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South Africa 2025
  • Bruno Helbert
  • Avron Avron
  • Bruno Helbert
  • Avron Avron

South Africa 2025

Just a year after our first trip to S.A., Avron and I are back! Read more
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  • Trip start
    April 1, 2025
    South Africa 2025
    3

    Back in Cape Town

    April 1, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 22 °C

    And just like that, we're back in South Africa!
    We're the first ones to be surprised, but so very excited.
    First "footprint" post includes views from our window, with the Table mountain, and the colorful neighborhood of Bo-Kaap.
    The video is meant to showcase the clouds rolling over the mountain.
    And possibly even more important: a hot Ricofé and a Rusk 😋    Read more

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    Stellenbosch

    April 2, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 25 °C

    We didn't get much time for the vineyard area last year, so why not explore it this time around?
    Starting with the beautiful Stellenbosch.
    We visited a museum comprising of 4 houses built a few decades apart from each other, starting with a "settlers" type of Dutch house, then a much fancier Dutch house with the pretty "gables" on the roofs' edges, and finally the English Victorian mansion (stay in your lane, England!).Read more

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    Boschendal

    April 2, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 23 °C

    Next vineyard we stumbled upon is the gorgeous Boschendal, very posh and "happening".
    I "remember" it from paintings gifted by my mum 40 years ago (you may have seen them at our place) after we first visited, when I was a wee child.
    The traditional manor and farm now host a restaurants, a cafe, a wedding venue, craft and fine food shops, an art gallery...
    More importantly, they had the best milk tart (south African specialty) that we have ever tasted.    Read more

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    Franschhoek, the French corner

    April 2, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 20 °C

    The vineyard area is called "french corner", because it was settled by French protestant huguenot fleeing religious persecutions.
    So many vineyards have French names, it's quite cute.
    Still, the architecture is quite Dutch, so here are a bunch of random houses from this area!
    (As a child, visiting South Africa and seeing non-French architecture for the first time, the Dutch gables rocked my understanding of the world. They still have a big place in my heart because of that)    Read more

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    Bonne Espérance

    April 3, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ 🌬 19 °C

    In 1488, the very powerful Turkish empire closed the land roads between Europe and Asia, which was a commercial catastrophe for spice traders especially.
    So some navigators decided to explore the theory that Africa might be in fact surrounded by oceans, and could therefore be sailed around from the Europe to Asia.
    Portuguese Bartholomeu Dias sailed further south than the southernmost African settlement (then in Namibia), all the way to the very south of Africa, and far enough around it to confirm that there was a way to connect the Atlantic and Indian Ocean this way.
    On his journey, he named this cape "the cape of storms", but upon hearing the news of this potential new commercial road, the Portuguese king renamed "Cape of Good Hope" the point from which a ship would start sailing more East than South on its way around Africa.
    It is not the southernmost tip of Africa, (that's Cape Agulhas, 150km away), but it is still a great favorite for tourists.
    And we are tourists 😅

    The area is fairly spectacular and somewhat bleak, but also home to baboons, wild ostriches, and Oryx gazelles.    Read more

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    We are way past the blooming season, but this protea bush seems to not have received the memo3

    Constantia Neck

    April 4, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 22 °C

    Since our arrival in SA, my hay-fever is back with a revenge. 🤧
    But I didn't want to waste a day feeling sorry for myself, so instead I convinced Avron to go for an "easy" 10km walk along the southern slopes of Table Mountain.
    Needless to say it was a lot more of a hot, long, arduous and exhausting adventure than what I had envisioned, especially on a hefty course of anti histamine
    But we made it, and now we can sleep off the rest of the day!    Read more

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    Sandy Bay Sunday

    April 6, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 24 °C

    So, as it turns out, it wasn't just hay-fever...
    I had a bit of a nasty cold that kept me in bed most of Saturday, seriously crippling our weekend plans.
    So when Sunday arrived, we made the best of this unseasonal sunshine and headed to the local nudist beach.
    It is in the Atlantic Ocean side, with water flowing north directly from Antarctica, so it is cold as all hells.
    But the weather was warm, the place is beautiful, and it was bustling.    Read more

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    Vroom-vroom, buses!

    April 7, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ☁️ 20 °C

    We're getting pretty familiar with Cape Town, so we decided to weave all the spots we know together with a red bus tour.
    So if you recognise some of these, it's because you have been paying attention!
    Same places, but from the top of the bus.    Read more

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    Table mountain's echo valley

    April 10, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 20 °C

    Table Mountain is the central point of Cape Town, and always worth the visit.
    I was keen on rushing past the beautiful but busy flatlands and diving further into the barely visited Echo valley.

