Road side baboons, Penguin suffrage, Coastline beauty, and the great escape from dinner

This morning we were served breakfast by a delightful waiter called Thompson, who did not mind in the slightest when David repeatedly called him Thomas. Our trusty guide Clive picked us up at 8:30am and we began our drive down the beautiful Southwestern coast toward the Cape of Good Hope. We stopped on the side of the road when Clive, who resembles a 55-year old version of a South African Philip Seymour Hoffman, spotted a family of baboons. Justin was in shock at the humanlike nature of the baboons, especially the mothers with babies on their backs, and snapped away dozens of photos not wanting to drive on. Unfortunately, Justin has decided that vertical photos are preferable to horizontal shots in spite of David’s insistence to the contrary, so I expect we will end up with a battle royale once we reach Botswana on photo technique. For the time being please enjoy the ample vertical photos from today.

We stopped several more times for roadside baboon watching and the occasional ostrich (remarkably well camouflaged in these parts but Justin had no problem spotting them and alerting us with ecstatic shrieks of OSSSSTRICH!!!!!) before stopping to pay the entrance fee to the national heritage park at Cape Point. Clive told the park ranger that we were 4 adults and 2 11-years and under, this is patently false and I knew that Clive was well aware of Justin’s age as we had discussed his 13th birthday just that morning. I then saw Clive hand over a pre-paid voucher and get back a small wad of folded bills. I suspected that Clive was pocketing the difference between the adult fee the tour company had prepaid and the child’s fee, but it was a small amount (<$10USD) and so I decided to let it slide but keep my eyes on my shifty friend Clive.

Once inside the park, we climbed up to the infamous lighthouse built by clearly the dumbest lighthouse engineers in history; the lighthouse was erected in 1870 at a huge cost atop the hill at Cape Point only to be found absolutely useless due to the preponderance of heavy cloud cover at night obscuring the lighthouse lights. And so, a second less elaborate but far more effective lighthouse was erected very shortly thereafter on the bottom part of the Cape Point. We also made a quick stop at the Cape of Good Hope to snap a photo en famille at this Southwestern most point on the continent just 4,000 miles from Antarctica.

More photos with the baboons enjoying a lunch of pincushion protea roadside until the alpha male bore his incisors at us in warning, and then it was quickly on to Simon’s Town to observe the flock of wild African penguins tending to their eggs on the beach and waddling about with much humor. I learned that it's the male penguins who sit on the eggs for 4 months, now that is just awesome. At the entrance to the penguin beach Clive once again said Justin was only 11 years of age and again pocketed a small amount of cash, I could see this was part of his m.o. and wondered what other tour guide loopholes he had discovered. My imagination ran temporarily wild, imagining Clive living in a sprawling mansion paid for by the thousands of pre-pubescent American boys he had guided over the years and used as ponzies in his elaborate entrance fee refund scheme. Snapped back to reality by my growling stomach we sat down to a thoroughly forgettable lunch where the kids compared the local ketchup to Heinz and pondered how they might make a buck importing Heinz which they concur is clearly far superior to the local brand. Nowhere in their discussion did the notion of fraud arise.

We then drove to the office of Baboon Matters, a local baboon conservation group which offers hiking tours of the territory inhabited by the baboons they are trying to save. We met our guide, Mzewatu, one of 12 monitors who work from dawn to dusk each day, attempting to keep the 4 baboon troops from leaving their natural habitat and entering the adjacent township where the residents view them as pests to be shot on site. Mzewatu gave us a thoroughly unintelligible orientation speech and we all smiled politely nodding our heads to his nonsensical instructions not wanting to offend or let on that the language he was speaking was not in fact English.

We drove through a nearby township called Ocean View, so named for its irony as the residents were relocated from their ocean side homes to this inland township during Apartheid. We piled out of the van and followed Mzewatu past the shacks and piles of rubbish onto a hiking trail at the foothill of the mountain. Mzewatu began calling out in a tribal tongue to locate the baboons, cupping his ear in his hand to listen to the forest and quickly shifting directions. Somehow Mzewatu understood the animals and could tell exactly where they were, for just minutes later he lead us directly to a group of over a dozen males, females, juveniles and babies. It was only later that I noticed the tiny mobile phone he was holding up to his ear and the other Baboon Matters monitor perched on a high rock some 200 feet up the mountain.
The juvenile baboons were fantastic to watch, just like kids daring one another to jump farther, run faster and come as close as possible to the humans in their midst. Livvy began the outing terrified of being attacked by the wild baboons but ended up a junior wildlife photographer snapping pics (horizontally thank god) while crouching in the tall grass. Yeah Liv!

We drove back to Cape Town and Chloe, Justin, Mom and I headed to the shopping area by the wharf before meeting up with David and Livvy for dinner at a steak house. Once seated at the restaurant we glanced at our menus and were uniformly turned off by the exceptionally unappetizing menu and décor. I noticed David and Livvy were still missing and asked where they were. Justin told me that Livvy wasn’t feeling well so she and David stayed behind to have room service. It was at that precise moment that our waiter was approaching the table with sparkling water I had requested, and Mom, ever the quick thinker, began to address me very loudly, “Oh no Lorna," she exclaimed, "do you think she will be okay all alone in the room?” Livvy was not alone but I realized this was our exit strategy and our waiter noticed the agita straight away, so I played along, “No she won’t be, we have to go now.” I rose from my chair with great drama, turned to our kind-faced waiter named Pride and apologized, “I’m so sorry, my daughter is ill (sounded better than saying sick I thought) and we must go to her now. I fear she may be quite unwell.” For some reason my English had turned into something written by Emily Bronte. “Ov kewse,” said Pride, “Aye hewp she filz behtah.” And off we scurried like mice, high fiving each other once safely out of site and congratulating Mom/Grandmaman for her ingenuity. We then returned to Meloncino’s for dinner as we had our first night. Thankfully Livvy is feeling much behtah now.