Penguins and Baboons and Ostriches (and Eland and Bontebok and Hartebeest), OH MY!

So on Saturday we went to the flea market and on Sunday, our friends took us all around the Cape Peninsula.

Here's the route we took:

From Cape Town all the way down to Cape Point.

So although we weren't technically on THE Southernmost part of Africa (which is a few hours East of us), it's still pretty dang close!

Once again, the thesaurus doesn't have enough adjectives for the amount of pretty and impressive we saw that day.

First we stopped at Simon's Town:

This town reminded me of the Riviera.  Gorgeous!

Then we went to Boulder's National Park, where we saw these guys:

 

The African Penguin

 Cute cuteness -- look at how fuzzy the babies are!

 

 

And look at the beach!

I wanted to stay there all day ... but further adventures called.

As we were driving -- look who we saw:

 Baboons!  They were just walking on the road!  They are very, very smart, but also very dangerous (especially the big males), so we just took some pictures from inside the car and kept going.  I guess they just roam around the neighborhoods here.

We then went to the Cape of Good Hope!  Call me Lorena "Bartolomeu Dias" Duarte (That doesn't make me a colonizer does it?  He was an explorer!  Right?!)

 The lighthouse on the Cape of Good Hope

 

I can't tell you how amazing it was -- the rocks, the waves crashing, the salt smell.  I've been fascinated by the ocean ever since I was a little kid on the black sand beaches of El Salvador ... and this ... wow, well, it's up there in my top life experiences! No Words.  Maybe some poetry though!

From the brochure: "The Cape of Good Hope National Park is situated at the junction of 2 of the earth's most contrasting water masses and is an integral part of the Cape Floristic Kingdom, the smallest but richest of the world's six floral kingdoms."

The flora here really is amazing.  It is called "fynbos," and I'm going to have to devote a whole post to it to do it justice.  But just briefly, it is an earlier type of vegetation (evolutionarily speaking) -- from afar it has a stark, brushy quality -- and then when you get close you see dozens of wildflowers and succulent-type beauties.

From there we went on to the Table Mountain National Park -- it is a huge park with some of the most interesting vistas I've ever seen.  It's like one park Tolkien, one part Machu Picchu and many parts its own unique place.

I kept expecting Frodo to step out from behind these rocks, I swear!

 

The rockiness of the place makes it feel like ruins -- like some huge, ancient city must have been built here and we're driving through its remains millenia later ...

This is where we saw all the animals:

Ostrich (a male, you can tell by the black and white plumage)

 

Young Ostriches (both males and females have this brownish plumage when they're young.)

A Speckled Mousebird blending in beautifully in the fynbos.

Eland Butt!  Elands are huge -- as big as a domestic cow.  But this Eland was very shy and would just show me his butt.

Then more baboons!

But these guys were in the park, eating natural vegetation, not garbage out of someone's bins!

These are Bontebok:

They are so sleek ... aren't they stunning?

And these are Grey Rhebok (said like the shoe)  -- they look like a cross between a rabbit and a deer:

Check out those super long ears.

And finally, just as we were leaving we saw Red Hartebeest:

 AMAZING.  Huge. 

In all it was like a 10 hour ride by the time we got back to Cape Town.

We got home a bit sunburnt and completely blissed out by all we had seen!