Hiking Trails, Canoe Trails & Game Drives

Howzit? We've had a great last couple of days here in the midst of South Africa...

We were in the Hogsback mountains for a couple days and stayed at a place called "Away With the Fairies" (I'm sure we'll get some comments on that alone!). It was a nice place with great views, although it did pale in comparison to being in the heart of the Drakensberg. We took a couple lovely walks through some really nice forests to a couple waterfalls. Lots of monkeys in those forests, that we might have missed if we didn't have three dogs along with us to bark incessantly at them.

Here's a look at one of the waterfalls. Sorry, Gracie, I've been playing with other dogs.


From there we drove south to Port Alfred which is on the coast and on the mouth of the Kowie River. We came here solely to do a two day canoe trip up the river to a hut. It was a random thing we read about in our guide book and it sounded like a nice change of pace. So we set out, 20 km up the river silently winding our way through the sleeping hippos and fending off the alligators with our paddles. Just joking. The most we had to contend with was a lazy seal that followed us part way up the river. Being so close to the coast, the tide has influence on the river for the entire journey so we had to time our paddling around the tides to make it easiest on ourselves. It was a lovely two days. We were pretty much the only ones on the river and once we got out of the residential parts of Port Alfred, it was nothing but us and Mother Nature at her best. We paddled through a couple nature reserves and while we didn't see much wildlife, the sounds of all the birds was amazing. It was a very relaxing time. At the end of the 20km we arrived at our hut for the night, where we ended up sleeping outside anyway as there were a few too many spiders inside for our liking (I know....spiders live outside as well...).

Here's what the scenery was like on the river.

The canoe did the job, but it was kinda small. I'm not sure how well you can see Keith in this picture, but this is the morning we headed back down the river (it looks early, but it's really only 7:00), so the canoe is actually much emptier as we have eaten a lot of food out of it.

From the Kowie River we beat feet to the Greater Addo Elephant Park where we saw, well, elephants! Among lots of other game. The park was built around saving the elephants of the area, when at creation there were only something like 11 elephants left. Now there is around 400 and we saw plenty of them. Other game we were able to see was one far off lion, hartbeest, kudu, ostrich, and so many warthogs we were ready to have one for a bbq by the end of our stay there! We stayed at the campground for two nights and enjoyed three game drives (self-driven now, of course!). The park is very well set up. Fabulous camping facilities, and very-easy-to-navigate roads.

The main attraction. One of the many times a whole herd passed right by our car.


We really enjoyed watching the kudu. There are tons of them in the park, so lots of close ups and even a few locking their beautiful horns with each other.


We are currently in Jeffery's Bay, the surfing mecca of South Africa. Not very good surf right now, as we have yet to see a surfer in the water. But we had to come here so that we could say we've been to "J'Bay". From here we'll move a little further west to spend a few days at Tstitikama National Park (definitely did not spell that correctly...).