Lesotho, One Year Later

Last year, during our stay in the Drakensberg, we made a day trip to the Kingdom of Lesotho.  We had been without a camera for a few weeks due our canoe accident on the Wild Coast, but an Irishwoman named Sarah offered to email us all the pictures she took.  After a few months passed, I just figured she lost our address, but I woke up this morning to a number of emails with her Lesotho pictures attached.  Without further comment, here's Lesotho, one year later.

Kruger: 1,500 Impalas and a Leopard

As you might remember, we lost our camera in a canoeing accident.

Does this thing even work anymore?  Is there anyone out there besides my mom who still checks this website?  I've been waiting on Magge for a month a half to write this post about our time in Kruger National Park, but if it hasn't happened yet, then it probably won't happen.  In her defense, she has kept herself busy since we've been back, but she repeatedly said all year that she couldn't wait to go on a safari, and then afterwards she repeatedly said she'd write about it.  In the interest of finally wrapping up our thirteen month odyssey, I'm taking the reins, even though my memory is already a little foggy.

I Laugh in the Face of Bad Weather

We are now back in the US, but we have a few more posts on South Africa before we can wrap up the trip.  I may even badger Magge into contributing one last time.

One of our last stops in South Africa was in the Drakensberg region.  The country's highest mountain range, it has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site for both its natural value and its cultural value as home to San rock paintings.  I took in some of both, doing the Sentinel Peak hike and seeing some rock paintings in Lesotho.  Thanks to Marcus from Stuttgart, I have pictures of the hike, so that's what I'm posting today.  If Sarah from Ireland sends me pictures of our Lesotho day trip as promised, a post of those pictures will be forthcoming.

Two Wild Coasts

From the Bulungula Lodge website

Magge and I had never heard of South Africa's Wild Coast before coming to this country, but after reading about it we were eager to visit.  Located on the southeast in a section formerly known as the Transkei, this rural and poor area receives far fewer tourists and backpackers than the more famed Garden Route.  This lack of British and German 19 year olds was actually a drawing card.  After a little research, we decided to stay in two places: Bulungula Lodge in the small village of Nqileni, and the Coffee Shack in Coffee Bay.  They ended up providing very different experiences.

Like Oregon, but with Baboons

Note: Due to a boating mishap, our camera and memory card are no longer working, so we will no longer be able to post any of our pictures for the remainder of this trip.  Hopefully, we'll be able to guilt other travelers into sharing their pictures with us so we have some to post.  This picture was taken from Wikipedia.

Storms River mouth / courtesy of Wikipedia

We stopped in Tsisikamma National Park because it was a convenient resting point on the way to the Wild Coast, not because we had any real particular interest in seeing it.  It is located in South Africa's "Garden Route", a heavily promoted and popular stretch of coastline east of Cape Town.  Although the Garden Route is part of the standard backpacker circuit in South Africa, we decided to largely skip it because the guidebooks make it sound like merely a collection of upscale, vacation beach towns.  We figured we could do that scene back in the US in places where the water is actually warm.  Driving past Knysna and Plettenberg Bay, two of the most popular stops on the route, we felt confident that we made the right decision.  Sure, the environs were pretty, but the areas were overdeveloped.  However, as we neared Tsisikamma, we could see what drew visitors to the Garden Route in the first place.

Touring the Cape Peninsula

On the Cape of Good Hope with Cape Point behind us

Another post, more Cape scenery.  We took a tour of the Cape Peninsula yesterday, from Cape Town all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope, and we liked it even more than the Winelands tour.  The weather did not cooperate at first, obscuring the mountains but by lunch it had cleared up and was a gorgeous day.

Go Take a Hike

First of all, let me apologize for the errant "Zs" and "Ys" you will undoubtedly see in this post.  Apparently they are switched on the Croatian keyboard. Silly Croatians.

Anyway!  For the past several days, to console ourselves after my mom and Lee's departure, we have been in repose on the beautiful island of Hvar about an hour off the coast of Split.  With five dazs to kill between leaving my mom and Lee, and before we meet the Bells in Italy, we decided taking it easy and recouping a bit would be a good idea.  (Those of you who have met our fabulous mothers know that one needs a lot of energy reserves to handle such forces of nature.)

Admittedly, Hvar, currently the hottest tourist destination for the rich and trashy, is admittedly not our usual scene.  We have, however, been able to look past the huge yachts and skimpy (or nonexistent) clothing, and have found a jewel of a historic little town set amongst some of the most incredible natural scenery to be found in Croatia.

