Garden route:caves & ostriches

Saturday 29/9
Today we continue on the Garden Route to the Cango caves which are amazing limestone caves. I take many photos.











One of our group is having a birthday today (75?) and the guide breaks out in a beautiful song. The acoustics are great. The birthday girl is very surprised and pleased.


A note re facilities. the Cave tourist place has toilets on every floor, just for your info.  other places we have visited are similarly well endowed with facilities of good quality.  a nice surprise.


we continue on our journey along a mountain range to an ostrich farm.  This is the part of our trip which is different fro the tour we thought we booked to the one we actually had booked.  We get ostriches instead of going to Botswana. 

Again well equipped farm and tourist place.  the farm  includes an amazing  homestead that the owner in the early 1900s built with the most expensive materials and decorated elaborately.  think Italian marble etc etc. soon after it was built he went bankrupt.  the bottom fell out of the ostrich industry.  apparently due to cars being used and ostrich feather hats not working too well with open top cars.




and then we saw ostrich after ostrich, big ones and little ones....







And they even have emus mainly to make us feel bad due to their inferior size. 


We had a real farmer giving us this talk. he plays cricket and rugby and was very interesting:


this is me in a peacock hat as was the fashion.  it smelled but reminds me of the hat I wore at my first wedding. I still like a good hat.

We lunched on ostrich salad  and ostrich pie.  Both really nice. More like beef than chicken.  You can make a lot o stuff out of ostrich. They use every bit of the bird including meat and the leather on its legs. The bags made out of ostrich leather were amazing(ly expensive).

I thought the range of pate sold in the shop was interesting:


And then we continued on our way to the tourist beachside town of Knysna (silent K).

on the way more photos of mountains:

this is a plantation of hops which is probably obvious to beer enthusiasts.(Ben?)





  We head back to the coast and beach. It is good to be back close to water and coast.  Feels like I can breathe again.


Our hotel is actually right on the waterfront which is more of a harbour than beach but we have water views from the room.

The parking spots are filled with Ferraris. There is money in south Africa still.
We have the afternoon to ourselves so I have a look eat the nearby shops and Paul finds a pub to watch the Rugby game.  You will know which game if you have any interest in rugby.

WE have dinner at our own cost but with the group at a nearby restaurant. it has seafood and pizza and kind of everything in between.  We have seafood.  There is more singing for the birthday girl and we have a great evening.


Tomorrow we organise to go on a 5 km walk.......... one of us is keen while the other is unsure.








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