The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

The jackass penguins live just south of Cape Town.

It looks like a fun place to live.

When they are born they stay warm and safe under Mom’s feet.

They are fluffy and cute.

And cuddly.

And loud when they are hungry. The noise doesn’t sound much like a donkey, but that’s where they got their name.

When they get bigger they are tubby fluffballs.

They still spend a lot of time lying around.

All sprawled out in the sand.

Pretending they can fly.

They are so cute.

So fluffy and cute.

But they are still loud when they were hungry.

Very loud.

When they get older they loose their fluffball feathers and become blue.

The loose feathers itch and they spend a lot of time scratching.

Then they are teenagers.

And slightly less cute.

They moult every year, loosing a ton of feathers every time. Eventually they become black and white adults.

The leftover feathers look funny.

They can’t fish while they are moulting, so they get very hungry.

They can’t swim well and get cold because they are not properly waterproofed.

But they still wade in, presumably to cool off.

They pick most of the loose feathers out with their beaks.

The adults are not at all fluffy.

They march in groups down to the water.

And wade in.

Until it gets too deep to wade.

Then they swim.

When they are not swimming the spend a lot of time standing around looking displeased.

Or staring at things.

There was lots of scenicness on our scenic drive around Cape Town.

There were also some whales waving at us from the ocean.

They were less blurry in person.

We went to swim with the great white sharks.

From inside a cage.

Which didn’t really work out that well because that’s Matt with his hand up right next to the shark there.

And he has a really good view of the fish hiding next to the cage, and a really not so good view of the shark.

There was also a really big ray that liked the shark bait.

And a ton of seagulls.

But we were there to see the sharks.

Which was much easier out of the water than in the water.

We saw 8 different sharks.

But we couldn’t really tell them apart.

Some were bigger and some were smaller.

Some were more aggressive than others too.

One thing they all shared is that they are very fast in the water.

They are very aggressive at the surface when they tried to grab the lures.

When we could see them under the water it was very briefly.

They were much easier to spot on the surface as opposed to in the water.

There’s one of the lures. It is supposed to look like a seal. Only one shark was actually interested in it.

Most tried to grab the ball of fish heads.

They were really cool to watch.

Still glad there was a cage between us and them. Definitely not a reef shark.

We took the cable car to the top of Table Mountain.

We could have climbed it on this narrow zigzag path, but we were lazy and couldn’t find it. This is where we would have come off the path onto the top.

This bird did not have to take the cable car or the zigzag path.

Table Mountain is above the city of Cape Town and has very pretty views.

It is known for it’s weird plants.

Like this one.

And this spiky one.

This plant has tonnes of tiny flowers opening.

Here’s another confier plant. Or at least based on the leaves it looks that way.

Although all the plants grow very short they seem to have very bright colours in their leaves.

The bees were having a field day with all the open flowers.

Okay so the pun was bad that doesn’t mean you have to fly away.

Not all the flowers were all the way open. This one needs a little more time.

This one needs a lot more time. Very pretty pink though.

Pretty purples were all over the place too.

The petals to this one were much more broad in shape.

The flower looks a lot different with all the stamens and pistels still attached.

There was more than one bird up the mountain.

It was a great day up on top.

No one way really around over here. Most people only do a small walk to see the view and miss out on all the things growing up here.

Maybe one day we will learn some plant names. In the mean time we’ll just take pictures.

This is what most of the walk looked like with the tiny flowers intermittently spaced around.

Just us up on top of table mountain.

Well at least this part of table mountain.