Ali Takes World's Highest Bungee Jump and We All Zip Through the Tsitsikamma Forest on the Garden Route

Lunch at Tsala above the Tsitsikamma Forest with Jon & Roz Mason

On Sunday the 24th, we drove the beautiful Garden Route through Mossel Bay, George, Wilderness and Knysna along the Indian Ocean coast to Plettenberg Bay where we spent two nights with Rosalind and John Mason, Bob's former counselor in the mission presidency. We enjoyed the Knysna Waterfront and Monkeyland and met the Masons for lunch at Tsala, a unique restaurant where we ate outdoors in the top of the Tsitsikamma Forest canopy.

  

Black & White Lemurs at Monkeyland



Ringtailed lemur at Monkeyland

Ali harnessed up and ready to face her fears on the
world's highest bungee jump pff the Bloukrans Bridge

On Tuesday we had breakfast with the Masons outdoors at the incredible Earth Café and embarked from there on a couple of very daring adventures on our way to Port Elizabeth - First, we stopped and watched bungee jumpers jump off the Bloukrans Bridge, the highest bungee jump in the world, and Ali said, "I have to do that!" and she did! The jump is over 200 meters, close to 680 feet straight down! She has a video DVD to show that she did it.

Then all three of us harnessed up at Stormsriver and took a Treetop Tour that consisted of ten different ziplines across the tops of 700-1000 year old trees throughout the Tsitsikamma Forest. We spent the night at the Courtyard Port Elizabeth, right on the Indian Ocean, after eating dinner at Old Austria.

Ready to embark upon the first of ten zip lines through the Tsitsikamma Forest

Then Wednesday was safari day, and we started in the morning with a 2-hour drive to a guided 4-hour safari at Pumba Game Reserve near Grahmstown, just the three of us and our ranger/guide Quinton in an open Range Rover safari vehicle. We saw several elephants, two white rhinos, a family of giraffes, herds of Nyala, kudu, red heartebeests and other antelope, zebras, wildebeests, warthogs, ostriches, and other fascinating animals and birds. The weather was perfect and the animals were out and active, making it a perfect safari. We had a very nice lunch at the lodge near the end of the safari, where we looked out upon zebras and warthogs at a waterhole below us.

Our safari vehicle at Pumba Private Game Reserve on the Eastern Cape

Our guide Quinton tells us about a warthog skull found near the road

Unfortunately, our time was quite limited at the Addo Elephant National Park in the afternoon because our brand new BMW rental car had a flat tire and didn't come with a spare! By the time Hertz was able to bring us a new wheel to swap out, all the way from Port Elizabeth, we had lost a couple of valuable hours of daylight, and the sun goes down at 5:30 here in late May. But we saw a herd of cape buffalo, one of the "Big 5" and several kudu at Addo and enjoyed a very beautiful sunset there.  We ended the day at the Port Elizabeth Boardwalk and one last night at the Courtyard Hotel. On Thursday we flew back to Johannesburg.