Garden Route

So South Africa is famous for the “garden route” which is the equivalent of driving PCH in southern California. So after picking up my car I headed west to spend the night near Tsitsikamma park. There I did a nice hike the next morning in or around Mt. Tsitsikamma park and saw a little bit of the S african wilderness.

monkey

I skipped the largest bungee jump in the world at 216m and instead headed to an animal rehabilitation park. They do birds and small mammals but I went for the cats. This was the same as the Lion walk, however most of the animals that I got to see were too socialized with humans to go back into the wild. They are used primarily to raise money and to aid the rehab the other animals. So there are a couple of token animals that are basically for show, better than a zoo for sure but not quite free. Aside from the leopard they all basically receptive to visitors.

  African Black footed cat, this is the predecessor to your everyday tabby

Mr Cheetach

Leopard

This guy was spectacular, at 15 mos old he had the most amazing coat I’ve seen and it took us a couple of minutes to find him. For some reason these big cats have almost a dog like personality. Respond to their names, like to play, like affection. (no so much with the leopards). So this guy had a play toy in the form of a plastic water jug, in about 5 min I watched him tear it apart. Leopards grip with the front claws, bite, and try to shred everything with their rear claws. Impressive, this was much closer than we saw them in the seregenti.

Just watching  the cheetahs walk around is amazing, everything about these cats is built for speed. Huge shoulders and rib cage, very impressive to see up close.

Caracal. I petted this guy, feels just like a housecat but about the size of a smallish mountain lion.

Serval, he hissed at me. We saw one of these in NgoroNgoro.

This cheetah was drinking up before he was taken on a walk with a group. Just prior to this photo he was rolling around getting scratched and petted by the guides and myself. Their purr is amazingly loud.

After the park I drove through Plett the S African equivalent of La Jolla and Knysa which is a little bit more like Sausalito/Tiburon. Both are very cool beach towns within a days drive from Cape town and the interior.

I ended up spending the night in Wilderness at a nice little organic guest house and then we had dinner with 71 Argentine female field ball players on tour. It was hard to stay focused during that meal.