Nonna and Poppy Visit Cape Town

Now we've got our flat and car and so on sorted out we are ready for visitors, so Nonna and Poppy came to stay with us for a couple of weeks. It was really fun. It was a great excuse for us all to do some touristy things around Cape Town and go off on safari!

Nic was brilliant as a tour guide and we'd planned out an itinerary for our 2 weeks starting with when we picked them up at the airport we went straight away to Groot Constantia and started wine tasting. It was very successful and we bought lots of wine. It seemed to be as good a way as any to cure jet lag.

Later, we went up Table Mountain on the cable car. We nearly didn't because the weather was a little cloudy and certain people thought it wasn't worth it, luckily I won this argument and we did go up and it was great. Because of the weather there weren't a lot of other people up there. Most of the time we didn't even see anyone else. The weather was also very obliging and did sort itself out after a while.

Before the weather sorted itself out

We also went to Cape Point and Poppy was very excited to see the Cape of Good Hope. He queued up with a load of Indian tourists to get his photo with the sign and he ended up taking a lot of photos for tourists. He seemed to enjoy it.

View from Cape Point

Here we are at the pointy bit of the point

I took Nonna and Poppy to Bird World and hurried them past all the birds so we could get it to see the tiny squirrel monkeys. The monkey's took particularly well to Nonna and a bunch of them fell asleep in her hands. I think we were all poo'd on by monkey's but at the time it didn't really matter - the monkey's are so cute!

But the best part of the holiday was travelling along the Garden Route stopping off at 3 different National Parks on our way. 

First we went to the most Southerly point of Africa - LÁugulas (probably not spelt like that). We stayed in adorable cottages and some of us learnt the ancient art of braai.

Adorable cottage (sadly next to a building site, but we ignored that mostly) 

Southerly-est point!

Nonna chillaxing at Augulas

It was very beautiful (still ignoring the building site next to our cottages) and we did did lots of rock pool exploring and throwing rocks into the sea and eating and drinking. A fine time was had by all.

After that we headed to Storms River Mouth which was even closer to the sea. Poppy was particularly impressed that we (or some of us) could actually throw a stone into the ocean from our balcony - so we were literally a stones throw from the ocean!

We arrived here a bit late and it was pretty much dark by the time we started on the braai. I was in charge of this braai and I'm pleased to say it was a bomb of a braai. If awards were being given out for 'best braai of the day' I would definitely have won that award.

For some reason we had booked honeymoon suites for this park (I think that's all that was on offer at the time) and they were terribly fancy. Bigger than our flat. We only had one night here though, so the next day we walked about the park for a bit, over this amazing bridge:

This is where Nic spent a lot of time on holiday as a kid, so it was really lovely to go and see it properly, although one night isn't long enough there - we'll have to go back when we've got a bit more time.

The next and final stop on our tour was Addo Elephant Park. There were shit load of elephants!!! We started driving around quietly, getting all excited when we saw a deer in the distance, but we soon saw loads of stuff, including my new favourite animal - the Warthog!

A Warthog (and some zebras)

Turns out I don't have any photos of my new favourite animal which is a little embarrassing.  There were loads of them though and two of them decided to have sex right in front of our car. They did not care that my parents were in the car! They just had sex right in front of us - we couldn't move!

An interesting fact that I didn't know about warthogs is that they have corkscrew shaped penises that rotate like a corkscrew. I can't find photographic proof of this online (and frankly I'm scared to keep searching, there's a lot of warthog porn out there) but Wikipedia does back this up.

The males possess a corkscrew-shaped penis, which fits into a similarly shaped groove in the female's cervix

So there you have it.

We did see a LOT of elephants. The elephants were amazing and they came so close to our car.

After recently seeing the elephants in Thailand, it was really a relief to see these lovely creatures in Addo. They really did seem happy and as free as they could possibly be. They seemed to be in their natural family groups and there were loads of babies and young ellies, which I'm sure is a sign of happy, healthy elephants.

This is a rondarval

Our rondarvel (a strange SA word for little round house) was overlooking a water hole and on the second night we saw a white rhino there! It was literally amazing. 

And on our final night at Addo Liz and Mike (Nic's folks) appeared! So we had our best braai yet to celebrate. 

I've become such a braai fan now - we bought one for our flat the other day and we may live off braai'd food for the rest of our lives now. It's great. Braai, braai, braai....