Cape fauna

As always in Africa, it seems, wildlife is never very far away - it was winter in the Cape (but very mild - although two weeks ago it was snowing and there were nine-METRE waves, so we were just lucky) - it was the wrong season for insects or reptiles, but we did see some wonderful birds (one that I didn't manage to photograph was irridescent blue and green with a bright red band across its throat) - including the penguins at Boulders Beach, one of the only two places in the world, apparently, where you can see penguin colonies on the mainland (the other place is just along the coast at Betty's Bay) - usually they gather on islands - in fact they avoided the mainland in the past largely to stay out of the way of predators such as leopards, which are now pretty rare in the area. However the Boulders penguins have recently been put behind a fence, partly to protect them from dogs and pet-hunters ( it would certainly be easy enough to grab one, they have no fear of humans - but you're warned not to touch them as they have razor-sharp bills and can peck something cruel), and partly to protect the surrounding properties - residents were complaining that the penguins were digging up their gardens and also creating a stink - in fact you can tell from some distance away that you're in the presence of something with a fishy diet. These are African penguins which are quite tiny, no more than two feet tall - they used to be called jackass penguins because they make a sound like a donkey when they feel like it (with their noses pointing straight up in the air) - but then someone pointed out that South American penguins make exactly the same noise, so the jackass penguins became African to avoid (human) confusion.

Another denizen of the area is the "rock rabbit" (first photo above) which isn't a rabbit at all but a hyrax, and known locally as a "dassie"; this looks something like a giant guinea pig, although just to confuse things even further it isn't classified as a rodent at all, but is apparently related to the elephant. These creatures are also relatively relaxed about humans approaching them and you can get within a few feet before one of the group will let out a piercing whistle - then they all disappear in a flash. Amazingly, dassie urine is used to make perfumes - the pee crystalises and can be scraped up - so take a close look at the labels of any perfumes you own and if you see the ingredient "hyraceum" you'll know you've been dabbing on the wee of these little critters.

Cape Town has a very wonderful aquarium which has some of the biggest fish tanks I've ever seen - including one where several white sharks cohabit with other fish species and with giant turtles - for a fee you can put on scuba gear and get in with them; we didn't do this. I didn't take the boat tour out to see the whales, either (I can get sea sick in a bath tub if there's too much movement), but my daughters did - thanks to Lisa for the pix above. You can see the whales from the coast east out of Cape Town - this is very exciting, you spot them when they start spouting and then they loll around on the surface for a while, occasionally sticking a fin or tail out of the water. In a boat you can get very close to them - as the whaleboat man said "they watch us just as much as we watch them" - which makes you wonder about all the Moby Dick stuff and the glorification of the whaling industry - apparently you can just motor up to a trusting whale and stick a harpoon in at arm's length should you want to (well at least if it's a southern right whale, which is what these are).

In the "fynbos", which is the Afrikaans name for the heathland found along the southern coast (which boasts a greater biodiversity than tropical rainforests) you also see tortoises - and sometimes you hear them before you see them, because they crash around in the dry undergrowth, presumably not too bothered about non-human predators - although undoubtedly a few have been mystified to find themselves in suburban gardens a short time later, possibly next to a penguin sitting in a water feature.

All of this is wonderful - the cumulative effect of seeing all these beautiful animals, mostly in their natural environment, is to restore some sense of mankind's real or at least original place in the world - just one species of ape in the midst of an incredible variety of lifeforms.