On Tuesday we moved from Storms River - to Sue's regret (she never wants to leave a nice place) - our first port of call was just down the coast at "Natures Valley" - we had intended camping here but discovered that the campsite is closed at the moment - this is the other end of the "Otter Trail" (a 5 day hike down the coast from Storms River including several river crossings) - we had met people setting off on it at Storms River and were lucky enough to be on the beach just as a group arrived at Natures Valley. One of the guys arrived after a 5 day hike saying "hey, I like your truck - I'm building one!" Seems like a small world.... Anyway, sorry if you're reading this, but I'm terrible with names - please get in touch! We had a short chat about trucks and fitting them out while Sue disappeared down the beach to watch the confluence of the river and the surf.
We have been looking at some of the more "touristy" activities that can be done on the Garden Route - one that caught Sue's imagination was to be able to "meet an elephant" - so we paid our money and off we went - it sounds a bit gimicky, but in reality these are rescued elephants (some from circuses, some would have been culled etc), and it's all well-managed. Sue got to feed fruit to the elephants and then to walk amongst them - she couldn't stop grinning all day!
From here we set off to a campsite at Buffalo Bay, near Knysna, with the intention of staying 2 nights so that we could do some laundry, maintenance and shopping - on arrival we found that the campsite didn't have any washing machines (lesson learnt - look at the details in the campsite book we bought!), so we decided to just stay one night and crack on the next day to somewhere else. Sue disappeared to the loos and never re-appeared, so I went to see what had happened. I found her chatting to one of the two other sets of campers on the site - Izaak(sp?) and Jenny who invited us to join them for a braii! We spent all night eating, drinking and chatting about everything from trucks to politics.
Today we had a quick look at Knysna, but the quays seemed a bit lonely there were so few tourists around. Some women made a half-hearted attempt to sell us textiles, but weren't really in the mood for it. We tried to go shopping, but couldn't find the entrance to the mall, so we just did our grocery shop and moved on. As we travelled inland over the Outeniqua Pass we had rain and low cloud obscuring the view. The landscape was mountainous with heather and shrubs and reminded us of the Lake District. Then suddenly we were going downhill, the clouds lifted and everything started to look drier and a lot less like British hillsides. We saw springbok and some other antelope/bucks (not up to scratch with identifying these yet) and some ostrich farms. We arrived at Oudtshoorn at another one of these huge well-organised sites with chalets, swimming pool and washing machines, where we will make a second attempt at the jobs we had been going to do at Knysna/Buffalo Bay.
We have been looking at some of the more "touristy" activities that can be done on the Garden Route - one that caught Sue's imagination was to be able to "meet an elephant" - so we paid our money and off we went - it sounds a bit gimicky, but in reality these are rescued elephants (some from circuses, some would have been culled etc), and it's all well-managed. Sue got to feed fruit to the elephants and then to walk amongst them - she couldn't stop grinning all day!
From here we set off to a campsite at Buffalo Bay, near Knysna, with the intention of staying 2 nights so that we could do some laundry, maintenance and shopping - on arrival we found that the campsite didn't have any washing machines (lesson learnt - look at the details in the campsite book we bought!), so we decided to just stay one night and crack on the next day to somewhere else. Sue disappeared to the loos and never re-appeared, so I went to see what had happened. I found her chatting to one of the two other sets of campers on the site - Izaak(sp?) and Jenny who invited us to join them for a braii! We spent all night eating, drinking and chatting about everything from trucks to politics.
Today we had a quick look at Knysna, but the quays seemed a bit lonely there were so few tourists around. Some women made a half-hearted attempt to sell us textiles, but weren't really in the mood for it. We tried to go shopping, but couldn't find the entrance to the mall, so we just did our grocery shop and moved on. As we travelled inland over the Outeniqua Pass we had rain and low cloud obscuring the view. The landscape was mountainous with heather and shrubs and reminded us of the Lake District. Then suddenly we were going downhill, the clouds lifted and everything started to look drier and a lot less like British hillsides. We saw springbok and some other antelope/bucks (not up to scratch with identifying these yet) and some ostrich farms. We arrived at Oudtshoorn at another one of these huge well-organised sites with chalets, swimming pool and washing machines, where we will make a second attempt at the jobs we had been going to do at Knysna/Buffalo Bay.