mike & rhonda's latest adventure: The Garden Route and Beyond

We continued driving east along the scenic coast with many stops along the way. Nature's Valley seemed like a nice secluded area to relax and at the opposite end of the spectrum, Bloukrans Bridge, 216 metres above the river, offered the world's highest bridge bungy jump. We watched several young people dive off the bridge and a few more on a live video feed in the cliff side pub. Our best stop however was at the Storms River Mouth Rest Camp within Tsitsikamma National Park. We stayed overnight in a lovely cabin overlooking the Indian Ocean. There were fabulous views and sounds from our deck and we sat mesmerized for several hours (or 3-4 beers whichever came first) watching the 15 foot breakers relentlessly pounding the rocky shoreline creating huge sprays. There was a perfect sunset that evening with the sun disappearing into the ocean. The next morning we took a short cruise up into the Storms River Gorge where the massive 70-90 metre rock walls created more scenic splendour. It was a wonderful place to stop and stay.

Further along the coast we stopped into Cape St. Francis to visit the Seal Point lighthouse, St. Francis Bay (beautiful homes along a canal based neighbourhood) and Jeffreys Bay (large sand beaches and a surfer's mecca). Port Elizabeth was our final destination, a large port and transportation hub for the region, but our main reason for stopping there was to visit nearby Addo Elephant National Park. Yesterday we spent 10 hours driving our car around just about every gravel road within the park and we saw all kinds of wildlife. The elephants were plentiful and we watched two young calves play for 10 minutes.......they were butting heads and trunk slapping one another.......it was quite entertaining to watch. At another stop we found two large male lions relaxing right beside the road, one on either side. After a short while one of them got up and walked right beside our car to cross the road looking for a little more shade. Rhonda quickly rolled up her window since the huge beast was almost within touching distance. Many other times during the day we had to stop and wait for tortoises or dung beetles to cross the road. Remind us to show you our video of the dung beetle in action.....quite hilarious.
One of our routine travel practices is to log our pictures at the end of the day. We both take lots of pictures, then Rhonda (who has a good artistic eye) edits the photos and I copy them over to the lap-top and catalogue them. After a full day at Addo she handed over the camera and declared she had narrowed it down to 73 pictures! I initially objected but after reviewing agreed that we did have a lot of good wildlife photos that would be a shame to delete. Don't worry, we will select a "best of" for the guest highlight show back home. It was a fabulous finish to our 800 km drive along the coast.

Today we will start our journey back towards Cape Town but this time we will take inland roads that wind through the mountains and though many wine regions so it should be scenic and pleasurable.