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    Flower kingdom

    April 10, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 20 °C

    Yesterday we learnt that the world is divided in 6 "flower kingdoms" - vast areas covering continents - and that plants from one kingdom only live in this kingdom.
    The smallest of those, by far, only covers the Cape area, and it has the richest variety.
    Unfortunately we are visiting at the end of autumn, way past the beautiful spring, but there was still a few late bloomer ready to welcome us on Table mountain    Read more

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    Zooming in

    April 10, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 20 °C

    For our last trip. We spent a lot of time desperately trying to line up the binoculars and our phones to get close up photos... It was a mission.
    And some day, I saw someone with a zooming lens attached to their phone and I thought: "I need this in my life".
    We looked everywhere in the shops without success, so since then I have been scouring the internet and here it is: the gizmo on which all of my hopes of happiness are resting (not that I'm being dramatic).
    When we were on the Table mountain, we were incredibly lucky to spot a handful of Klipspringers, and you can see my first photo without the lenses, and then the ones I took when I realised I had a few seconds to fish it out and clip it on.
    I'm pretty chuffed about the results 😁    Read more

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    Hoedspruit

    April 11, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ 🌙 23 °C

    Bye bye Cape Town, hello beautiful Hoedspruit.
    Although it is only our second time at Cathy's place, it feels like home away from home.
    And the local wildlife also made us feel very welcome with a couple of kudus in the backyard, and warthog and guinea fowls on the way to the shops...

    Tomorrow is the start of a week in the Kruger park. So expect an avalanche of animal pictures. You have been warned!    Read more

  • South Africa 2025

    Kruger park - To Lower Sabi

    April 12, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 27 °C

    And we are back in the Kruger park!
    We wanted to drive swiftly to our camp in Lower Sabi, but we kept on being stopped by so many animal encounters!
    Including the absolutely terrifying visit of a most cuddly looking hyena, loose in one of the picnic areas, with kids playing around and the hyena sneaking under the tables to scavenge crumbs.
    People just shooed it away every time it got too close, and politely complied before coming back from a different angle... Surreal experience!    Read more

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    A day in the bush

    April 13, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ 🌙 27 °C

    Another day in the Kruger, another avalanche of picture.
    The park is packed with babies of all types, and it is hard not to stop every time we see a baby elephant (or zebra, or warthog, or Nyala, or, or...)
    The big event of the day was stepping out of the car to get into an observation hut, only to be surrounded by a herd of elephants. No way to get back to the car until they decided to move on. I was thrilled for the photographic opportunity, but Avron, who has more experience with elephants and therefore a much healthier distrust of their moods, did not have the best time 😅    Read more

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    Kruger morning walk and afternoon drinks

    April 14, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 36 °C

    We woke up at 4.30am for a 4-hour walk in the Kruger with 2 game-rangers and 6 of us tourists. We were driven out into the heart of the bush and on location we watched the game-rangers fully load their rifles with live ammunition. It certainly got the adrenaline going as we ducked and weaved through bushes and spider webs, walking on sandy paths riddled with an assortment of buck hoof prints and other animal tracks. Within minutes we could see giraffes just a few metres away and then a few elephants only 25 metres away. We quietly backed away and gave them a wide berth as we circled around and continued down the hill to a water hole and stopped to take some photos of hippos in the wild.

    We finished off the day at the restaurant overlooking the Sabie river, drinking cocktails of long island iced teas, pina coladas and a Mexican pineapple and ginger ale one that I'm now too tipsy to remember the name of. The animals came down to the river and I wonder if they were as focused on us as we were on them.    Read more

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    21This was not filmed in slow motion3

    Driving to Pretoriuskop

    April 15, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ☁️ 23 °C

    Oh what a day!
    We left Lower Sabie, our camp for the past three days and headed to Pretoriuskop, our camp for the next three days.
    A pretty long drive, but the fates were on our side and we had some incredible sightings:
    lions, thunderbirds, a family of rhinos!
    Absolutely incredible.
    And on top of that, a couple of unexpected ones like this chameleon crossing the track, this tortoise munching on the side of the road, and my favorite random: a turtle on a turtle... You can't make that up.

    We have now settled into Pretoriuskop, which doesn't have the stunning view over the river that Lower Sabi had (or the cocktails, apparently), but is gorgeous in its own way, and has a pool built to include the gentle slopes of a rocky outcrop so that it forms one side and most of the bottom of the pool! Genius.    Read more

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    More animals...

    April 16, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ☀️ 29 °C

    Slow day today.
    Not because we didn't see plenty of animals, but because we have been so spoiled so far that it has become hard to see something new! 😅

    So today we have:
    - An adorable Common Duiker (a rare sighting for us)
    - A Water Monitor (giant lizard)
    - A female Kudu (not rare, I just liked it)
    - A male Waterbuck (also not rare, but they are SO FLUFFY !!!)
    - Mother and baby Warthogs (ubiquitous, but I am yet to take a great portrait of them and I will not stop trying !)
    - Two sightings of Bushbucks, a reddish female and a more distant greyish male. These ones we had never seen ever before and we were ridiculously excited about spotting and identifying them.
    - A couple of baboons, more rare than I thought, and very cute while grooming each other.    Read more

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    Daytime… nighttime…

    April 16, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ⛅ 19 °C

    We are just back from a night tour, something we have never done before.
    Most of it was very unsuccessful, with very little animals around except for a plethora of owls, grouses and (of all things), chameleons (they actually stand out better at night under the bright torchlight).

