Cross-country drive w/photos

Hello from Paradise! Backpackers Paradise, that is, our hostel here in Outdshoorn (about an hour and a half inland, midway along the southern coast of South Africa)!

We wound up here after visiting the Garden Route Game Lodge, where we went on two safaris and saw elephants, giraffes, zebras, rhinos, lions, etc. (more to come later). Last night, we visited the national landmark Cango Caves (http://www.places.co.za/html/cango.html), which were amazing and went out for Valentine's dinner, where our waitress spoke five languages and had worked as an English teacher in South Korea and New York.

On our way to the park from Cape Town, we took a southerly turn to visit the southernmost point in all of Africa: Cape Agulhas. The town itself, I likened to an African Laguna Beach. And, really, much of what we've seen along the coast looks soooooooooooo much like SoCal! Cape Town has that feel, and D adds, a touch of the Bahamas. But, I've got to tell you, driving inland, it's nothing like what we expected (i.e. grassy savannah bending and swaying in the wind with sturdy trees dotting the horizon and lions and zebras peeking out). There are three different landscapes we keep seeing.

1) Eroded fields that stretch as far as you can see, where the land was cleared of its native vegetation for farming by the Dutch and now looks like the face of the moon, with only a few blades of dried grass here or there and sheep around every bend.
2) Breathtakingly beautiful, awesome (in the true sense of the word), Middle Earth-looking mountains painted with striking colors: Bright blue, bright green, slate gray, white boulders. As we drove into the mountains, we saw some baboons just hanging out on the side of the highway and later on, we saw sheep scrabbling up along the craggy top of a mountain.
3) Idyllic famlands in the valleys of the mountains, green grasses blowing in the wind, blue skies, windy little rivers and ostriches around every bend.

Let's talk about ostriches. They love their ostriches here. This morning, we had fresh, scrambled ostrich eggs for breakfast and they were quite delicious! We ate with a British couple who told us about the failed efforts to farm ostriches in the wet climate of Norfolk, England, when ostriches were "all the rage." There are all kinds of things made out of ostriches here (besides the food), including leather, decorative eggs, feather dusters, key chains, you name it! There are ostrich farms you can tour and they have ostrich races too (yes, people ride ostriches). But, there is a worrisome cloud on the ostrich horizon: As we've been driving, we've been listening to the South African public radio, which is abuzz with news about bird flu in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa. Check it out:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/africa/02/12/nigeria.flu.reut/index.html

This morning, we're getting ready to head out for a tour of the winelands on our way back to Cape Town! Hope you all had a good Valentine's Day!

Love you!

Leslie