More on Capetown and Namibia

I left you at the World of Birds in Capetown. After an hour of looking at the feathered friends--including the bizarre looking secretary birds, cuckoos, storks, ducks, etc.--I continued my city tour. I decided to book a tour for whale watching the next day in Hermanus, a pretty little town further down the coast of South Africa, as there would probably be good weather. It had rained off and on since I had arrived. We had dinner a restaurant called Mama Africa and I had crocodile and kudu.

The next morning I got up early for the whale tour. We saw only four whales and some seals, but it was bracing being on the water in a little boat which was batted about quite a bit by the huge waves.On the drive to the seaside town of Hermanus, we saw several townships with illegal electrical hookups--cables dangling from power poles, looking like carousels. Also of interest was another tour company which advertised on its tour bus Marriage Counseling and Shark Diving. I pictured a quarreling couple in a cage underwater working out their differences with the shark holding a pad of paper and smoking a pipe.

The following day was our last in South Africa. I went to Table Mountain because it was the first clear day and they close it when there are too many clouds. I was accompanied by two Australian guys and learned that the Australian prime minister is a woman, an atheist and not married to the man she lives with. Can you imagine such a person being elected to the top office in the US. On top of the mountain, there were two rock climbers selling a repelling adventure down the side of this high natural wonder. I considered it, but since this was not the Amazing Race, I decided against it.

That afternoon Jerry wanted to visit a record store before we went to the airport and our cab driver found one. He was a South African native who became head of Kentucky Fried Chicken in Namibia, but the company did not renew his work permit and he had to return home. He took us to the waterfront shopping center, led us to the store and waited while we looked, then took us back to the hotel. Can you imagine a NY taxi driver doing that?

We stayed in the capital city of Windhoek Namibia that Sunday. Some streets are named after great musicians like Mozart Strasse and Beethoven Strasse, a holdover from when the country was a German colony and called South West Africa. Other streets are named for foreign leaders such as Robert Mugabe, Fidel Castro, and Nelson Mandela. The city was not especially exciting, it was the desert and the wildlife outside of it we had come to see.

While in Namibia, we took tours of the Namib Desert and Etosha National Park (giraffe above is from that huge game perserve). More on those next blog.