Krka National Park: How to Ruin a Beautiful Place

1.  Make it overly accessible.
2.  Build large pavilions where restaurants serve overpriced food.
3.  Invite people to swim in the water.

These are the steps Krka National Park has taken to transform itself into a water park.  When I read about the park and its waterfalls and looked at the pictures, they sounded and looked pristine.  Yes, the descriptions stated that people swam at the bottom of the lowest waterfall, but I envisioned something similar to what we saw in Australia: a handful of people but by no means crowded.  Excited by the pictures, Marcia (on her birthday), Lee, Magge and I changed our plans to accommodate the hour and half trip north of Split.  When we arrived, we were very surprised at what we saw.  The park was beyond crowded, with the waterfalls and its surroundings packed with people doing their best to make Krka National Park look like the neighborhood pee-filled pool.  We had planned on taking a swim, but I don't know if we could have found any spare room in the water.  Besides, the bathrooms there charged five Croatian kuna (almost a dollar) entry fee, so the aforementioned pool is probably cleaner.

Halong Bay

Magge and I have spent the last three days on a boat in Halong Bay, in northeastern Vietnam.  A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the bay is littered with nearly 2,000 limestone karst islets. Tantalized by pictures we've seen on the internet,  we've been looking forward to seeing it since we put Vietnam on the schedule.  Seeing it in person, we were not disappointed.  The scenery borders on the surreal; the bay and its jutting rocky islands look like the whimsical paintings you see in shops in Chinatown, but assumed were based on some mythical land instead of somewhere that could possibly exist naturally.

Wild Things

We had the opportunity to visit the Amazon Basin while we were in Peru, but passed because of the cost and logistics. While it was the right decision, we were both disappointed that we would miss out on spending a few days in the rainforest. It turns out that it wasn't our last chance to get into the jungle, as Borneo offers multiple areas with interesting flora and fauna. After quickly researching our options, we settled on a three day, two night stay at a jungle camp on the muddy Kinabatangan River. The camp warned us in advance that accommodations were spartan, but with the chance to see animals that are rarely or never seen in the wild anywhere else in the world, we were more than willing to accept that.

Jucing in Australia, Part III: Islands

The plan for our roadtrip was to make it to Cairns and back, but we did not make it that far.  After leaving Wallaman Falls, we called both Cairns and Airlie Beach to get their respective weather forecasts to decide from which city to take a boat trip, and Cairns' weather did not look appealing.  So we turned around, 250 kms short of the planned endpoint, and made our way back south.  Cairns itself is not supposed to be overly exciting or beautiful, but it is the most common jumping point to the Great Barrier Reef, which I was disappointed to miss.  However, the three day/two night boat trip from Airlie Beach visits fringe reefs around the Whitsunday Islands that are part of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (a UNESCO World Heritage Site), so I was somewhat appeased.

Jucing in Australia, Part II: Waterfalls and Wallabies

"I'm sorry about the weather," the travel agent said as soon as we walked into her office.  That wasn't what we wanted to hear.  Following the disappointment of the muddy Capricorn Coast, we pushed all the way up to Airlie Beach to get on a sailing trip around the Whitsunday Islands.  We were over halfway to Cairns, and still hadn't seen as much as we had wanted, and now the sailing trip wasn't looking likely either.  Maybe we could go straight up to Cairns, go diving up there and come back to Airlie on the way back to Brisbane?  "The weather's just as bad in Cairns," warned the travel agent.  Dejected, Lorena, Magge and I took some brochures and ate lunch on a windy beach as we strategized.  Different plans were discussed, including a crazy one that would have us backtrack nine hours, and in the end we decided to continue north to Paluma National Park, and decide in a few days whether to go up to Cairns or back to Airlie Beach.  The plan sounded fine, but all three of us were still discouraged and we had to remind ourselves that we were traveling around Australia while everyone else we know is working.

So Many Animals to Take Pictures Of!

Jeff loves talking about my obsession with taking pictures of animals. Australia is proving to be a wonderland of interesting animals to serve as photo subjects. This of course annoys Jeff greatly, which only adds to my pleasure of snapping picture after picture.

These birds are all over Sydney. Their population is clearly being monitored, as they all had tags around their legs. I still need to figure out what kind of bird they are though.

Another Universal Constant: kids love chasing birds

So many times I have wished I had a zoom lense! These bats were incredible. They are the biggest bats I have ever seen in my life and they were all over the place. They are also referred to as "flying foxes". Don't worry, they aren't carnivorous.

They also made terrible sounds. They damage the trees and so the government is taking measures to eradicate them in some areas.

