Hello again - this will be our last EVER journal entry from the lovely continent of Africa!!! All in all, we have had a bloody good time here!!! There has been some amazing scenery and some real eye openers, concerning the way that some people live!!! Also we have had to try and toughen up with all the dodgy people hanging around cape town!!!!

Our last few days have been pretty uneventful to be quite honest, we have just slowed the pace right down, and caught up on our sleep. Just chilling out in a nice new hostel that we found, only about 600m from the V & A Waterfront!! The only problem we came across was that the hostel we are in now was fully booken on sunday, so we had to move in on saturday, move out on sunday and move back in on monday - which meant 2 long walks with all of our gear in the baking heat!!! and we dont have any clean clothes left!!! so we are looking forward to Australia, because handwashing really does NOT work!!!

However, last Friday we did decide to rent a car and go trekking down the peninsula to see all the beaches. It started in disaster, as we booked it with an Avis rep at the waterfront who said that you need a credit card for security, fine but only sarah has one. they then said sarah would have to drive, but we explained that i had to drive (for obvious reasons!! hehe) and the rep said that was fine ...... do you think that is what they told us when we went to pick up the car???? i think not!!! apparently on weekends you are not allowed any additional drivers unless you are husband and wife?!?!?!?!? i do not know!!!!! but after 10 mins of pleading they let us get away with it as it was only for 1 day, so we finally jumped in to out VW Polo (see pics!!!!) and headed off through the crazy traffic of Cape Town!!

The reason it is so crazy is the abundance of these scabby minibuses that fly everywhere (dodgy as hell, had a bit of a scare in a couple during our stay), they are not all official and they are always knackered!!! we later learned that part of the reason for the mentalness is the fact that you can turn up at their equivalent of the DVLA pay R2500 and there you go - you have a driving license!!

To make the day worse, it decided to go grey and cloudy, so if you see the pics it was pretty windy and pretty chilly!! so we could not even sunbathe and swim as planned (obviously every other day in cape town has been beautiful sunshine!!).

Still we marched on and had a cool day, some really nice coastal roads, but we could not go all the way to cape point as the entry fee was too much!! and when we went to see the penguins at boulders beach, we could not be bothered to pay that entrance fee, so the old 10X optical zoom came into its own once again!!!

we then stayed in a little town called Simon's Town for supper, and splashed out a bit, as we decided that we would save some money that night by making the most of our bed on wheels!!!! the meal and wine was lovely, then the waiter started asking where we were stayin that night!! He seemed pretty surprised when we told him we did not know yet - and started phoning around and getting us leaflets (we couldnt find it in ourselves to tell him we were not staying anywhere!!).

we had decided that we would park in the marina by our restaurant and stay there, but our plan was foiled by the stupid 'parking marshall', some guy that hangs around car parks and you pay him to stop ppl nicking your car. He kept on staring at us getting in and out, so we scarpered. Unfortunately just to spend the next hour driving up and down the coast through towns and towns trying to find a 'safe' place to park and stay, eventually we just became to stressed and fed up, so we pulled on the side of the main road opposite a restaurant and tried to sleep.

Sarah hung up the 'curtains'(jumper and towel) on the handles above the doors......we jumped in to our sleeping bags and tried to sleep with the cars zooming past and shaking the car every 5 mins!!!

it was ...... an experience, i think that is what we decided!!!

after that we brought it back, paid up (after more ill advice from the stupid rep) and that was that.

last night it was matt (one of the guys from the tour) bday so we went on a sunset cruise (very very cold and very wet) which was nice, followed by a meal

And so ends the first chapter of our tour