After eating our way through Cape Town, we spent the second week of our trip on two terrific adventures into the bush: first we traveled south on the Cape Peninsula to Simon's Town, then we headed east to De Hoop Nature Reserve, which is about a 4-hour drive from Cape Town.
In reality, the peninsula doesn't really count as the bush, although we did manage to get off the beaten track enough to feel like we were out of the city.
De Hoop was absolutely in the bush, complete with sporadic electricity, gravel roads for which our otherwise lovely Honda "Jazz" rental car was not designed, stunningly bright stars at night, and a family of bats living in our cabin.
As a side note, we learned two important things about driving in South Africa. One is that stoplights are called "robots". As in, you'll be driving down an otherwise perfectly normal road, and then you see a sign that says "Robot, 400 meters ahead".
Danger, Will Robinson!
The second (don't read this part, Mom) is that South Africans believe in an unofficial third lane.
Sure, there are lane markings to tell you when to pass and when not to pass.
But in reality, if you're driving behind someone and they're going slower than you are — or even if they think that you might *want* to go faster (or they understand telepathically that your loving boyfriend / navigator thinks you should stop lingering behind this slow person and pass them already) — they'll go ahead and move over so that they're driving half in the shoulder and half in the left lane.
The idea is that you can then pass them by ignoring any pesky markings and driving along the center line. Should you happen to encounter someone coming in the opposite direction, they'll scoot over a little bit so they're driving on the outer edge of the right lane.
Ta-da! The unofficial third lane.
Needless to say, this violates every principle of driving that I have ever learned. But I realized (eventually) that the driving was actually a lot easier and less stressful once I just accepted the third lane instead of trying to resist.
As the robots would tell us, resistance is futile.
Most people who go into the bush to see wild animals have their sights set (literally and/or figuratively) on the "Big Five": the lion, the African elephant, the Cape buffalo, the leopard, and the rhinoceros:
As I've just now learned through the power of the Internet, this list comes from old-school big game hunters, who consider these to be the most difficult animals to hunt on foot.
John and I were also in pursuit of wild animals, though we reluctantly left our safari vests, rifles, gin and tonics, and Land Rover at home.
Although it would be great to see the Big Five some day, I present to you instead our own wildlife list: South Africa's Overlooked Nine.
(As a side note in the interest of due credit, most of the photos here are John's, with the exception of some of the baboon, penguin, and John photos. He is also the featured guest artist for the road owl drawing below.)
1. Baboons
Unfortunately, it seems like baboons are seen as more of a pest in South Africa than a national treasure. Being clever and opposably thumbed, they've figured out that humans (and their houses and trash cans and cars) are an excellent source of food.
Potato chips in particular seem to be as irresistible to baboons as they are to humans.
But we found an organization near Simon's Town that tries to help baboons and humans coexist peacefully. As part of that work, they offer guided baboon walks where one can go into the hills with a local guide and hang out with the baboons for an hour or two.
Our baboon walk was pretty much like being in the middle of a David Attenborough nature show.
After hiking up to the rocks where the 20 or so baboons were hanging out, we were within a few feet of them grooming each other, calling, eating, digging for roots, fighting, nursing, masturbating, and playing with rocks.
(Not all at the same time, thankfully.)
The baboons didn't seem to care very much whether we were there or not, although one of the alpha males did look like he was going to eat John until our guide ran him off.
And one of the babies thought that John's hiking stick seemed like it would be a fun toy.
Aside from that, we just watched them and took about 400 photos and enjoyed seeing a group of primates in their natural environment.
2. Limpets
Just for the record? Limpets are awesome.
They look suspiciously like a shell stuck to a rock, but in reality, they move all over the place, leaving a cute little trail where they've eaten the algae off the rock with their cute little radula.
The best part about limpets (which maybe is not that great for the limpet) is that if you wiggle them veeeeery gently, you can feel how they move a little at first but then clamp down on the rock. Hard.
When we were at Boulders Beach in Simon's Town, we found a limpet in the process of laying its eggs in a spiral pattern.
We noticed it because the egg coil looks a lot like the egg coil of the nudibranch, one of our other favorite mollusks.
This sort of egg-laying operation may explain why there are about 300 billion limpets in the tide pools of South Africa.
So there we were, minding our own business, driving along the winding road to the point at the end of the Cape Peninsula, when we spotted a family of ostriches with their crazy big eyes and dinosaur feet, snacking away at the grass between the road and the beach.
This was our first ostrich encounter but by no means our last; there are a lot of ostrich farms in the Western Cape, but there are also a lot of wild ostriches running around.
Fortunately for us, they're one of the easiest animals to see from the road or the trail, since it's hard to miss a giant black blob that looks like it's suspended in space.
Sometimes, the ostriches were up close and personal. We were eating lunch at a camp site in the middle of De Hoop when we had a visitor.
We didn't seem to be a worthy distraction from her single-minded (would it be wrong to say "bird-brained"?) pursuit of tender shoots of vegetation.
This is one of those photos that turned out to be inadvertently artistic, and that somehow captures the weirdness of being visited during one's picnic by an ostrich.
These little lizards are hard to spot at first, but once you see one, all of a sudden they're everywhere.
The only thing I like more than John's photo of this agama is my photo of John (who is deathly afraid of heights) inching his way toward the edge of the cliff in order to take the photo.
