Exploring the Garden route #7

We said our farewells in East London and set off with our backpacks west along the coast towards Cape Town . Due to the long drive we decided to take our time, taking in the beautiful landscape and stopping in Knysna along the garden route and spending a few days there to see the sights. For those of you who have been to this part of South Africa , I’m sure you would agree it is one of the most stunning places, with the contrast between the dense green forests and the rugged coast line. Knysna is set right on the coast next to a lagoon that reaches out to the Indian Ocean , so wherever you are in Knysna you are sure to having an amazing view. If you love wildlife then Kynsna and Plettenberg Bay are the places to visit. We visited Monkey Land which is home to monkeys from lemur to vervet and gibbons who roam freely in the forested area. A guide took us around the forest, and he taught us about the lives of the monkeys whilst they came up very close to us to explore and suss out what we were. The vervet monkeys are the extremely cheeky and like to take sunglasses and camera’s from you so we were constantly watching our backs. We were very privileged to see a family of lemur’s interacting with their two new 5 day old babies. The lemur group had recently adopted a black lemur called ‘Brad’ whose partner ‘Angelina’ had recently died.

Opposite MonkeyLand was ‘Birds of Eden’, a free flight netted area in the forest, home to over 1500 birds. We freely wondered in the area looking at the birds and they were also very interested in us – I was soon advised to take off my earings because they had a particular fancy to them. Some of the birds liked to come up and sit on your shoulder pecking any shiny object they saw from buttons to glasses!

After a fun 2 days in Knysa interacting with the wildlife we embarked on the final leg of our journey to Cape Town .