Penguins in Africa

Did you know there are penguins in Africa? We went down to Boulders Bay in the South African Cape Peninsula National Park this weekend and visited the penguin colony.

This is the welcome sign to the park (note, no shaking hands with penguins is allowed):


This was the first penguin we saw. He came out to meet us as we entered the walkway to the park:

Then we saw all these penguins on a boulder in the distance...

And then we got really close to them!

See how close Debra is to the penguins! (but she is not shaking hands with them...)

These are the penguins sitting on nests:

If you look really close you can see some of the dark gray fluffy baby penguins:

These guys were such posers! Seriously they just stood on this rock and posed. We guess they make extra money doing that.

Cape Town in the Spring

To celebrate Thom's birthday, we planned a little getaway for Columbus Day weekend. We ended up driving to Johannesburg on Friday, spent the night at a hotel close to the airport, and then flew down to Cape Town on Saturday. We love Cape Town. It's so refreshing to be on the coast or down town at the Waterfront. It's a special treat after spending months in the desert.

This time we stayed right on the beach in Camps Bay. And we managed to lose our camera so all of our photos for this blog are borrowed from other websites.


We stayed at the Fairways which was nice.


But the best feature of this hotel is the restaurant Luigi's. We had dinner there Saturday night and it was unquestionably the best Italian food we have had in a very long time.

Our other fabulous restaurant experience was Codfather's. Codfather's was recommended to us by a friend who had also given us the driving directions to Johannesburg and we're just not sure if she was trying to kill us or not. After the driving directions experience we were somewhat skeptical of the restaurant she recommended. It turned out we were pleasantly surprised. At Codfather's, you get to pick your food from the fresh seafood case and you can mix and match and then they cook it perfectly. We had tuna steak, sword fish, local mahi mahi which is called something else, and prawns from Mozambique the size of lobsters (they're truly too big to be called shrimp). It was a delightful experience.

It was a just a bit too chilly and way too rainy to really enjoy being on the beach. It rained all day Sunday. We tried going down to the Waterfront and even made it to the Green Market Square craft market in a break in the rain:




The craft market experience is similar to many places in Africa and many of the "shops" have the same stuff that everyone else has. There's the typical hard sell approach because you'll find the same thing at the next shop and maybe they'll make you a better deal. When we first got there, everyone was pressuring us to come inside their booths and look at there stuff more closely. As soon as it started raining, the message changed to "buy something and then you can come inside to get 'free' shelter".

We ended up going back down to the Waterfront and spending several hours in a very nice mall to stay out of the rain. Debra was happy. Thom, not so much.

We're looking forward to going back in February when it should be hot and steamy.

The Great Train Adventure

We now depart from our regular posts to talk about something truly fabulous. Friday, June 1 we left Gaborone on the 7:00 am flight to Johannesburg, we then transferred to the domestic airport and caught a flight to Cape Town where we were met by a driver with our names on a sign (Debra loves getting met with her name on a sign!). Our driver took us to the Victoria and Albert Hotel on the waterfront.


We had a lovely afternoon walking around the waterfront, shopping and snacking. Our one disappointment was trying to get a sandwich from Subway. Looked just like a Subway sandwich shop but the sandwiches just weren't right. It was sad. The rest of our time in Cape Town was great and we plan to go back in the not so distant future to explore the city more fully. This trip we didn't have much time because Saturday just after breakfast we were taken to the train station. As soon as the car stopped we were met by Rovos Rail staff who took our baggage and checked us in and gave us drinks and thus, began a most fabulous adventure.

We waited for about an hour in a very comfortable lounge waiting for the rest of the passengers to assemble. It turns out there were 27 passengers total on the train which meant no lines, no crowds, lots of special attention, etc. We were escorted to the train and shown to our suite (The Tsesebe -- named after some sort of a deer like animal (dla)).

Shortly after boarding, the train pulled out of the Cape Town station and we were on our way. The next 48 hours were truly fantastic. The Rovos Rail is an unquestionable first class experience. (We must take a minute to correct a misunderstanding. Before the trip, we thought Rovos Rail and the Blue Train were one and the same. It turns out that is not the case. The Blue Train is run by the government. Rovos Rail is privately operated). So Rovos Rail is described as the "most luxurious train in the world". We haven't taken enough trains to personally endorse this description but we can say we had an incredible experience. The food was really good and served quite interestingly (4 and 5 course meals for lunch and dinner). The service was unbelievable. Every time we left our room, the hostess came in and straightened up everything. In the lounge car and observation car the staff made sure we had constant snacks and beverages. The train experience itself was an amazing blend of history and modern comforts. All the train cars are really, really old and fully restored and the wood paneling and detailing is very nice. You kind of get the feeling that you might be traveling through Africa in the 1930s.

Our journey took us from Cape Town to Pretoria. We had an hour stop in Majtsfontein Saturday evening. Supposedly it's a preserved Victorian Village. They have a creepy museum that even goes down into a basement area that used to be a jail. Frankly "the village" just wasn't very interesting. Maybe in daylight it's nicer.

Sunday we stopped in Kimberley for an excursion. Kimberley has an old diamond mine known as "The Big Hole". It's quite interesting from an historical perspective. Kimberley is where diamond mining began in southern Africa in the late 1800s. Also, this is where DeBeers came to be. According to our tour guide, it is the largest man-made mine (200 some meters deep -- all by shovels and some dynamite). Thom was hugely disppointed. He thought it was supposed to be the biggest hole. And it's clearly not that at all. The total production from the Big Hole was about 14.5 million carats. Annual production from Jwaneng (previously described in this blog) is 12 million carats. All mining activity is finished in the area but DeBeers still has offices in the town. The mine is now purely a tourist attraction.

So back on the train as we left Kimberley, we came across scads and scads of flamingos hanging out in a little lake that is actually filled from water from the Big Hole. It was a spectacular sight -- very pink.

Monday morning was another highlight of the trip. We stopped a little ways outside of Pretoria and switched engines. The ordinary electric engines pulled away, and we hooked up to a very cool steam locomotive.

And so we finished the rest of our journey being pulled by the steam engine. A perfect ending to a most fantastic experience. For those of you with lots of extra time, more photos of this experience can be viewed by clicking here