Elephants in the woods

The morning after we decided to spend the day walking and a few of the Knysna locals recommended the local forests- not least because there are supposed to be elephants in there. The area is so big nobody has seen them for about 5 years but since it's free we drove the 9 km up a dusty track to check it out. We issued ourselves with trekking permits and wandered off into the woodland. Unfortunately that's about all that could be said for it. The Amazon rainforest CD was playing in the background which was nice but otherwise all we saw was an awful lot of trees and each other's backsides as the order of march changed throughout the day. D 'n D were excellent company and the fact that it was free, we got some exercise and had a laugh about how boring it was made it OK. We decided also to have an ice cream every afternoon- and did!

We hit the road again, our next stop for the night being the picturesque Plettenburg Bay- or Plett. We booked into the excellent Nontando hostel which D n'D thought they had pre booked. The self titled 'general manager' took issue when he couldn't find their booking and was a bit funny until I said "have you got space?" When he replied "yes" I think my point was made that the booking was irrelevant. He made a big play about showing us around and was probably one of the weirdest people I have met. Sticking to my no cooking policy I dragged my companions out to a recommended restaurant and ordered a huge lamb shank before their eyes. Dana elected for soup and Dan, whose eating habits he would agree are unusual declined everything. He would frequently say how his day is free of the structure of meal times and make fun of me when I started to get hungry at lunch or dinner time. He ate nothing vegetable or mineral- just animal, proclaiming 'veg is what he eats, eats'. While I admire the cleverness of this statement I wished he would reconsider his one meal a day of only meat with lots of coffee and ice cream through the day. Anyway, the lamb was fantastic- it must have been cooking for a week they way the meat fell off (I had veg too) and he cracked, putting the chef under pressure to produce a spag bol in record time which he went on to demolish in record time.
Back to the hostel for a few beers and a game of pool.