Port Elizabeth and Elephants and Bettles

The city of Port Elizabeth marks the end of the Garden Route from Cape Town, or obviously for us the start of the Garden Route.

It's actually quite a big town, but easy enough to see most of the things on offer in a few days. We stayed for 3 nights at the Lungile Backpackers, getting a lovely ensuite room. It was easy walking distance to most of the attractions, including the beach, the oceanarium (very old and quite run down, but good dolphin and penguin shows), the Boardwalk entertainment complex (all very new and swish and shiny and boring really, but at least I finally got to try bunny-chow) and a number of great restaurants (the best was the Indian just at the end of the road).

We strolled around the city centre one day, visiting a lovingly restored Victorian house (although the curator wasn't currently too fond of Irish people, as the locals were having a lot of trouble with an Irish property developer who wanted to destroy a number of historic buildings in the town, after apparently illegally gaining ownership of them in the first place - basically just another greedy bugger by the sounds of it).

Port Elizabeth is also the perfect jumping off point for visiting the Addo Elephant Game Reserve, famous for having over 400 elephants. Yet again this was a fantastic safari, although it actually took a good bit of driving around before we spotted our first pachyderms. Once we did find them of course, we spent the rest of the end encountering them all over the place. The park certainly lived up to its reputation while we were there, and we got extremely close and personal with a few groups throughout the day.

At one point poor Sarah was getting very nervous as we were literally surrounded by a family of huge elephants. I, however, thought it was brilliant to be so close to these peaceful, graceful, almost soundless animals. It was funny too, because in the car immediately in front of us I could hear exactly the same conversation going on between that couple, i.e. the woman freaking out and the man constantly trying to claim her down and reassuring her that everything was OK. Naturally everything was perfectly OK and we must have spent close to an hour just watching these majestic wonders casually eating and interacting and crossing the road right in front of us - brilliant.

Addo is also well known for its prolific dung bettles that collect the elephant dung in perfect spheres to lay their eggs in it. At first I thought the road signs informing us that dung bettles have right of way was just a kinda joke meant to mean that ALL wildlife naturally has right of way. But it soon became clear that the signs were being far more literal, as there were millions of the wee beasties everywhere. We came across only a few though that were actually pushing along balls of dung, but it was utterly fascinating to me to watch them right up close. The balls are so huge, relative to the size of the bettle, that they really have to struggle to push them along.

So that was basically Port Elizabeth, and from there it was on to the famous surfing spot of Jefferys Bay (or J-Bay if your, like, cool and stuff).