Today was our first of two days in Wilderness, a small town right at the start of South Africa’s garden route, with miles of beautiful beaches and…  well, not much else!  But that’s what we were here for.  We woke up, went upstairs, ad had breakfast, scanning waves for a glimpse of a dolphin or two.  Definitely saw a lot of things that might have been dolphins; not a whole lot of things that definitely were dolphins.

Breakfast.

As you can see from the photo, it was an overcast day, but this was our Beach Day, and we weren’t gonna let that stop us from going to the beach!  But since we’d be swimming and leaving our stuff unattended, we didn’t take a camera or anything else with us- just towels and a credit card, pretty much.

That’s really a shame, too, because the beach was absolutely deserted- nobody around to relieve of us our stuffs!  We foud a ice place to swim, and then did so.  While we were in the waves, a couple came up and set up camp right next to our stuff, which was…  odd, because it was literally just us on maybe 5 miles of beach.  But so it goes!

Based on a recommendation from our Cape Point tour guide, we climbed up to some now unused railroad tracks and followed them to the site of an abandoned cave restaurant.  Well, abandoned isn’t the right word.  After a landslide rendered the tracks less-than-train-worthy, the cave restaurant found itself patronless and shut down.  A bit later, a Christian mystic fellow named Clifford (!) decided it would make a nice spot for a place of worship, reminiscent of the Throne of the Third Heaven but with driftwood.  The mystic wasn’t home, but we still got to glimpse his impressive seashell windchime collection.

Past the church, there was an old rusty bridge crossing a ravine, but we got spooked about crossing it and turned around before reaching the next town (Vic Bay).  Of course, we didn’t have a camera, but man!  Imagine some cool photos!

We ate lunch at a nice little cafe called Bee Juice and ordered some craft beer with our sandwiches, which we were pretty excited about!  We’re not really wine drinkers, and South Africa is a wine country.  Remember how South Africans can’t make cocktails?  Well, they can’t make beer either.  Yikes.

Afterwards, we went to the grocery store and considered (but rejected) going to Off The Rails pub- a converted train station on the old tracks.  With supplies in hang from the grocery store, we headed back to showers and a picnic dinner in the sand.

Dinner.