Pretty scary spider, huh? Apparently Australia has more animals that can kill you than any other place in the world. I'm not sure if these are amongst the deadly ones. I would think not though since they're everywhere.

Kind of looks like they're floating in air

Again wishing I had a zoom lense (hint, hint, mom!). The colors of these birds were spectacular.

Photographs from New Zealand's Roadsides

Following the theme I started in the Life on the Road in New Zealand's South Island post, here are pictures taken from New Zealand's highways.  Most of them were taken off the shoulder or from lookout points, and the longest we walked to get any of these was fifteen minutes.

Drive from Fox Glacier to Lake Manapouri

Pining for the Fjords

Throughout our time in New Zealand, we had repeatedly heard and read that the Fiordland (part of the enormous Te Wahipounamu UNESCO World Heritage Site) is the prettiest area of the country.  Given how stunning the rest of New Zealand is, we've been excited about getting to the Fiordland, but we still wanted to temper our expectations to avoid being let down.

Hiking on Fox Glacier

We wanted to go on a guided hike on Grey Glacier in Torres del Paine in Chile, but the logistics of getting to the meeting point at 7am when we were a five hour hike away didn't allow us.  I promised Magge we would would do a glacier hike at some point, and the opportunity quickly presented itself in New Zealand.  Fox and Franz Josef, two of the many glaciers in this country, are among the most accessible in the world, with tours getting on the ice every day.  Only 20km from each other in Westland National Park, part of the Te Wahipounamu UNESCO World Heritage Site*, the glaciers are unique in that they descend into a rain forest only 300m above sea level and that they have actually been advancing for most of the last twenty-five years while most of the world's glaciers have been retreating.  I could go on and on about Fox and Franz Josef facts (the ice at the top of the glacier can move as much as 5m in one day, while the ice in the middle can move as much as 2m, about ten times more than the average glacier's speed), but you probably want to hear about the hike.

More on Hokitika Gorge

For the first time on this website, I'm posting a video.  We'll try to this more going forward if we get video of interesting things, but for this first time, I'm just trying to break the ice.  We took this video of the Hokitika Gorge because of the bird calls, which you can still hear, but don't sound as pretty as they did in person.

Life on the Road in New Zealand's South Island

We racked up more miles on buses in four months in South America than anyone should in a lifetime. Nevertheless, we were planning on tackling New Zealand in the same manner before being convinced by a number of travelers that getting our own car was the way to go. It’s the best decision we’ve made in this country. Just being freed from the Traveling Problem Child Corollary to Murphy’s Law validates the decision, let alone the added scheduling flexibility and ability to get to places the buses do not travel.  But our favorite feature is that we can pull over whenever we see something interesting.  New Zealand is incredibly beautiful, and much of that beauty is easily accessible from the road.  Aside from the picture from the ferry, every picture in this post was taken within an hour's walk from the road, and most were within much shorter walks than that.

Too Little Time on New Zealand's North Island

We arrived in New Zealand more unprepared than we have been upon arrival in any other country so far.  We had bought guide books for Ecuador, Peru and Chile back in August of last year and had spent hours looking at each before entering the respective country.  In French Polynesia, we knew where we would be spending each night before we left Santiago.  All we knew about our plans in New Zealand was where we were staying the first two nights in Auckland, and that we are flying out of Queenstown on April 10.

The first thing we did after checking in was buy a New Zealand guidebook so we could start planning our three weeks here (we originally had four weeks, but the earthquake in Santiago and subsequent plane flight changes cut nearly a whole week out).  Following the advice of a number of travelers we met in South America, we decided to spend only a week on the North Island and the remaining time on the South Island.  I left Magge to find us a rental car while I did our taxes, which will be much easier next year when neither of us has income to declare.  By the end of the day, we had our car and picked out and the two spots we'd see on the North Island: Rotorua and Waitomo.

The Honeymoon Portion of the Honeymoon

Ever since Jeff and I first decided we would be doing our trip, people seemed to be confused that a year of backpacking was going to be our honeymoon. I was amazed at how many people asked me if we would be going on a separate honeymoon prior to our departure. Jeff and my mother keep insisting money does not grow on trees (I'm still not entirely sure I believe them), so a separate honeymoon before the honeymoon was not really a financial possibility. Unfortunately, in order to make our trip from Easter Island to New Zealand with our Around the World Ticket, we had to stop in Tahiti (life is so unfair). In an attempt to appease me for not having a traditional honeymoon, Jeff said Tahiti could be our honeymoon portion of the trip. Not overly disgruntled by the prospect of spending a year backpacking around the world to begin with, I happily accepted the offer.