Tuesday 15^th July, 2014……Left Kei Mouth on the Indian Ocean at 6 am…yet again in the dark….(they call this area the Wild Coast and we wished we could have had more time there)……when we got daylight it was the usual landscape….so much land and so barren with all the match box houses, and so colourful in the Eastern Cape, with the local settlements always on the horizon…we’ve come to the conclusion that they are in these remote places because of the “outhouses”…no sewerage here and so all these long drop toilets must really smell in due course…..also water is like gold here and yet we are amazed that even on the better houses they have no spouting to collect the rain water into tanks…..also all the stones/rocks that are on the roof to hold the roof on but they still always have that satellite dish!!  An so our first town this morning was East London…coming into East London we saw this big sign “Southern Sun” and there was a shopping complex that would rival Sylvia Park in Auckland and then approximately 1 km down the road are all the local settlements…….often there is real uniformity with the match box houses in that they are identical and all in a row which means the government have built the houses…..today we have bought Mandela’s book “The Long Road to Freedom” which we hope will enlighten us more with things in SA…….it really has got us thinking compared with what we have seen in the other countries, SA is very different and as tourists we feel apartheid is still alive and well here….these local settlements on the hillsides have no roads, no house numbers, we just can’t imagine how you tell someone where you live!! We did a comfort stop just south of East London and all of a sudden we couldn’t believe our eyes as there was a golf course so there must be white SA’s here somewhere…that is also what has amazed us is that there are hardly no tourists and we seldom see a white face when we stop in these towns….particularly this Eastern Cape region, it really is all black/native people…….quite a good train track most of the way today be we never saw a train…..just some very derelict and unused stations but the railway line looked to be in pretty good shape….next stop was King Williams town and so many British architectural buildings there……but some of the streets were like the terrace houses in Sydney….then on to Grahamstown which the British settled in in the 1820’s and set up a trading post….everything still oh so British here but again we hardly saw a white face….we spent 2 hours here…went to a bank and changed money and that always takes about 30 minutes, the paperwork and questions  are incredible…..we found a nice little French restaurant for lunch but it served Italian food…as usual we nearly walked out as the service was dreadful, as always in this part of the world and when you have a time frame to work to it gets a bit frustrating…..(just watching the maids at Benmore Lodge yesterday, they have all day and just take all day…one was cleaning out the bird cage and one was preparing the onions for pickling…labour is so cheap here you don’t do anything yourself……then it was cacti’s and euphoria trees on the landscape to our destination  at Addo Elephant National Park…..school holidays here and the park is busy but the weather is still good…got very hot today…..as usual we have a cabin/chalet in  the park, surrounded by trees but told to keep our windows closed because of the baboons......Michael and I went into the park shop which is awesome, so much good camping gear and wonderful souveneirs….then it was a game drive in the park until dinner…this park is about 40,000 hectares and we can’t believe how the money tree (the smaller leaf variety) is an absolute weed in the park…..it is everywhere…we had some close encounters with the elephants tonight but still not a close up of a male lion…that is the only animal we haven’t had a close up with yet, they are so lazy…but we have had some really good encounters with the female lions so perhaps we will have to settle for that…..M & F