    The highlight of this tour was undeniably stumbling onto this bored baby hyena left alone while mummy is hunting, and who thought that the tyres of the vehicle were fascinating.
    In a trip with so many baby animals, this one was unexpected!    Read more

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    Last Kruger day

    April 17, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ☁️ 24 °C

    Today was a very slow day, with literal hours without any animal sighting, quite surreal.
    And yet we had a couple of great encounters! So fear not, we have more pics to shove down your throat 😄

    In order of appearance we have:
    - A pregnant hyena who just wanted to chill on the warm road in the chilly morning.
    - An African fish-eagle in a tree.
    - The most random encounter with an African squirrel (they are everywhere but so skittish!)
    - A few adorable baby buffalos with their tiny knobbly horns.
    - A Malachite kingfisher (So tiny, Avron outdid himself with this one)
    - Another African fish-eagle, surveying a water hole, with a heard of hippos sunning themselves in the background.
    - A young lion and lioness engaged in their hours long ritual of 10 seconds of mating / 15 minutes snooze, rinse, repeat...
    That last one was a great way for us to close our Kruger experience, and head home for some celebratory cocktails (mango slushies from Wimpy made better with the addition of Malibu from the camp shop 😄)    Read more

  • South Africa 2025
    Angela and Evgeny
    Cathy and Lucia, mother and aunty of the bride

    The wedding

    April 18, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ☁️ 20 °C

    It felt strange not adding a footprint for the wedding that took us back to South Africa in the first place: Avron's cousin Angela and her husband Evgeny.
    We didn't take many pictures, because there was a photographer doing that much better than we do, so we'll probably make a footprint when these pictures are released.
    But the venue, an old tobacco shed in the middle of a grapefruit orchard, by the foot of the local mountain range, was too pretty not to show you.    Read more

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    Return of the Dark-Menace

    April 24, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ☁️ 19 °C

    (News from the front)

    Dear reader, if you followed our South African adventure last year, you know that, during our stay at Avron's aunt's estate (Mawusi), we got woken up in the middle of the night by a ruffle in the backyard, only to be faced when we opened the window with the shadow of the most enormous kudu ever: "the Dark Menace".
    At the time, he had munched on the protected young trees in the garden and massacred them.

    When we visited before our Kruger safari this year, we rejoiced at the trees having regained their fullness and health after their ordeal.
    "But everything changed, when the Dark Menace attacked (again)"
    We received this video from the courageous Cathy fending off the invader who had breached the perimeter.
    As you can see, the little tree is almost intact by then.

    But the walls of Mawusi couldn't resist the second wave, and a section collapsed, leading to untold massacres during the following nights. You can see what the trees look like now...

    So now it is once again time to rebuild, and Avron has been hard at work doing just that.

    Mawusi is safe again. But for how long ?!
    😄    Read more

  • South Africa 2025
    1Look at the adorable little paws!Cathy, Angela and Lucia... Oh, and Jessica munching in the background

    Hungry hungry hippos

    April 25, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ ⛅ 26 °C

    Today we took a family trip to see Jessica the ever-so-famous hippo.
    Last year she had a 2 weeks old newborn calf, and wasn't to be bothered, so we socialised with her grown up adopted child Seun instead.
    This time around, her calf being old enough to be left alone a little, she came around with Seun for the snacks.

    Those are free hippos. Both were orphans raised by the people who own this property, but they can come and go as they please, they just seem to believe that they are part of the family.

    They are somewhat less dangerous than wild hippos, but only because they choose to be...    Read more

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    1The road from point A to point B... A helicopter would have been welcome.#tourists"Draw me like one of your French girls"

    The three Rondavels

    April 28, 2025 in South Africa ⋅ 🌙 18 °C

    For our last day in South Africa, we took a day trip to one of the most breathtaking places in the world: the Three Rondavels.
    (Rondavels are the round huts often found in Africa, and as you can see there's three of these mountains shaped like Rondavels).
    And as Angela was free today and had never seen it, she joined us at the last minute which was an unexpected treat.

    To do something different, we started with a different access, from below, near the Blyde river, which was beautiful and took us both to a lovely waterfall in the forest, as well as to the abandoned set of the Australian "I'm a celebrity, get me out of here" show.

    We didn't realise that the route that would then take us from the river at the bottom to the viewpoint at the top would have us backtrack and make a ridiculous loop through the plains, up a different canyon, and along the plateau, so we made it just in time to enjoy the low sun on this magnificent view.

    This is one of my very favorite places in the world, it's hard to convey its serene majesty with pictures only...

    A link to a photosphere below:
    https://photos.app.goo.gl/c9MSMBgr6AdD9nv68    Read more

    Trip end
    May 1, 2025
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