Tuesday, 22 July 2014

Wednesday 16th July, 2014…….6.30 am this morning and we were on yet another game drive in the dark!!  Nothing exciting this morning though and so we left the park about 9 am…..we headed on down the N2 which we are driving on which goes all the way to Cape Town……it is a fairly good motorway in parts and then parts are little better than our old Great South Road…the speed limits are 100 and 120 km per hour and there are a few toll gates…..and so it was more of the barren landscape we have got used to in the Eastern Cape Province with the odd cows you see grazing….all have big horns….nothing gets dehorned here….. then we drove through a small settlement called Colchester….all these English names….I forgot to mention yesterday the beautiful cathedral type churches in Grahamstown…very English….I would loved to have gone inside one of them to see how they are being maintained but from the outside they looked well maintained……very few white Africans in this Eastern Cape Province and that is why you wonder what the future will be for all these beautiful buildings…..and then we drove through a small resort area with massive sand hills between the Indian ocean and the resort…..then we lost the coast for a bit until we got to Port Elizabeth…coming into PE we passed the biggest port in Africa ….Port Ngqura in the settlement of Coega…PE had quite a lot of pollution as there was a big coal power station and another power station….some beautiful homes though and then the middle class suburbs….the council flats, very tidy, and then on the outskirts all the local settlements….the first we have seen today…..all the match box houses here built in wood but lots of bricks used to build all the better homes…brick houses everywhere… PE has big car assembly plants for BMW and Volkswagon so we guess that creates some employment… .it got greener as we drove south……big farms with very large dairy herds but still lots of irrigation but we were almost into the Western Cape Province where they have winter rain…..we drove down to the ocean at Jeffreys Bay and what a great spot….good beach, lots of interesting shops, we would love to have stopped there for a longer period of time but as always one has to keep moving…..leaving here there were lots of windmill turbines on the horizon…..our next stop was Tsitsikamma where we had our lunch stop…truck lunch in a park area….after lunch we walked to view the oldest tree in Africa…a Yellowwood tree and supposed to be 1,000 years old…..and this is where Western Cape Province begins and where the  white SA’s live (we go that impression)…..we have seen a noticeable change in how the roads have improved and the facilities along the way….Tsitsikamma is where the Garden Route begins and goes down to Mossell Bay…we don’t know why they call it the garden route as it was kms and kms of pine forest and then farms and more tree lined roads…..lots of gum trees, one part of the journey, you felt you were in Australia….the next area we went through was Plettenberg Bay and pretty upmarket with a very upmarket gold course where Tiger Woods has played we were told….but once again the local  settlement en route out of the town…at least these local settlement in Western Cape Province are not miles from anywhere like the local settlements in the Eastern Cape Province….but they are real slum areas sadly….even though there seems to be more wealth in the WCP than the ECP…..then on to Knysna to our accommodation for 2 nights….once again the slum area as we drove into this town was very sad but there are some lovely homes and accommodation where we are on the edge of a lagoon with the ocean in the distance….and so tonight we are going out to a restaurant for dinner to taste the local seafood which we are told is very good…..M & F

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