Africa Adventures, Day 5: Addo Elephant Park

Luckily our early bedtime led to waking up early. We got a good 7am start to our next destination: Addo Elephant Reserve! The reserve is about an hour and a half outside of Port Elizabeth. After a few adventures with the car involving poorly marked streets, hard-to-find gears and speed limits that seemed way too fast for this car we arrived safely.

Unfortunately the weather was rainy, and had been all morning. Rain causes most of the animals to go into hiding. Even the elephants don't care for it because it washes the mud off their skin, leaving them vulnerable to parasites. That said, we were still able to see several elephants.





We also managed to spot a few other animals, including a zebra, several antelope, a warthog, ostriches, and a rare dung beetle! The poor weather lead to horrible picture taking and I only got a few photos worth keeping.

We gave up on the park after a few hours as spotting was scarce (one of the guides said we were fortunate to see what we had!). We decided to set off toward Cape Town and find a place to stay on the way. After looking at a map we decided on a pleasant-sounding town called Oyster Bay. Sounds cozy, right?

After plugging it into the GPS we found ourselves driving nearly 20 miles on a dirt road to get there. And what do we find when we get there? A town of maybe 30 houses, one general store, and definitely no hotels to speak of. While we didn't feel unwelcome, it was pretty obvious there wouldn't be anywhere to stay. Instead we backtracked to Jeffery's Bay, a surfing town and popular vacation destination for South African locals. The town had a definite party atmosphere, as the hotel we stayed in had several bars across the street, and they were hopping well past 3 am. If the bars weren't keeping me awake it was the people in the room across from ours, who were making us well-aware of the paper-thin walls with their (remarkably short-lived) sexy time. Not to be too hard on the guy's stamina, but if you were to use them as an egg timer, your eggs would be done over VERY easy.