According to my father, we will be home in 168 hours....

Well folks - it is coming up super soon! But we still have a few days of play left in this country before we turn our focus to coming home. We are back in South Africa and I am actually writing from a famous surf town - Jeffery's Bay (it was featured in the movie The Endless Summer). The surf conditions are not great for sad Jay, but we will try again tomorrow. So, we are heading north to Addo Elephant National Park for the day and night.
As for the remainder of our trip up north, it was GREAT. We had two amazing days in Kruger National Park....sadly I don't have my best photos up yet from that part of the trip....so these OK pics will have to do for now. Our favorite sighting?? Watching three hyenas gorge on a fresh kill at night. It was a bone-crunching and munching experience. The birds of the park were incredible - lots of eagles, rollers, hornbills, owls, vultures, weavers, spoonbills, etc. They were a real highlight for both of us. We also saw three male lions guarding a giant carcass of a black rhino (although no one knows if they killed it, but they were certainly watching over it when three hungry ground hornbills approached). What else? Elephants with their tiny tiny calves all around our overland truck. Giraffes, buffalo, crocs, graceful antelope of many species... the list goes on and on.
There is so much more to tell, but damn, the internet is expensive here and we have more elephants to see! So, I will have to save some of those stories for face-to-face meetings with friends and family. We can't wait.

Buffalo herd

Hippos

Tawny eagle

My favorite large mammal in Africa (I feel like a giraffe sometimes)

Maputo

Hi there! We are in the capital of Mozambique (Maputo) and once again, without a ton of time on the internet. Here are a few photos of our past few days. We have spent a LOT of time in the water or on the water. We went on an overnight dhow trip (a local sailboat), I got stung by a scorpion (I don't recommend this experience to anyone), we went diving twice, and we have spent much time on the beach in the warm Indian Ocean sun. We arrived into Maputo tonight and had only a few hours to explore what seemed to be a very vibrant city. And tomorrow we head to South Africa and Kruger National Park. Mozambique has been GREAT and we can't wait to tell more stories when time permits. For now, I'm off to dinner. Can you believe we will be home in 13 days? Whoa.

Jay could be an Olympian!

Traditional dhow

Devil rays

Swaziland and Mozambique

We have little time on the net but we are LOVING the sights of the trip thus far. Swaziland delievered at Hlane Royal National Park with tons of rhinos and some great views of lions, elephants, warthogs, and incredible birds. A dancing performance that night sealed the deal - we are in Africa. Awesome. Now we are in Mozambique, in a town called Tofo, and enjoying the tropics and the BIG animals. See below....

White rhinos

Male lion with his damn cute cubs

Women putting on quite the performance for us in Swaziland - great drumming in the background!

Not so great image of a manta ray

WHALE SHARK!!!

In Jo-burg

Hello! We made it to Jo-burg (Johannesburg) this morning and are settling into the nice backpacker place we found. Tomorrow we pick up the overland trip and head off for 2 weeks of camping around South Africa, Swaziland, and Mozambique. We are a little nervous about doing a tour (this will be our first in the whole trip) but it will afford us the chance off seeing A LOT more than we could if we were doing it on our own. Because we are going to be camping, we have no clue what kind of internet access we will have - so don't expect any updates over the next two weeks.
Maybe we will get lucky though and be able to put some pics up as we move along on the trip.
After this trip we will be home in a week! Yikes, exciting, wow, scary, can't wait, etc... =)

Heading to Mozambique!

Just a few more pics for people to look at (we uploaded another round to picasa if you are dying for more shark pics). We went diving yesterday and I froze my bum off. I believe it was the first time I was diving in cold water without a drysuit in EIGHT years. I didn't last very long, but we still saw some cool stuff like a shy shark, a crab that lives in a tunicate, beautiful kelp, an octopus, and loads of cool anemones and nudibranchs. Sadly, the LCD screen on Jay's camera (the one we take diving) stopped working in Nepal. So we thought we had it in macro mode, but we didn't and most of our shots are out of focus. But, at least it still takes photos!

There are some baboons that hang out along the Cape of Good Hope and they try to scare you into giving them food. I took this shot from Nickie's car.

Beautiful kelp forests

Jay and I leave Cape Town on Sunday and fly up to Jo-burg and pick-up our overland tour to Mozambique on Monday. Our first stop will be Swaziland and then Mozambique for some warmer water and diving. We will be back in Cape Town for the last week of October and then we fly home!

Meet the real jaws

Holy moly. I am hoping we have time to write more tonight onto this blog. But for now let me just tempt you to come back with some photos of our GREAT WHITE SHARK cage snorkel. WOW. I couldn't help but add in one shot of a great bird we saw too - a black-shouldered kite.
Check again in a few hours or a few days - photos will be posted to picasa by then and we will have added some stories to this blog. For now - dinner calls. I have a GREAT life.

Correction Julie, WE have a great life.

These animals are incredible and so beautiful. What a privilege to see them in the wild. Before we went to sleep last night we decided that both of us could be potentially terrified of seeing these sharks up close and personal considering that we spend a lot of time in the water. But today was totally awesome and anything but scary. The first shark arrived just minutes after the first bucket of chum was tossed into the water. We were very close to shore, in about 10m of water, off the town of Gansbaai, which is about 100km or so east of Cape Town. Over the course of the day we saw about 10-15 different individuals ranging from 2.5 to 3.5 meters in length. They were all females and probably all immature...adults are typically 4 to 6 meters and can exceed 7 meters. The sharks we saw were all huge to us (their girth was especially impressive) so we can only imagine how massive a big adult must look. Apparently they used to see many sharks over 4 meters in this area, but in the past ten years or so it has been mostly smaller sharks. This likely reflects the continuing worldwide overfishing of sharks, either for their fins or their jaws and little else. It must end or else many shark species will be gone within our lifetimes.

Congratulations to Jenni and Richard!

Congratulations to my dear friend Jenni and her almost new hubby, Richard! They are getting married this Saturday! Here they are at Mammoth Caves National Park, where we met up after Christmas ummmm.... 2 years ago now? Wow!

And here are a few shots of stuff we have been doing the past few days. We went to the botanical gardens in Cape Town and saw some wonderful native wildflowers and birds. Another day involved a lot of wine and beer tasting. We did not enjoy ourselves at all that day.

Protea and Table Mountain

Sunbird (female) and protea

Jay and Nickie sample some beer along the wine trail

Julie and Nickie do not have fun together.