2007's big holiday was in South Africa - along the Garden Route from Kariega Lodge (near Kenton on Sea) to CapeTown. We've split the holiday into 4 pages so they'll load in quicker.
We arrived at Hermanus early evening to a lovely warm welcome from Salome, Esme and Elmarie at the Auberge Burgundy. We managed to catch sight of a few whales in the bay (too far away to photograph in such poor light apparently!). The photo on the left is the view from our balcony (which is shown below), the picture on the top right is our suite.
I spent many a happy hour on the balcony reading and looking up through my binoculars occasionally to watch the whales in the bay.
Whilst I was relaxing on the balcony, Jonathon was busy with his camera taking photos of the whales from the shore. It is amazing how close they come but they obviously feel safe in the bay.
Next door was having some refurb work done to it - not sure I'd want to be near the scaffolding let alone on it!
Hermanus is a very pretty coastal village / town with a really beautiful coastal path. It also boasts a good number of excellent restaurants. A few that we tried and can definitely recommend are Restuarant Joubert, The Fisherman's Cottage, the Harbour Rock and Fabio's, all of a very different style but all serving delicious food.
We took ourselves and our cameras along the coastal path - first going westwards (bright sunny weather) ...
As per usual, we went out on several whale watching trips and I've put all the whale photos together later on rather than doing them on a daily basis! The best people we went out with were Dyer Island Cruises - they are really keen on conservation and were keen to tell us all about the whales and other creatures we saw rather than just taking us out and back. They also run a charity called Faces of Need that provides houses for penguins on Dyer Island - needed as humans have "cleaned up" the island and therefore made it more difficult for the penguins to nest. We went out with DIC 4 times - the first time was sunny but very choppy, the second calm but misty and the third was so calm and sunny that we did a "back to back" and went out twice that day!
Now to the whales. We got pretty close to some Southern Right Whales. They are not as pretty as the Orcas but they are huge and magnificent! The crusty bits (collosities) on them are used to identify one whale from the next as each set of crustiness is unique (bit like our fingerprints)
There are loads of whale photographs (even though I've included only a fraction of the photos we took!) which just goes to show how close we got to them and how friendly they were as they hung around for ages being almost as nosey about us as we were about them.
The picture above is of a pair of adults and a calf.
The whale on the left was showing off by rolling over and showing us his white tummy!
It was time to leave Hermanus and the whales, sharks and seals behind - we hope to be back one day before too long.
Next stop Cape Town.