South Africa 2023

Sunday5November

7:30 am, the sun has been up for a while, the gull too. It is time for us to leave Tsitsikamma to continue our advance towards Cape Town along the coast to the west. Next stop, the town of Knysna.

Visit to the SA National Parks Board office to try to find our next campsite.

Finally, we will just take a quick tour of the area to directly reach the next stage which will be Wilderness.

In the meantime, a short walk along the city's seafront.

Knysna is also well known in France because it is here that the French football team refused to get off the bus during the 2010 World Cup...  

Nice view of the Knysna lagoon.

The Gon Fishing statue.

Lunch break at the Blend Country Restaurant.  

After 50 km of driving, here we are on the beach of Wilderness, a small seaside resort town on the edge of the natural park of the same name.

Wilderness beach is 8 km long.  

The entrance to the Ebb and Flow Rest Camp campsite where a bushbuck (Tragelaphus sylvaticus) welcomes us.

A pretty starry sky for this end of the evening. We are in the southern hemisphere, so we are lucky to see the Large Magellanic Cloud (the diffuse white spot at the top left of the photo).

Monday6November

Yes, we are not disturbed by neighbors...

Morning program, canoe trip on the Touw river which passes through the campsite.

A walking section is planned on the route. So we leave the canoe on a pebble beach.

Two bushbucks.

The path arrives at small waterfalls, the Kingfisher waterfall.

The little beasts of the area. A caterpillar Eutricha capensis and a beetle Lycus paliatus.

Return to the canoe and return to the campsite.

Quiet afternoon with a little walk in the Woodville river forest where a large tree stands.

Here is the big tree. An Afrocarpus falcatus about 800 years old and 33 meters high.  

Lentinus sajor-caju and coriolus versicolor mushrooms?  

Tuesday7November

New day. We leave Wilderness to reach the surrounding mountains.

The Seweweekspoort Pass crosses the folded mountains of the region. The passage was made between 1859 and 1862 by convicts. Before its construction, the passage of the pass with an ox cart took 4 to 6 days to cover the 17 km along the Huis river. After the completion of the pass, the passage could be made in about 3 hours.

The marlothii aloes have taken possession of the place.

Millions of years of strata, folding, compression and erosion have updated these formations in vertical or horizontal layers more or less rounded.

At the end of the track, we turn around and redo the same path in reverse.

We skirt the mountain range to the east to approach the Swartberg pass.

We are in the "Karoo", large semi-desert area in the south of the country. The Swartberg mountains cut this semi-desert in two, the great Karoo in the north and the little Karoo in the south.

On the right photo, the small road that joins the Swartberg pass and which we will take. Swartberg means "Black Mountain" in Afrikaans.

Here we are on the Swartberg massif. Opposite, another much more rounded massif.

The valley is superb with its cultivated fields of the town of Matjiesrivier.

Here we are arrived at the Swartberg pass with its 1568 meters altitude.

And hop, on the other side of the pass, a little higher at 1575 meters altitude.

Short walk to stretch your legs.

The Swartberg has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage since 2004.

Here we are in Oudtshoorn, the main city of the region, located one hour from the coast. We found a nice house on Airbnb for the next two nights.

Wednesday8November

Oudtshoorn is known as the ostrich capital of the world due to its ostrich farming industry which is one of the largest in the world. Approximately 200,000 ostriches are raised on nearly 500 farms. Here we are in one of them, at Cango Ostrich Farm which we are going to visit with one of the farm employees.

Small exhibition on the theme of the ostrich with notably its leather recognizable by its pimples or pearls, marks left by the bird's feathers.

And here, a sample of what can be found in the stomach of this large bird...   Gravel and pebbles allow it to better grind what it ingests. But the ostrich is not very picky about what it picks up with its beak, everything goes, animals as well as plastics...

The inside of the egg visible thanks to a bulb placed behind. The egg can weigh between 1.2 and 1.8 kilos.

Only two toes end the ostrich's foot, the big toe ends in a huge claw, its best defense weapon against its predators.

Big beak, but capable of eating from my hand without hurting me.  

A blue-necked subspecies.

Courtship display demonstration to impress the male or female tourist...  

Beware if the ostrich attacks you, its scratch could be fatal...  

"Neck massage" generously dispensed by several ostriches in exchange for a few corn seeds...

And demonstration of the solidity of the eggs being able to support our weight...  

Continuation of the program with the visit to the Cango cave.

The plaque commemorating the discovery of the cave on July 11, 1780, and inaugurated in 1988 by the prime minister of the time.

Beautiful interpretation by our guide of an Ave Maria taking advantage of the acoustics of the great "Van Zyl" hall, named after its discoverer.

On the right, Cleopatra's Needle

Botha's hall magnified by the play of lights.

We leave Oudtshoorn for Mossel Bay where on February 3, 1488, the Portuguese Bartolomeu Dias docked, the first European navigator to pass the tip of Africa.

The museum around Bartolomeu Dias.

Inside, a replica of the caravel that brought Bartolomeu Dias here by rounding the Cape of Good Hope.

What Europe knew of the world in 1490 after Bartolomeu's voyage.

In 1988, the replica of the caravel is completed and launched to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the passage through southern Africa.

This tree served as a "mailbox" for sailors passing through to transmit a message to the next navigator. Located near a source of fresh water, sailors invariably came to quench their thirst near this tree. The message was hidden in an old shoe hanging from the tree, which attracted the eye of travelers and thus the discovery of the message.

Swellendam, our stopover town to spend the night.

The house even has its pool table!

Tomorrow, we will do like Bartolomeu Dias, we will pass by the Cape of Good Hope!