Enjoying Nature

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Today was another beautiful day crisp, cool, and sunny.

Left our backpacker's hostel in the morning and headed to the Knysna Elephant Sanctuary. Here, we learned a lot about the elephants of Knysna and we also got to feed and interact with them. There were 5 of them, three adults and two youngsters. Sally was the matriarch of the herd so all of the elephants followed her. Keisha was the baby of the herd at 2 years of age. and Shaka was the only male of the herd. The other two elephants were Thandi and Nandi. Whenever the elephants rubbed against each other, it sounded like sandpaper, but when they walked, it was completely silent because they have padded feet. It was amazing but sad to hear that the population of elephants dropped from 500 in the 1870's to only 3 in 2000 due to poachers looking for ivory. The elephant sancturies were set up to try to save them from extinction. Cool facts about elephants if you are interested: The ears of an African elephant are shaped like the outline of Africa while the Asians are like the outline of India. Pregnancy lasts about 22 months. The trunk has no bone or cartilage, has over 100,000 muscles, and can hold up to 8.5 liters of water.

After the Elephant Sanctuary, we walked around an area of shops in Plettenburg. Unfortunately, most of the shops were closed because it's Sunday. We walked down towards the beach to take some pictures and hopped back in the car to go to our next desitination, Monkeyland. Monkeyland was a monkey sanctuary where they are trying to reintroduce many species of primates back into the wild. We got a guided tour through the forests where they lived but we were not allowed to touch or feed the animals. At the sanctuary, there were 12 different species of primates, the black and white lemur, the ringtailed lemur (the one in the movie Madagascar), the black and brown lemure, the squirrel monkey, the cappuchin monkey, the marmoset, the tamarind, the spider monkey, the spectacled monkey, the vervet monkey, the howler monkey, and the gibbon. We were lucky enough to have seen all of them. Most of the primates that are in the sanctuary came from zoos, labs, and private homes where they used to be pets.

Our last activity of the day was a waterfall zipline tour at the Tsitsikamma Falls at Storm's River. There were 8 ziplines that extended over the waterfalls and were anchored to the rocks on each side. There were some short steep ziplines where you could zip down really fast, and others that were a lot longer. The longest zipline was 211 meters long and 40 meters above the water. It was a great feeling to have the wind in my face as I was zipping over the spectacular scenery.

Made it into our backpacker's hostel in Storm's River early tonight. I'm planning on having some yummy dinner and watching the last game of the World Cup with the other people in the hostel. Oh, and I'm going to snack on my biltong which I bought at a store today. Biltong is the South African version of jerky (beef, chicken, ostrich, etc). I could chew on one stick for hours. There's other beef biltong that's not so dry. I don't enjoy it as much though because it gives me the sensation that I'm just eating slices of raw beef. I'm definitely the type of person that likes my meat well done.

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Comments

[Anjuli]

hello!
Hi Angela - glad you're having fun! The trip sounds really cool so far! a little adventure, a little nature appreciation, a little exotic animal visiting... exciting! i just made it back from Europe in one piece, yay! i hope things continue going well!