Weekend Report (Saturday)

Saturday

I think we all woke up very early on Saturday. Even after the amount we did the day before, we were all up before 8am when breakfast was served at the B&B. It was a simple cereal/toast/scrambled egg/coffee/tea breakfast, it might have only just been worth the 30 Rand. We took up 3 of the 5 rooms of the B&B so there were very few other people around, none down for breakfast.

We left at about 9:30 and drove to Knysna (silent 'K') Elephant Park the way we stopped off briefly at a market and Minna and Sari bought some bits and bobs. The elephant park is a sanctuary for elephants and they do the usual tour that all these places do. While waiting in the foyer, we heard some Finnish being spoken - a family of 3 Finns over for a holiday in the area, very weird randomly meeting people from Helsinki all the way down here.. We first watched a video about the elephants and then went out to the tractor-pulled 'buggy' which took us out to the elephants. I think they have 9 elephants in total but we were in a pen with 4 of them. When we pulled up, they all huddled around the feeding area - they knew the drill! We fed them for a while and chatted with the minders about them. They ate everything and we had a lot of fun putting pellets in the trunk and placing food in their huge mouths.

We then moved back and the elephants came round so we could stroke them. They weren't fully grown so they weren't massive, but still, it was quite daunting standing right up against a very heavy animal with a massive trunk swaying around. We were told we can't bend down as they could easily knock us over.

We were then driven back to the main building and we had lunch and India bought a bright pink elephant, now named Princess :)

The plan was then to drive to Buffalo Hills , a game reserve slash safari. It was a huge place, they had a lot of land. The drive was a couple of hours long, and we saw a lot of wildlife, much more than we did on our very windy tour around Aquila last month. We saw the only zebra in the whole of Africa with an 'X' shape made with its stripes - even National Geographic had been recently to photograph it. We also saw giraffes - there had been a new baby born 2 days previously, but the mum was hiding it when we went to see it. There were also wilderbeast, bush buk, rondebok, kudu, gnu, lots of African animals. We didn't see any of the rhinos or lions, but we still were satisfied with what we saw. Our tour guide looked a lot like Wayne Rooney which amused me.

After the drive, we were taken to the tiny little distillery they have there. They make strong alcohol liqueur type drinks, but with crazy flavours like Chili Strawberry. It was too strong for me, especially with the added kick of chili, but Minna, Heikki and Sari all enjoyed tasting the different flavours and bought some too.

After another packed day of driving and tours, we started driving back to Wilderness. We went to an oyster restaurant in Knysna, The Knysna Oyster Company . Of course Milja and I went for chicken salad and chicken kebabs, but Heikki and Sari looked to be enjoying the horrible looking slimy things.

We then headed back to Wilderness for some well earned rest and to watch some DVDs before bed.

Dan | 08:21
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