A Whale of a Time!

Well, what a fabulous few days we've just had, roaming all over the stunningly beautiful Cape Peninsula!

On Friday, we took a guided tour to Hermanus to look for whales - and we did see two: a Southern Right mother and her calf cavorting in the choppy waters of the bay, tantalisingly close to the shore and showing their heads or tails for just a few seconds at a time over the course of about an hour. Unfortunately for us, although the weather was gorgeously sunny, it was very windy that day, and our planned boat trip was cancelled at the last minute because of the sea swell, which meant we had to watch the whales from the nearby cliffs instead, and the choppiness of the water did mean that it was not easy to see what they were up to below the waterline. While we were waiting and watching, we did see a school of about 30-40 dolphins swim rapidly by, and we also learnt that, had we been there a couple of hours earlier, we'd have seen 8 or 10 mothers and baby whales performing for the crowds, rising out of the water much more dramatically and clearly than 'our' two!

As part of the meandering tour back from Hermanus (where our car was literally stopped in its tracks by a large family of baboons who were larking around right in the middle of the road),

we stopped by a Cheetah Project, whose objective is to try and protect the rapidly dwindling cheetah population from farmers in particular - they being one of the cheetah's most dangerous 'predators', happy to shoot any large animals who prey on their herds. As cheetahs happen to be mainly day-time hunters, more of them get killed by farmers than any others of the big game predators around. So, instead, this project concentrates on breeding and training huge hunting dogs alongside cattle and sheep, so that they develop a familial 'bond' with them, and will bark aggressively (but not necessarily attack) when they smell nearby predators, thus deterring most attacks from other game, and hence obviating the need for farmers to shoot them. As the cheetahs in this project are, for a variety of reasons, never likely to be allowed back into the wild, they are fairly tame, and we were even allowed to get up close and personal with one of them, stroking its head and back whilst the handler talked soothingly to keep him calm.

On Saturday, we used Jacques' car to drive all over the Cape Peninsula, right down to Cape Point itself, stopping for brief sojourns on our way south in Kalks' Bay and Simonstown. Simonstown is a picturesque fishing town and harbour, with a small naval base, and we explored a Saturday-morning market at its 'Just Nuisance' area - named after a dog who had befriended and guarded the naval ratings stationed there during WW2, and whose statue is displayed proudly on the seafront.
  

Close by Simonstown, we also stopped to see the penguins in their protected colony at Boulders Beach. We saw literally hundreds of African penguins (about half the size of the more famous Emperor penguin), mainly standing stock still, looking fairly bored, or shuffling comically around each other on the white-sand beaches and boulders, often only inches away from us. We saw only one or two actually take to the water (but wow, do they swim sleekly and swiftly when they do!), as our visit coincided with their 3-weeks'long moulting season, during which time they lose their waterproof coating, and have to stay on land until waterproof again once the moult is completed. During these three weeks, they therefore cannot eat anything, since they can't swim to catch fish, so they'll have spent several weeks beforehand gorging and fattening themselves up to cope with this food-free diet period, and we assumed that their relative lack of activity was in order to conserve energy during this time of fasting.

During the trip, we also saw loads and loads of Cape Fur seals, either basking on harbour walls or rocks by the beaches, or occasionally performing all kinds of wonderful under-water acrobatics, ballet sequences (which we could see very easily this time in these by now clear and relatively calm, turquoise waters), including at one place a kind of 'synchronised swimming' routine in circular formation worthy of an Olympic gold.





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At Cape Point itself (again, absolutely breathtakingly beautiful - a superlative which could preface just about every other place we've driven through or stopped at this weekend!) we saw hundreds and hundreds of cormorants, oyster-catchers and other unidentified sea-birds often swooping at great speed in circles so absolutely perfect that you could imagine they were attached to a string at a single point on the cliffs below them - oh, and yet more dassies too!

Our route back to Cape Town on the western coast of the peninsula took us through Kommetjie and the stunning Chapman's Peak Drive to Hout Bay, Llandudno, Bakoven, and back to our apartment in Sea Point, stopping off for a meal at a seafront restaurant in Camps Bay.