2009-09-20 – A whale of a time

NB: This entry will be eventually edited to add photos, links, etc.

Mmmm... it's amazing what 10 hours of sleep does for you! Sure, we felt like dorks when we went to bed at 10 pm on a Saturday night, but it really helped to get a good night's sleep after the complete lack of it on the plane. An excellent breakfast of eggs, bacon, and sausage also helped a lot :-D

Today's agenda included a boat trip to see whales. We were supposed to go out at 10 am, but the tide hadn't come in yet, so they couldn't get the boat out. So the trip was delayed until 1 pm. No problem; we drove out to Cape Agulhas National Park, where we took photos at the meeting point of the two oceans (Atlantic and Indian, duh) and looked for a geocache. The geocache box had been flooded with water, which was a shame, as we couldn't leave our gift (a mini plush puffin) in that box. Hmmf. We didn't really stay very long in the area as we had been there before, so we stopped at an art gallery/guest house for a cup of coffee, and then drove back to the harbor area to get some lunch. We went to a pub called Nostra, where we ate deep fried hake with chips. It was OK; not the greatest thing in the world, but not horrible either...

After lunch, we drove to another geocache site, but the cache was hidden in a sort of inconvenient location, so we had to give that up, considering we had to get back to catch the boat for the whale watching...

The whale watching was quite nice. We saw a lot of mothers with calves, and they were all rather lazy (it's Sunday, of course). You could see that they were very curious about the boat and us, but unfortunately there was too much wind, and the boat kept drifting away from the whales. Otherwise, as we were told, they would have been more active with regard to swimming around the boat and peeking up to take a look at us. Also, when there are calves, the mothers are a little bit more protective, and are not too thrilled about the darn kids wandering off to play with the silly tourists. You never know what the darn kids can catch from silly tourists :-) There was one mother-calf pair that did come very, very close to the boat though, in an om nom nom kind of way. The calf swam under the boat, and we were wondering if it had planned to surface directly under the boat, to toss it into the air... “wheeeee, this is fun!”

Our guide told us that the whales were particularly passive today, that they were jumping quite a bit yesterday. We did see one whale jumping, from a distance. But other than that... lazy, lazy whales.

After whale watching, we drove back to the backpackers to park the car, and then we walked back into “town” (hah, if you can call it that) in order to have a beer. We found a little local dive that served Windhoek (yay!) and had a bottle each. We decided to go back to our room to take a little nap before dinner, and so that Mr. Penguin could sleep off the beer so that we could drive to the place where we were going to have dinner. Yep, we had to go out to dinner because we forgot to bring our harpoons along with us on the whale watching trip (ha ha ha) ...

We went to a place called Angelo's Trattoria, which is located right before Cape Agulhas National Park; it was recommended to us by Steffi. Angelo's is very cozy and rustic, but also quite dark, even with all the candles. They have a huge wood-burning oven for cooking pizzas. But we didn't have pizza. We had steak with seafood – a big 350 gram sirloin prepared medium rare, served with prawns, mussels, and calamari, as well as fries, salad, and a garlic dressing. It was delicious, but also way too much, even for the Ring of Fat (RoF)...

For those of you who are new to the term, Ring of Fat, or simply RoF, is the very creature that controls each and every one of us. RoF is our guts. Our spare tires. Our love handles. Our extra baggage. You know. You know very well, don't you? RoF wants food. It always wants food. But sometimes, RoF meets its match. As it did tonight...

Now we're back at the bar at the backpackers, drinking our Raka Biography Shiraz. “Bring your own” isn't really allowed here as the backpackers has its own bar, although you can pay a corkage fee (10 rand) if you want to drink your own wine at the bar...

Anyway, the wine: Raka Biography Shiraz 2003
color: too dark to see here
nose: red meat, licorice, Norwegian blueberries
palate: powerful but smooth, flavor of spices (cloves and anise), Norwegian blueberries, and other dark berries, as well as sour cherries. Discreet tannins. This would be an excellent match to a good, well-marbled steak, but it's also fantastic on its own.
Grade: :-D

Oh, and in case you didn't know, Ms. Penguin is a bird fanatic. So she is giving the bird count so far: African penguins, Cape cormorants, white-chested cormorants, two different species of seagulls, hadeda ibises, at least two different types of sunbirds, Cape turtle doves, red-eyed doves, Cape robins, Cape sparrows, wagtails, blacksmith lapwings, Guinea fowl, francolins, paradise flycatchers, Cape starlings, European starlings, weaver birds, some kind of little yellow pip-pip (not sure what kind), at least two different kinds of birds of prey, a bird with white around its eye (some kind of bulbul?), some kind of thrush, some blue cranes, etc...

While we were drinking our wine, we were offered a taste of a fish called a white musselcracker; one of the locals caught it and (I think) they were serving it for dinner at the backpackers. It is not fished commercially. We found it quite nice; the meat was very firm and flavorful...