Monkey in the Middle

Okay, so I’m two days behind on postings, as Saturday night I had to get to bed early for my early morning Sunday safari. More on that tomorrow…

This is the European spec Nissan Micra, the closest thing to a Beetle that I could rent. The manager of the rental place brought it right to the front door of my hotel, which is good, but I stalled it before even leaving the driveway, with him in the car directly behind me, which is bad. Though I’ve successfully piloted a scooter on the left side of many a Bermudian road, I’ve never actually driven a right hand-drive car, let alone one with a manual transmission. From the waist down all is as it should be, with the clutch, brake and gas pedal in proper order from left to right. Same for the gearbox, except that you use it with the opposite hand, so everything from the waist-up is semi-backwards.

At any rate, I did way better than the runaway truck that barreled past me down a hill and took out the front end of a car at the bottom a few seconds later. I would have stayed on the scene but there were plenty of other witnesses present. And to tell the truth, I really didn’t see anything — I was too busy trying to figure out the radio!

And so I ventured down to the Cape of Good Hope, first to visit the Boulders Beach Penguin sanctuary. I had actually seen the first penguin of my trip to Robben Island but this place was crawling with them. The actual sanctuary had about as many tourists, but the pathway to the actual beach made for more intimate human/penguin interactions — that is, them looking up at me sideways while I took pictures like the one above.

Half an hour down the highway was the fabled Cape Point, the spiritual (if not geographically accurate) spot where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet. To get there I had to first climb up the side of a mountain crawling with baboons. Actually, most of them stayed near the parking lot, where the garbage was.

At the top of it I came face to face with another sign. For the record, I made it there and back in forty minutes — hah!

Indian Ocean on the left, Atlantic on the right…

… And back in the parking lot, a baboon on my car! Possibly attracted by the burning smell of my clutch plate, it took off after sucking on my antenna for a few minutes.