5. Bat stars
Maybe it goes without saying that I love poking around in tide pools.
It's not quite as fun as scuba diving, but it does have a few advantages, such as being able to look for critters indefinitely without having to worry about running out of air.
One of the most exciting things we found in the tide pools on the Cape Peninsula were tiny little bat stars.
(For purposes of taxonomical purity, these are not technically bat stars but Parvulastra exigua, but to us, they looked like miniature bat stars.)
Some people (I'm thinking here of my sister and my friend Helen) find it weird and vaguely disturbing to think that something without a face is so cute.
But I really don't see how anyone can possibly resist the cuteness of the bat star.
Especially when it's surrounded by a whole bunch of super-cute snails.
6. African Jackass Penguins
Bat stars are wonderful, but the top attraction for most people at Boulders Beach in Simon's Town is the giant colony of penguins.
It was extraordinarily fun to watch the penguins waddling around, hopping across the gaps in the rocks, finding good places to bask in the sun, interacting with their mates, and getting in and out of the water.
It was equally fun to watch the people who were walking around, scrambling over the rocks, and taking photos of the penguins.
Down at the beach, it's possible to get in the frigid water and paddle around with the penguins. And with the scary European men who think that Speedos are appropriate penguin-viewing gear.
That weirdness aside, it was pretty amazing to wander around on the beach and find penguins splashing around in the water and hiding in every little nook and cranny.
The penguins didn't seem like they cared too much about all of the people milling around, and there was at least one penguin who looked like he was ready to get on the tour bus:
7. Garden Spiders
Seeing these beautiful, giant spiders in the late-afternoon sun was an exciting bonus on the way back from our baboon hike.
Our guide seemed mildly amused when we suggested that he could branch out and lead spider walks if he ever got tired of baboons.
8. Cape Spurfowl (Veldchooks)
These football-shaped birds are to South Africa as pigeons are to New York City: they're everywhere, and they seem to think that people exist for the sole purpose of bearing food.
Technically, they're spurfowl, but we started calling them "veldchooks", which is a combination of veld (which is literally Afrikaans / Dutch for field, but also refers to the grasslands and scrublands where said bird can be found) and chook (which is Australian for chicken).
Spurfowl is a fine name and probably refers to some important scientific principle about the bird, but doesn't really convey how cute and curious they are.
"Hi! I'm a veldchook! Who are you? Where did you come from? What do you have in your car? What sort of delicious things do you have to eat? Where are you going now? Hey, wait up! We're coming with you!"
9. Road owls
Last but absolutely not least: the road owl.
On our last night at De Hoop, we skipped the extraordinarily British dinner at the bush camp (and I don't mean "extraordinarily British" in a good way) and ate dinner at the restaurant in the Nature Reserve.
This was something of a moral victory for us and for the Reserve, which had been without power for two full days and had been trying to feed its guests with a paltry assortment of salads and preserved meats.
Anyone care for some springbok carpaccio with a slice of melon and a celery stick?
After a lovely dinner, we left the park around 10. It was absolutely pitch black: no moon, no stars, no artifical lighting of any kind.
We were in the Jazz, creeping along the gravel road back to the park entrance, when I saw something unusual at the edge of the road.It was shaped a little bit like a big, fat rodent standing on its hind legs, but the closer we got, the less it seemed like an animal and the more it seemed like a giant, vertical rock.
Since I am sometimes guilty of imagining animals out of clumps of dirt, I said something like "What is that?" And then, "Oh, I guess it's a rock."
But then, as we crawled past, John said "No, it's an owl!" just before it flew away.
Luckily for us, there was another owl just down the road. Sitting in the middle of the gravel path, minding his own business, swiveling his head around and around as owls tend to do.
I love owls almost as much as I love tide pools, so this was very, very exciting.
We're not really sure why the owls were sitting in the road.
One theory is that the rocks get warm during the heat of the day. Another theory is that the owls can more easily see little round rodents when they scurry from one side of the road to the other.
Or maybe sitting in the road is just what owls like to do.
Honorable Mention
The Overlooked Twelve just doesn't have the same ring as the Overlooked Nine, but I wanted to point out three more categories of South African animals that are worth an honorable mention:
The hermit crab
If I had an animal totem, it would definitely be the hermit crab. They're just so adorable and grumpy.
Live ungulates
We did see a few ungulates out in the fynbos, including the bontebok (top) and the eland (bottom).
Notice the typical ungulate pose, which communicates a somewhat dimwitted curiosity about whether we're about to kill them:
Dead ungulates
Despite my general disdain for vehicular safari tours, we gained a new appreciation this past week for how difficult it is to find large grazing animals while walking around on human legs.
They cover so much more distance than we do, and it's hard to see them when you're standing on the ground instead of sitting high up in a 4x4.
In De Hoop, we had a funny series of hikes while in pursuit of the animals of the park, which include but are not limited to zebras, elands, bonteboks, mongoose, rock hyrax, cape otters and the occasional leopard.
On the first hike, we saw an amazing array of animal droppings but no actual animals. As in, wow, John, look! There is yet another kind of animal feces!
On the second hike, we saw an amazing array of dead animals but no live ones. As in, wow, John, look! There is yet another dead ungulate!
Along with the long shadows cast by the late afternoon sun, the skeletons gave our hike a real 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death' kind of feel to it.
Dead or not, they were beautiful and interesting in their own way.
