Queen Elizabeth Voyage: April 17, 2017, Port Elizabeth, South Africa

April 17, 2017, Port Elizabeth, South Africa

We are finally back on a real continent after so many islands in the Indian Ocean. We visit the city of Port Elizabeth, South Africa. This is our first visit to this port. A seems to be a nice place with many sites to see. Our ship’s tour takes us to the Addo Elephant National Park about thirty miles outside of town. At the pier, there were a number of large buses and a group of smaller 22 passenger buses. Since our group is going to be up close and personal with a number of wild animals, we get the 22 passenger bus. We must have been low persons on the totem pole. We had one lady who wanted the seat up front riding shotgun for the driver. Our guide, an older lady, was determined that she was getting that seat to be able to spot the animals. The guide won. Next problem, it had rained the night before our trip. Several of the bus windows had been left open. Therefore, there were a number of seats that were wet. That really never got totally sorted out, but our guide found a bunch of newspaper at our first stop. Those were spread out on the seats to block the water from the bottoms of the passengers. Except, those bottoms had already soaked up most of the water.

Now, back to the tour. We drove for about an hour outside of Port Elizabeth to the Addo Elephant Park. At one time this area had been settled and farmed. The whole area has been reclaimed and turned into a nature park. Well sort of reclaimed. There were not enough water holes to support a large number of animals, so a number of artificial water holes were created. A lot of our time was spent going from water hole to water hole. Our first sighting was a group of zebra, followed by some red hartebeest with very distinctive heart-shaped horns. We had one sighting of a warthog very close to the bus. I got one good picture but did not actually see the warthog. At one of the water holes, we saw a family of elephants. Unfortunately, they did not have their best side turned to us. A bit further down the road, some people stopped their vehicle to tell us they had seen a lion attacking a buffalo. A little further down the road, the people in the front of the bus saw a buffalo dashing across the road but no lion. We will never know how all this turned out.
The tour turned out to be several hours of driving around in South African scrub land, seeing a few animals gathered around a couple of man-made watering holes, seeing a few more animals on their own, and a twenty minute stop at the gift shop.

The drive back to town took us on one of the back roads. In reality, it was rougher
than the dirt roads in the park. It also took us by one of the townships where the blacks are forced to live. It looked no better than the ones we had seen ten years ago.

We were back on the ship to clean up and for lunch at the Lido. The ship was providing a bus to one of the local shopping centers so we decided to see some more of Port Elizabeth. We ended up at The Board Walk which turned out to be part hotel, part convention center, and part amusement park. There was a small lake in the center of all the shops and restaurants. We walked through most of the shops and found nothing that caught our eye. We found an ATM for some addition rand (local money) and walked across the road to a flea market where Sandra picked up a number of locally made gifts. After all of that, it was back on the bus for a return to the ship. The evening was the usual dinner and a show.