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Down the Garden Route (11/10/00)
Jim
I'm writing this at about 8pm in the only Internet cafe I could find in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.
Today is Friday. Yesterday, Steph and I decided to spend an extra day at the Fairy Knowe (Little Hill) backpacker since, just an hour away was a fantastic attraction -- the Cango Caves.
So, we make the right up through the mountains on some beautiful roads with sweeping turns--a biker's delight.
Once we arrived at the Cango Caves, we had a choice of Standard or Adventure tour. The adventure tour requires "a degree of fitness, thin people only".
Well, despite the politicallly incorrect ad for the adventure tour, we went for it.
The two groups started together, and initially there were well over 50 tourists, mostly multiple-camera toting Europeans with translators echoing the guide's every word.
The Cango Caves are spectacular. The first one we entered was 100m x 50m (the size of a football field). They used to have concerts in it!
Anyway, my writing can't do the caves justice, but we will try to get some photos up soon.
At some point, the guide asked the "adventure" tourers to step to one side. Much to our delight, there was only a total of five of us. And it turned out that yes, you do need to be thin--and agile. We were soon crawling, and squirming, and scaling, and sliding the circuitous labyrinth of the caves.
Definitely a day well-spent!
I forgot to mention, that this neck of the woods has loads of ostrich farms. So, after riding past all those ostriches, I ended the day with a nice ostrich fillet. (Steph stuck with beef ribs.) The ostrich tasted more like beef than anything--not gamey. I hope there is never an outbreak of mad-bird disease :-)
This morning, we rode for about an hour to Plattenburg Bay which is renowned for the schools of dolphins nearby. We hung out on the beach for a couple of hours and did some body surfing, but alas, no dolphins joined us.
Then, we spent a few more hours heading along the coast to Port Elizabeth, a big coastal town in the Eastern Cape Province.
We basically have two pretty big days of riding ahead of us so that we can get to Pretoria by Sunday evening. Monday morning, we will be picked up by an adventure tour company for a four-day trek into Kruger Park where we hope to see all of the "big five" (I'll explain later.)
Keep the emails and support coming!
