South Africa 2010

Today’s program was pretty much filled and we started out pretty early with a wonderful breakfast at the Tsisikama Storm River Lodge. It was the owners birthday, which made us feel a bit guilty for making him wake up so early to feed us. We had a booking at the Tsitsikamma Falls adventure park at 8 for something called “Waterfall Zipline Tours”. We had a slight idea what this was, so we drive there with high hopes of being entertained to the fullest. Upon arrival we got suited up for adventure, and with our trusty cameras in hand, we started our zipline tour.

As you might see from the pictures, this mainly consists of ziplines (…) from where you hang and slide from base to base. Some of the lines were steep, other just long, but all equally fun. The whole tour took about an hour, with a small break in the middle for a small photo-session. When we reached the finish point, we all wanted to go one more time. But we still had a tight schedule, so we quickly disrobed our gear, and jumped into the car for the next stop. Somewhat spontaneous, we ended up at the Tsisikamma Khoisan Village besides Bloukrans Bridge. The spot is currently holding the Guinness World Record of Longest Bungee Jump (216m) .

Damnit. We patiently stood in line to pay for willingly jumping off a bridge. We bought our our tickets, got geared up and was ready for action. Too bad that we had one group before us, and almost a whole group before us in line in our own group. We had to wait at a lookout point, which even provided live close-up video of the group currently situated under the bridge
. This did not help

. Looking at these people being frightened out of their mind made us reconsider the whole thing. Half an hour later we were on our way to the bridge. We got a short security speech, and proceeded to the middle of the bridge in a excessively scary see-trough steel mesh passage. Not helping. Arriving at the jump site, we got more security info before they started playing loud music and encouraged us to dance. The rest of our group was American students, with a fair amount of cheerleaders, so they didn’t have a problem with keeping the mood up. One after one they disappeared into the nothingness. Some of us had second thoughts, some had their fifteenth thoughts. The rest is best viewed in video-form, so please watch the youtube-videos in the previous post,

We used quite a while at the bridge, but had to keep on moving towards the west. On our way we stopped at a beautiful place called Nature’s Valley, which had great beaches. Still in a shortage of time, we didn’t even go into the water, but instead headed for Plettenberg Bay. This was not our wanted end point for the day, but we got recommended to at least check it out due to nice scenery.

We found a restaurant called “The lookout”, which provided exactly this. Dinner was consumed, and pictures were taken. The sun was already setting, so we ran back to the car again and headed towards Knysna, where we planned on staying the night. This was easier said than done. Everyone had said that Knysna was a beautiful place we could not pass on seeing. First of all, it was dark. Secondly, it didn’t seem nice at all. We had issues finding a hotel, and kept driving back and forth looking for something of a somewhat standard. Finally, a building lit up in blue shined to us, and gave us some rooms for the night. The name of the place was the Knysna Terrace Hotel, which had multiple dogs, friendly owners, and something as great as a honesty-bar. Take what you want and tell the staff when you check out. Love the concept.