Smile you sonofabitch!

Leaving the Aquila Game Reserve, we drove down to the Garden Route, a series of very picturesque towns along the coast between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth.  First stop was Mossel Bay, where we got to check off one of our "bucket list" activities - cage diving with the great white sharks.  Melanie was the only woman on the boat with the cojones to get in the cage.  Melanie's face is less than 12 inches from Jaws:

Next, it was on to the Knysna elephant park.  The ellies were tame in comparison:

Today, we spent the day in Plettenberg Bay - the playground of South Africa's wealthy.  The beach is gorgeous, and the surfing is great (though neither of us are surfers).  Tonight, I ate Springbok for the first time, though it didn't seem quite so foreign since Melanie bought a Springbok pocketbook in Cape Town.  Tomorrow, we head to Port Elizabeth in search of the elusive "laundromat".  Having been on the road for 15 days, most of our clothes are ready to walk by themselves.  One night in PE, then on to Shamwari on Monday, where we'll be spending the next 8 weeks.

Overheard a conversation a couple of nights ago between an American tourist and a South African:  the tourist said she was planning on going home to the States.  The South African told her she couldn't go, "didn't you hear, America is closed".

Funny vignette for the week:  we were at dinner tonight, and a party of German tourists next to us kept looking over at our table.  Melanie asked them why they kept looking at us.  They said they had seen a mouse under our table.  Melanie was more scared of the mouse than she was of being in the water with a great white shark.  Go figure!