Penguins, Baboons, Ostrich and Other South African Adventures

We arrived in South Africa nearly 10 days ago, after some hellish last few days in West Africa...We contracted parasites (giardia!! ugh!) during our last meal in Bamako, Mali, before heading back to Dakar, Senegal. We then holed up in our hotel in Dakar for four days, miserable and unable to go anywhere until the day arrived that we were to get on our flight to South Africa. We were so ready to leave West Africa, yet we blew it by arriving at the airport too late to get on our flight! We spent the last 24 hours in Senegal, attempting to negotiate African airport chaos and determine whether we would be able to get on the same flight to South Africa the next morning. We did!
And we are here, in Cape Town! We went to a doctor soon after arriving, got on extremely strong meds and are now feeling well...Cape Town and the surrounding area is absolutely beautiful, stunning and amazing. There are elememts of its natural beauty, architecture and scenery that remind us of New England, Oregon, Northern California, Ireland, but then there are baboons and ostriches and penguins in the wild! We had a great wild-life viewing day yesterday where we saw all three of these animals up close. The penguins were awesome! A whole little colony about 20 feet away from us, on Boulder Beach south of Cape Town. We rented a car and drove around the Cape south of the city for the last few days. The Southern part of the Cape is all national park, it is stunning. We rented a cabin in the gorgeous little town of Scarborough and saw incredible sunsets...
It is wonderful to be able to communicate with people in English again. I can now take care of making decisions, paying for things, making calls, etc, rather than relying on Joe to be source of communication with the outside world. We have been eating good food, drinking good wine and going to see movies...The weather is mild (low 70s during the day and low 50s at night) and it is nice to not be hot and sweaty all the time. Joe is now watching the South African national team play New Zealand in rugby, at a local bar. Apparently, many black, South Africans support the New Zealand team because up until the end of Apartheid, the South African team did not allow blacks to play (and the team is still largely white). In a nutshell, this captures a lot of the on-going conflict of life and politics in this country. It is so incredibly different from West Africa, but there are major challenges facing this country, even while its economy is the powerhouse of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Tomorrow, we start our ventures into other regions of South Africa. We booked a ticket on the tourist bus, called the Baz Bus, which will allow us to get on and off the bus from here to Durban (about 1000 miles up the coast) for the next 2 weeks. We have our route mostly planned out and it sounds incredible. Our first stop will be Stellenbosch, in the wine-growing region, where we will go wine-tasting. Joe says it looks a lot like Napa there. Afterwards, we head to the town of Wilderness (love that name), on the Garden Route of the Indian Ocean, where there is a 27 km long, undeveloped beach on a national park...More from there!