After the long day yesterday it was nice to take a looong morning in the bed, in other words I woke up around 08 and couldn’t get back to sleep. Well well, some picture handling and blog writing as Mona slept on didn’t hurt. We decided to stroll down to the beach and see what it had to offer.

The beach didn’t have much in the direction towards city centre so instead we headed further down south. In our hunt for a nice breakfast place I spotted something very similar to blood on the street, in fact it looked like someone had dripped blood for quite a walk. Mona then said “It might have been that guy with his face totally smashed up?” I’d missed the apparently calm, bad-bleeding white backpacker – and of course I pondered to and fro during the rest of the day what could have happened to him without the possibility to ever question him.

We had breakfast/lunch at a cafe called Bella or something, located at Bay World – awesome omelets and nice fresh fruit-muesli. We then headed back towards Lungile to see what activities we would could find for the rest of christmas eve. We booked a massage and headed back to the southern shoreline for some more sightseeing/strolling again. We came across a place called Boardwalk which seemed to be a strange crossing between an amusement park and a shopping centre.

The Boardwalk offered among other things a cinema, showing Avatar which we decided would be fun to watch (in 2D). The schedule was a little tight though with the massage so we weren’t sure we would make it and were hesitant to book in advance until we were told about the price, 3€ per ticket. We booked the tickets, headed back and re-scheduled the massage.

The massage was OK, but since I’d chosen “Deep Tissue Massage” I expected to be heavily assaulted but instead got something very similar to “a basic massage”, slightly disappointing. The movie Avatar was very nice however, not the most original story but oh-so-sweetly graphics – it definitely raised the bar – similar to the way Matrix pioneered the moving-camera-frozen-scene style. And the fact that the tickets were a mere 3€ showed that apparently going to the cinema doesn’t have to cost 10-12€ like in Sweden.

The day started 0600 with a bush walk around the actual camp (still big five classified), and our guide Laurie was armed with an old school hunting rifle, .357 caliber. The walk was only an hour and the focus was the small things such as ant lion (which we were able to find), tracks, different trees and bushes. It was a nice walk although we would perhaps preferred something in the range of 4 hours and getting up close and personal with some of the big five.

We had our final breakfast at Marc’s accompanied by a bunch of monkeys eager to steal anything edible within reach. We then spent some half an hour waiting for some ‘tards who were late from the neighboring camp before we headed off towards Jo’burg again.

We didn’t go the exact same route as when arriving, but instead passed Blyde River Canyon, apparently the 3rd largest Canyon in the world. It was quite impressive sights, and the weather wasn’t bad at all, ~26° C, especially compared to what we would have experienced in Göteborg. A long drive with several naps later we arrived at Jo’burg airport.

While checking in we encountered a rare sight, a highly effective south african worker, a species that many thought were complete lost but apparently it is only an endangered species after all. With little more than 2 hours to kill it was time to blog and start the art of going from 500 photos to 50. The airport was also blessed with a Subway restaurant to our pleasant surprise and we decided that it would most likely be better than any dishes served on the flight.

As I gave the too-many-times-repeated string of words dictating my order in the correct way I was interrupted by “We don’t have veggy patty”. Oh, well ok then – I’ll have the …. seafood platter (?). “We don’t have any sea food left”. I saw that my old favorite Italian BMT at least had made it to the menu so I went for the old classic. I was a bit surprised when I turned back to see that the lovely lady had skipped the cheese but instead smacked on the salad before toasting the sub. This is akin to heresy, and I kindly pointed out that I would like it toasted. This was not possible, since they didn’t had a toaster, only in Cape town they had that. I kind understand that they have local variations on the menu such as halal meat, fewer vegetarian alternatives and such but removing the possibility to toast your sub is on yhe same level as opening up a Burger King franchise and rather than grill your burgers offer to microwave them. Which is exactly what they did to heat up the meat. Well well, it was cheaper than in Sweden but microwaved meat with cheese underneath and hell-of-a-strong southwest sauce wasn’t top notch on my (perhaps quite strict) scale for Subway subs.

The flight went well, and arriving in Port Elizabeth we found a pay-phone and called Lungile Backpackers who would sent a cab for us. I realized while waiting for the cab that my phone was not in my pocked and as I started moving in a blur towards my beloved gadget I cursed my sleepy head for leaving it at the pay-phones. I was very pleased to see it elegantly tipped looking at me as I got back there. We got to Lungile without more hassle than a rather amusingly malfunctioning gate and dropped dead knowing that tomorrow we could sleep as long as we wanted. Vacation.

We awoke to the sound of Simbian Mobile Disco from the alarm clock/phone but a minute later we heard Florence, the main organizer for the camp ask whether we were awake. She explained that it was 0800 now and if we wanted to join the safari we should really hurry. Surprised we looked at my phone, which stated 0700 – well well no time to argue. Three minutes later we had brought some muffins and got ourselves dressed but unfortunately missed a bacon&egg breakfast. Apparently my phone had decided to adjust itself to the laptop’s timezone, i.e. Swedish and one hour later. Bah.

We did not have a guide for ourselves this time, instead we were accompanied by Chris, an australian guy and four other Swedish people. The whole point of being able to speak swedish without others understanding seemed to have been lost somehow. Todays goal was to spot some cats and off we drove.

Safaris are hard to describe with words, we saw too many wonderful sights to count (however my camera’s memory card was about full after some ~450 shots after the two days;)). In general we had better luck (or a better guide?) this day than the previous and got the chance to see some lions.

First three females dozing under a tree, some ok shots but later on the day we ended up being the only car enjoying the sight of a male lion having a feast on a Giraffe. The carcass smelled somewhat, possibly a day or two old, and there were two dead trees nearby with a bunch of vultures waiting for their turn. Really really nice to see that view, not more than at maximum 20 meters away.

Another highlight was the bathing elephant babies, it seems that anything being newly born or very young can be cute – regardless how mad ugly some animals become as they become adults. Speaking of ugly, it seems that Wilder beast, also known as Gnu, was one of “the ugly five” (warthog being another proud member), Mona found this very entertaining. Something else entertaining was the guide’s very good explanation to why Nialas looked furry – they are.

We had another nice dinner back at Marc’s Treehouse lodge but went to bed rather early to be able to get up for the early bush-walk tomorrow morning at 0600 and then start the journey towards Port Elizabeth…