Thursday 17^th July, 2014……left at 7.30 am this morning and went up into the wealthier suberbs of Knynsa which also gave great views of the Indian Ocean (they have viewing platforms up there)  and we even saw  at a distance, the whales splashing around out there…..some fabulous homes and something else we have noticed in the Western Cape province is that hardly anyone has the razor wire on their fences….also there is no burning of the land here in the Western Cape province…..Knynsa…as the story goes, George Rex, said to be the illegitimate son of George III of England and a Quaker named Sarah Lightfoot settled here in 1797 after being banished from England….and the lagoon here was formed by the sea originally coming in closer years ago so it is not a manmade lagoon as we thought it was,  and they say Knysna is the most important town on the Garden Route…..formerly it was a centre for the timber industry supplying yellowwood and stinkwood for railway lines, shipping and house building….something else we read today is that the Eastern Cape province is the poorest of the 9 provinces in SA but I think we have come to that conclusion……we then drove back on the road we had been on yesterday but this time we stopped at Bloukrans Bridge which is in the Tsitsikamma National Park on the Garden Route…..the Bloukrans Bridge is the biggest in Africa and they do a bungy jump here which is 216 metres and the highest in the world now we’re told…..Hannah, our Ethiopian/Swedish girl decided she wanted to do a jump so we spent time here…..lots of local craft being sold and a very picturesque area…interesting that you could not pass through this area before 1983 as there were no bridges to cross these great valleys….awesome looking through these big valleys to the Indian Ocean….. then we drove on to another area of Tsitsikamma National Park, the Stormsriver Mouth……a great spot on the Indian Ocean where they have built a big board walk and then put 3 swing bridges in the area….we went and walked it all and then had lunch at the lovely restaurant in the area, right on the ocean…..we had 2 mains and 2 shandy’s for $20….last night’s dinner was awesome…the fish here is great…we had 2 mains, 1 bottle of bubbly and 1 dessert for $43…..then it was a drive back to our accommodation at Knysna…..we stopped off in Plettenburg Bay and what an upmarket place that is…..lovely sandy beach and great shops…P/Bay is a resort town and one of SA’s top local tourist spots…..forgot to mention that Jeffreys Bay yesterday is the top surfing beach in SA…….Western Cape province certainly is very different from the Eastern Cape province and it is reflected in the life style here in the Western Cape province……sadly again today though we went passed all these absolute wooden shacks on the outskirts of Knysna and Plettenberg…such a contrast to the beautiful homes that are in both these towns…we are told that the government is slowly building the match box houses for the local natives and there is evidence that that has started as in one area we saw all the box houses in a row, all identical, such uniformity with no imagination whatsoever and just another slum waiting to happen down the track…… reflecting back on Port Elizabeth yesterday…..apparently the city centre was really run down but the world cup there in 2010 and the building of the Nelson Mandela Stadium gave the place a boost…(we had the stadium pointed out to us) ……time to go for dinner to another restaurant…another culinary adventure……M & F