Woke up today feeling much better.  We are at the Whale View Inn overlooking False Bay in Simon’s Town.

our room

views from our balcony

After a lovely breakfast at the Inn we drove along beautiful beaches around False Bay to Stony Point.

False Bay

Stony Point is all the way around to the end of the mountains.

A closer view

Some of the beaches we passed had nesting Kelp Gulls on the dunes and fishermen on the beaches.

Fishermen on the beach

There were million dollar mansions along the cliffs and views of Table Mountain and the Atlantic Ocean.

Our first stop was at Betty’s Bay.

You might see this sign and think you might get to see a penguin or two but this is what we saw.

 

Betty’s Bay

Our first look at Penguins.

Taking a rest

Standing Penguin

 

The Penguins were all along the rocks.  A boardwalk ran right next the the rocks so we were very close to them.  There were 2,500 nesting pairs counted last year.  Probably similar number now.  Pretty awesome!

We found some other new birds at Stony Point–Victorine Warbler and Cape Sugarbird, both endemics and rare. (Since we don’t have the better camera anymore pictures of small birds are impossible but I’ll keep giving you links to google images so you know what I’m talking about.)  We did manage a picture of this caterpillar

From there we went to the Harold Porter Botanical Gardens which had many of the up to 63 different species of Protea flowers.

This entire hillside was covered in Protea.  It also was where we found quite a few Orange-breasted Sunbirds.   We also found some other endemics such as Cape Siskin, Rock Martin and Swee’s Waxbill.

We had lunch at the garden.  I had this beautiful salad.

And here is a picture of Pao drinking a milkshake.

Pao, being from Taiwan, had never had a milkshake before coming to So. Africa.  From the very beginning Greg would order one for him as he seemed to enjoy it so much.  It was like a running gag that wherever we went we’d order him one, sometimes different flavors, but he really liked chocolate the best.  One restaurant had a special double fudge hot milkshake that consisted of vanilla ice cream, chocolate syrup and hot chocolate milk which you poured over the ice cream when you got it.  He loved that one.

Some more pictures from the gardens:

We moved on to Rooi Els to walk along a dirt road with steep hills on the side.

All these rocks are perfect habitat for the Cape Rockjumper,  the other species we were looking for.  These birds work their way up the hillside and then back down all day long.  We were lucky to find a pair working its way down to the road where we were and got some great looks at them.

We also found a few other things

Flowers and Aloe

Southern Rock Agama

Cape Dwarf Chameleon

And this view looking down to the beach

This day was a welcome improvement on the day before.