Posts In The “Indian Ocean” Category
As part of our trip to the South Pole, we returned to Cape Town for the first time since 2015. Back then, we’d arrived in South Africa from Reunion after crossing the Indian Ocean in Dirona, and spent two months in country before sailing on to Barbados via St. Helena. As our plane banked over…
World-famous Kruger National Park is one of the largest game reserves on the African continent, encompassing nearly 4.9 million acres (2 million ha). The park also is home to among the widest diversity of large mammals in the world, including the lion, leopard, cheetah, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, elephant, buffalo, giraffe, zebra, antelope, and wildebeest. We very…
While on a recent safari at Lion Sands Ivory Lodge in Sabi Sands Game Reserve, South Africa, we watched an African rock python swallow an impala. The opportunity to watch a python swallow its prey is rare and ours was even more so, in that the typical prey for the python is much smaller animals…
During our last two days in Cape Town, we visited the Titanic Artifact Exhibit, the Springbok Rugby Musuem, the Cape Town McLaren dealership, the Two Oceans Aquarium and the Cape Town Diamond Museum. Trip highlights from December 21st and 22nd follow follow. Click any image for a larger view, or click the position to view…
We’ve been in Cape Town for a month now and have really enjoyed the city and our berth at the V&A Waterfront. In between seeing the sights, we’ve also been completing some boat projects and getting ready for the next big run across the Atlantic Ocean. And James has spent a fair bit of time…
Port Elizabeth residents Knut Hildebrand and Christine Weibel were in Cape Town for a few days and invited us out to tour the winelands with them. We enjoyed a wine-tasting, estate tour and picnic lunch at the famous Boschendal Estate, the second-oldest winery in South Africa. The scenery in the winelands valley and en route…
We purchased a City Sightseeing day pass that allows us to take unlimited rides on any of their four main bus routes and get on and off at any stop along the way. We started off on the Mini Peninsula Tour, which runs through downtown Cape Town, then east of Table Mountain to Hout Bay,…
We took the dinghy out for a tour of Cape Town Harbour and found an unusually diverse collection of ships moored there, including a super-yacht, a cruiseship, an icebreaker, a diamond-miner, and a small boat with 1,200HP of outboard engines; several drillships, offshore supply vessels and cargo ships; and many fishing vessels. The outer harbour…
Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners were improsoned on Robben Island before the fall of apartheid. The island is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site with daily tours through the former prison. Four-hour tours depart from Cape Town Harbour and include a ferry ride to the island, a bus tour of the island, and a…
With clear weather forecast for the entire day, we set off on a hike up Table Mountain. The climb up was hot and tiring, but the views along the way and at the top were amazing. Trip highlights from Nov 24th follow. Click any image for a larger view, or click the position to view…
The Victoria and Alfred (V&A) Waterfront is a major South-African tourist attraction that draws over 23 million visitors per year. The property was transformed from a largely derelic and underutlized commercial wharf and storage area in the 1970s to a fabulous selection of restaurants, shops and tourist venues, plus condos and hotels while remaining a…
From Richards Bay, we made a 931-mile trip to Cape Town in a week. We could have covered that distance in 3 to 4 days, but current weather patterns only allows for 2-3 days travel between weather systems. So we made the trip in 3 hops of about 300 miles each, with a 3-day layover…
iSimangaliso Wetland Park is a Unesco World Heritage site about an hour’s drive north of Richards Bay. The park is famous for its resident hippo population and other wild animals, but also has an incredibly diverse ecosystem including a lake and estuary, sandy beaches, wave-pounded shores and hilltop viewpoints. We toured the southern portion of…
Mining is an industry where the goal is to extract minerals at the maximum possible efficiency while minimizing environmental impact. It sounds simple, but the innovation that lies behind mining, processing, and smelting operations is incredibly deep. And, it’s getting more complex all the time where the world’s global logistics systems allows mines world-wide to…
Once the big storm was over, we med-moored again to the Zululand Yacht Club wavebreak. While we’d prefer to be either swinging free at anchor or secured to a dock, this is working out remarkably well and the yacht club is a good base to operate from. Days later, we’re still seeing debris and reminders…
Our Nordhavn 52 Dirona is far from light at 110,000 lbs but fully laden, the Bell B40D articulating dump truck weights considerably more at 147,000 lbs. Yesterday, I got a chance to drive this six-wheel-drive monster on the Bell Equipment test track. What’s perhaps even more amazing is this is only a mid-sized truck in…
The combined Hluhluwe-iMfolizi Game Reserve is just over an hour’s drive from the marina and at 96,000 hectares and is considered one of South Africa’s most beautiful parks. We packed a picnic lunch and made a day-trip through the southern half, iMfolizi Game Reserve. Guided safaris are available, but we purchased a map and animal…
The Endomeni Rehabilitation Project cares for injured or abandoned South African cats with the hopes of re-introducing them into the wild. They offer tours of the facility that includes bringing visitors into the pens to interact with the animals. While we expected to touch a cat or two, we were amazed to find ourselves inside…