From Africa to Asia heading East. This Saturday brings closure. :)

Better late than never.. the first batch of our pictures from our FIRST arrival in Cape Town are up.. this covers everything before we left for the overland.

Hooray! We have arrived back in Cape Town and are spending many an hour in our favorite internet cafe, "Geek Internet" working on photos and forward planning for the next "leg" of our journey, among other body parts.

Breaching, blowing, paddling. The paddling was us, but the rest of the noise was from the approximately 80 whales in the Walker Bay Sanctuary.

So we've arrived in Port Elizabeth. As it turns out, internet access can be incredibly hard to come by in some of the places we've been. But here's a few highlights...

The overland journey was a fantastic trip - we'll be posting more about it later, but now we have arrived in Durban, on the south-east coast of South Africa on the Indian Ocean. We are set to take on the country's third largest city. So far it seems much less daunting than Cape Town or Johannesburg.

We're online again, and we're hoping to start posting a little more often, and get our many pictures online (yes, we filled an entire 256M card, and have started filling the 2nd..) so stay tuned!

Lesotho (pronounced "Le-sooto") is another country completely enveloped by S. Africa. It is the highest country in the world... or at least its low-point is the highest low-point of any in the world.

Riaan, our guide, shook our tents to wake us at 5:30am. Ouch. We packed up our tents and our bags before a breakfast of cereal and tea, and said goodbye to the many indoor luxuries of the Gekko's Backpackers. Our 500 km drive north begins with rocky, rugged landscape and gives way to very flat and dry scrubland.

Today we started our overland tour. After weeks of travelling on our own, we've been looking forward to a slightly more low-key form of travel. We'll be seeing many of the sights of South Africa and Namibia, but we won't have to worry about transportation or accomodation.

(This is a pretty long entry because it includes some introductory stuff about how the overland is going to work, etc)

We've taken a break from the rat race in Cape Town to visit South Africa's wine country. We had heard that there was a wine region here, but we learned on our tour that it is the 9th largest in the world. Not bad, considering!

Our "overland" trip with Nomad Tours or Which Way Adventures (depending on how your look for them) begins on Wednesday the 1st and continues for 20 days before leaving us in Victoria Falls. We then plan to either rent a car or assess the public transit options back to Cape Town.

Tour Itinerary
A map and different details
Even more details on OverlandAfrica.com

Yesterday, we took a guided trip around the Western Cape with the Baz Bus people. It was really fun and relaxing to be spoon-fed some of the amazing sites for a day. It was also pretty great to get out of the city. We visited the native African Penguins, rode bikes down through the national park toward the tip of the point, hiked along the SW edge of this continent from Cape Point to the (official) Cape of Good Hope, and enjoyed a picnic lunch.

Well, we've been here for just over a day now, and Cape Town is quite a place. As you may have guessed, from Heather's message, its huge! 4.3 million people makes it by far the biggest city we've seen, not counting London, which was really just a short stopover.

One interesting fact. Since moving from summer to winter overnight, our sunset has gotten about 2 hours earlier. We have arrived to a clear blue winter in South Africa. I'll admit to being completely overwhelmed by the size of the city compared to the small cobble-stoned, walkable old towns we'd grown accustomed to.

The last few days I've been exchanging e-mail with a travel agent in Cape Town. She's been incredibly helpful, but I think she thinks we're on a much larger budget than we are. We found this great overland trip from Cape Town to Victoria Falls, for 3 weeks, for about $1000 per person. She suggested a 6 night canoe trip for $1800. Yikes.