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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