Garden Route Vacation

This was my most athletic vacation of my time in South Africa so far, and possibly of my entire life so far. Every day Becky and I would go to bed with aches and pains from hiking, canoeing, riding on taxis, and other such physically taxing activities.

Here is a list (yay lists!) of the new things I tried or did on vacation:

*riding an ostrich
*eating ostrich meat
*sandboarding
*saw a whale up close
*went hiking in the rain (somehow it’d always been sunny in the past…)
*saw a blue duiker
*rode in a tuktuk

Things I haven’t done in twenty-one months:
*ate microwave popcorn
*got a hair cut by someone other than myself
*had a facial
*ate cheesecake that tasted like cheesecake (Fynbos Café in Knysna!)

Somehow I thought those lists would be longer…oh well.

We started in Knysna, which was my favorite town of the three, and it rained pretty much every day we were there. Not to be deterred, we went hiking, canoeing, and ferrying regardless, though I did not get to go snorkeling. We then made our way to Wilderness, which involved walking through a National Park for an hour with all our luggage in order to get to the backpackers, where we spent a day canoeing and hiking in the sun. Lastly, we went to Mossel Bay, a much larger town, where we were also blessed by sun.

One of our days there we actually spent on a day trip to Outshoorn, a bit to the north, which is kind of the ostrich capital of South Africa. There, I got to ride an ostrich (!!!!!), which I stayed on for about ten seconds before falling off. On my Picasa album, you can see a picture of me on the hooded (and thus calm) ostrich, and another of me falling off. If you’ll look closely, you may note that in the second picture, I have lost my shoes. I was the only one in the group to volunteer to ride an ostrich—they’re pretty ferocious creatures. That day, we also went to the beautiful Cango Caves and an animal reserve.

Our last day in Mossel Bay, we got quite close to some whales—one actually swam right underneath our boat. Afterwards we went sandboarding, which is like skiing but minus the ski lift, thus leaving the terrain pristine but making the biggest deterrent to going down the hill the idea that afterwards you have to go back up.

This entire vacation also involved being around lots of European tourists who will never see any part of South Africa besides the little vacation town with the pretty beaches, which was even more disheartening than walking back uphill after sandboarding down.