Happy New Year

We ended 2010 with a three hour hike in the mountains in the afternoon; beautiful but quite tiring and we didn’t quite make it to the end which would have ended in the Elephant Eye Cave (my fault!) so we will have to do it again.  

We walked close to these baboons so I took a quick picture.....and then hurried off!

 

We had a quiet evening at our house to recover and, surprisingly, made it to midnight and watched the fireworks at the waterfront from our balcony (admittedly we were standing on the table!) which were very good.

 

New Years Day was the BIG clear up as we cleaned the house and packed up (again!) ready for the new tenants to move in on Jan 3^rd….. we did quite a good job too!

On 2^nd Jan we spent the day with our friends in Betty’s Bay about 50km away eating crayfish and walking on the beach and then left early the next morning to complete the packing to move out.

The next few weeks will be spent in Knysna about 450km from Cape Town along the Garden Route and on the Indian Ocean rather than the Atlantic so the sea is much warmer.  We decided to make two overnight stops along the way and spent the first night in Franschhoek, one of the best wine areas in the Cape. 

We did some wine tasting of course and bought a few bottles....



 

The second night was spent in MacGregor, another wine region so we bought some more wine!  By now the Western Cape was in a heat wave and the temperature went up to 39 degrees!  We were staying in a stone cottage with a thatched roof which was amazingly cool under the circumstances but sadly their swimming pool had a problem and we couldn’t cool off – it was a three shower day!!

On the 5^th we completed our journey through the Klein Karoo and Overberg regions (famous for fruit farms, Karoo lamb and Ostrich) and headed for the coast via the Tradouw Pass.

The temperature went from 39 degrees down to 20 degrees as we arrived at George in a sea mist but soon rose again to 23 degrees in Knysna.  
 

 








Our home for the next 3 ½ weeks is a flat overlooking the Knysna Quays….lovely!   This is where Malc will swim every morning  - two or three times "around the block" and trying not to get run over by a boat!!