Our trip started in Cape Town, a quite big city in the south west of South Africa. After hearing to many bad stories about crime, it was a really strange feeling to arrive at the airport knowing you have to get cash in the local currency, but not to much to get robbed and as well enough to be able to pay all these hostels, food and so on. After a quick ride with a taxi I checked in and had a short look at the city. One could see an armed guard on nearly every corner in the city center and you shouldn‘t go outside at night, and not alone … and not in places away from the public. So in short: all the things I prefer over the normal touristic stuff. But to make it all clear, nothing bad happened during the whole 3 weeks.

On the next day I met the two girls and we did some sight seeing. The table mountain is the first place to go with a beautiful view over Cape Town and the surrounding area.
Nearby is the Cape of good hope, our next destination. I like the name, it was given because of the great relief of the sailors after reaching this point on their journey back from Asia. The waters east that point are less known and dangerous. Luckily we traveled by car and had only to face to left sided driving problem. From there we continued traveling along the coast and had some stop overs with cute penguins, waterfalls in botanical gardens and various kinds of nature and hostels. In Arniston we booked some rooms for two days and ended up in whole house for eight persons alone for the same price – not to bad.
Like in many other countries the driving distances are pretty huge, so we ended up driving three or four hours of gravel road to see some voltures and sand dunes, driving through a mountain pass or to visit a gigantic drip stone cave. All that with a hired city rental car not made to go off the streets. But it never let us down and did a really good job. In Wilderness we stayed in a hostel on top of a huge hill, meaning to drive up for 20 minutes gravel roads and a bumpy driveway beside some step cliffs. I really liked it!

In the next days I visited a bird sanctuary with beautiful and colorful birds mostly from area. And in the evening we visited a lit bit strange hippy hostel with many nice people and an overly motivated waiter. It doesn’t really matter where you are in the world, when there are backpackers around, it is mostly a really good atmosphere.

Next place on our list was Addo elephant national park, a quite big park with mainly elephants and some other herbivores. We decided not to take a guided tour and so drove by our self. As it turns out, it was a really good idea. We saw Greater kudu, zebras, warthogs and even a jackal. Highlight of the park was of course the sighting of a herd of elephants, mostly followed by a herd of cars. The elephants came quite close to the cars, at some point less then 2 meters away. Knowing that a male bull weight 5 to 6 tons, you should have enough respect and distance. But no car was pushed away and all had their nice adventure, we were able to get some nice pictures and saw a baby elephant chasing away some zebras.


After that day we went our own ways, on was going home, on along the east coast and I took a plane to another National Park to see the big 5, Africas biggest animals (Or better: most famous ones).