Whiling away an afternoon.

Bored bored bored.
Have struggled down to the post office braving the predicted gale force winds. Ok, well maybe it wasn't that bad - but this is a very windy place! At least it stopped hailing. :S On the way, in one patch of flooded green I saw several beautiful sacred Ibises (Ibi? :P), some small white egrets, two egyptian geese and three guinea fowl - not bad birding for a ten minute walk.

Anyway what with all the rain and hail and winds we've been sitting at home far too much. Already watched three films this morning before coming down here - luckily the internet is the perfect and ultimate procrastination tool as ever - more so when you've been deprived for a while! Getting on two hours now but luckily the pony-tailed guy who seems to be in charge of the post office today is also procrastinating, so all is good. :)

We've only been out once since I last wrote I think. Me and Amy went off to find the Cape Point troupe. Since Winnie has a radio collar on, we got out the antenna again and now I was in charge of trying to work out which direction the strongest signal was coming from. Hmm. The result was, at various times and from various suitably high rocks, all four compass points, and very frequently two opposite directions simultaneously. This is largely blamed on the fact that the signal won't travel through cliffs or hills but is exceptionally happy to bounce off them and pounce at you from random angles. We eventually put our amazing tracking skills to the test - we gathered excitedly round poo going 'this looks fresh!' and then followed fresh baboon footprints through the shrubland! Well not so much through shrubland as along a conveniantly earthy hiker's path. I love it when baboons follow paths. :D Paths and roads - wonderful inventions!

So anyway we located the troupe - hoorah - and set about following them. They helpfully reached a road and set off along it so Amy hiked back to the car and brought it down so we could sit inside and safely eat our lunch.Unfortunately I'd just finished my first sandwich when they all disappeared into the bushes again. Darn! So off we went. The area turned out to be full of restios - tall dry grass/reeds - that are always full of ticks. It was practically impossible to move without getting covered with them and once they get on to you they head upwards until they find somewhere warm - little buggers. Frequent stopping to brush them off seems to have done the trick though, but it does slow you up. The bushes there were so tall and dense we often couldn't see the baboons - we were just following the sounds of their crunching. The problem with that is it's not very easy to notice a sporadic sound stopping.

While I was retracing my steps to recover a dropped GPS device (I have GOT to stop losing expensive pieces of equipment! :S ) the baboons disappeared again. However we were confident that they were heading away from the road to the beach. Our plan was to race them there and wait for them to come out. This was all going fine until we hit a long strip of marsh with a tall, furry green plant growing in it. It wasn't too wet but this plant was growing densely and was over our heads. We ploughed in, alarmingly getting closer and closer to the sounds of frogs. Eventually we came to a stop, not knowing if we had made it halfway through, or if we were only metres from the end. I also had the feeling we weren't heading straight across since the easiest route always seemed to be tending to the right. Amy decided we should go back; though I hated to admit defeat I had no idea where we or the baboons were, so we followed our path back to the reassuringly short bushes we'd come from.

Once out of the marsh we were still about halfway between the road and the beach with the tick infected grasses between us and the car. It was at this point that it began to rain. Thunder rumbled ominously from black clouds on the horizon. We set off and hoped the damp would put off the ticks! We eventually made it back to the car (of course) and leapt in - I went straight for my unfinished lunch. While we sat there munching as the rain strenghthened we heard baboons barking nearby on the other side of the road. Grrrr.

We decided that we'd definitely completely lost the bloody baboons and set off home.

Which is of course where we've been since. As I said there's been lots of DVD watching and I've managed to borrow Caroline's Harry Potter (it made me happy) and am now going through some ancient 'Just William' books I've found which have turned out to be very amusing. I was considering how I should read them to my children, when I came across the word 'nigger' and decided to check through them first. :)

Speaking of which, 'coloured' is apparently a valid descriptive term here. I shall have to remember next time to enlighted you all with my completely naive and ignorant report on South Africa. I failed miserably to wiki the politics before I came. I'm hoping I can get along with 'Mandela good!'.

Till next time!