the one that as of yet has not come to greet me). I had a close encounter with the white rhino you see in the picture, though not due to my own reckless curiosity, but rather it decided the grass under my feet in particular was the best to be had. It approached, I photographed, it growled, I stepped back slowly, attempting to keep my bladder under control.

The aptly named Addo Elephant park did not dissapoint, we saw more elephant than I could count and at one point ended up accidentally driving through (yes, "through") a herd of them. We accelerated. The elephant park was also home to predators including lions. We saw two of them munching on their kill, some kind of buck I presume, and before flopping down to sleep. 

The accomodation in Addo was a large safari tent with a veranda, on which lay a dinner table we shared with many tame birds (hence the close up photo, one of many) and if it hadn't been for the fence 1 metre in front of us we might also have been sharing it with the hyena that decided our barbecued steak smelled good one evening (I get in trouble for saying "barbecue" here).

We're on the garden route right now, making our way to Cape Town. In Plettenberg bay we experimented with geocaching. Geocaching is like a worldwide treasure hunt; people hide random things and put the GPS coordinates of their cache on the geocache website. In this case he cache was a box containing a notepad and pencil, which we signed and dated as many people before us had, and there were also some  random exchanges in there (sea shells, a key ring etc) which you could take and replace with somthing of your own. It was good fun, gives an added bit of fun to a long hike.

Plenty more to see as we ramble on down the road over the next week and a bit, more to come.