18 August - Animals

After dinner with friends (and yet more wine) we spent last night in Franschhoek with Berlize's sister who conveniently lived there. It was also a good starting point for today’s first activity: an encounter with a cheetah. Located on one of the wine estates is a 'Cheetah Outreach Centre', an organisation that focuses on trying to help support the survival of cheetahs in the wild. As part of this it has three cheetahs at Franschhoek which you can not only see but also pet. After breakfast and a short drive I found myself in a large compound stroking a dozing cheetah which in every respect, other than colour and size, reminded me of the cat I once owned: the lazing in the sun, the purring, the stretching of limbs, the moulting of hair. It was hard to imagine it as a fast and efficient killer when at home in the wild.

                                                                                

From Franschhoek we headed south and along the rugged south coast to view some penguins, on the way encountering baboons standing around in the road. Apparently they are a bit of a nuisance here having learned how to break into badly secured cars and houses. Agile, fast and strong, direct contact is best avoided so we watched them for a while from the safety of the (locked) car.

Another hour saw us at Betty's Cove and the penguin colony. South Africa is the only home of one particular penguin species, the African or 'Jackass' penguin (so called because its call sounds like a donkey). Like so many other animals their population has dramatically reduced due to man's intervention but there are a number of populations around the Cape Coast. This particular population is in the area of what was once a whaling station that had been built in the early 1900s from a kit that had been marketed by Norway at the time; two boats contained everything needed to set up a fully functional whaling station. Interesting - and sad - to consider that the industry was developed to such ruthless efficiency at the time. The penguins were accompanied by a creature that the South Africans call a dassie but more formally is known as a rock hyrax. Brown and about the size of a large guinea pig they were supposedly once the most populous grazing animal in South Africa. Apparently their nearest biological relative is, of all things, the elephant.  Mostly they were lazing on the rocks enjoying the sun, their favourite occupation for most of the day apparently, but we did see a couple running around that clearly hadn’t read the hyrax handbook and they had an amazing turn of speed.

Cheetahs, baboons, penguins and dassies under my belt it was time to return to Strand and a quiet night in readiness for tomorrow’s departure east to Shamwari and a month, hopefully, of more and bigger animals.