Waking up early due to the sun heating up our room we had an early breakfast at Island Vibe before walking into the town. It was a 10 minute walk to get to the city centre, i.e. the main street. Jeffrey’s Bay is a surfer place most of all, where Billabong has (one of?) their factory and the only stores apart from restaurants and clubs on the main street are surf shops of different brands. We got back to Island Vibe to mentally prepare ourselves before our Surfing lessons we’d booked and after placing my camera and other expensive stuff in a safe in the reception (with, off course, the had the label “use at your own risk”) we headed off to become mad-skilled surfers.

Unfortunately the wind had picked up and when the teacher had checked with the group before it seemed that surfing was do-able but far from good conditions. We chose to postpone the two hour lesson until tomorrow 0800. Somehow we already knew as we said it that we would most likely end up partying at this place and be hung-over like hell at that time but well well. After magically finding another double room we extended our stay in J-bay to three days (at least? ;))

The rest of the day was spent chilling at the beach, (not in the frickin ice-cold water though, 21° C or something?) and browsing the surfing shops. After hoping that we would have evened out the sunburn we had a siesta. Life isn’t that bad after 30 after all. We had dinner at a place called the Mexican, very nice. For starters I had mussels in some creamy sauce, and Mona had a tequila, for main we went for enchiladas and fajitas. The food was really good and attentive staff made sure we kept drinking.

Then some band called napalma (or The Fez ?) come up on the stage and there was a concert by these guys from Mozambique, it was quite ok – some electronic beats backing the main guy singing. It was quite ironic however when the band played “Rap Das Armas” and the crowd went wild singing along. Mostly white rich people using cabs to avoid getting mugged are singing along with a dreadlocked black guy from Mozambique in a tune glorifying the violence against police in townships. It put a smile on my face at least, and after taking a cab back we had another early night.

We got up in time and wrapped up our stuff and met our driver Vernon and paid Lungile for the tour as well as dropped our other gear there until we would get back for a shower before getting a taxi/shuttle to J-Bay later.

As we are driving on the highway Vernon talks about the stuff we can do at this place we’re heading – we had actually only one demand for the tour that we told Lungile about, who then found this Vernon guy, we wanted to have a bush walk in Addo Elephant Park – not only game driving. It seemed strange that we could use canoes, ride quad-bikes etc but well well, however when he said that the place bordered to Addo Park we reacted. “Bordering to Addo Park, you mean we’re not going to the actual Addo Park?”. “Weeeelll, no, you’re not – but this is actually better yadayadayada, – Lungile knew this since I told them from the beginning”. After a very quick chat in Swedish we decided that what the hell, let’s make the best out of the day and then have a chat with Lungile about our tour.

We got to the place just started up by a guy called Dave (who used to manage Kings Beach Backpackers in P.E apparently) who was a real friendly and relaxed guy who offered us breakfast as Vernon drove off. We did a “bush walk” with him, that is walk in the bushes on his property – and spotted three impalas that he had introduced to his property. Not exactly big-five classified. When we told Dave how much we had paid for this (130€) he was shocked and said that it must have been some kind of mistake, he usually charge 13€ per person for a lodge for two including breakfast – and although we would get lunch we were only here for the day.

We did some canoeing in the river next to Dave’s place which was very nice and tranquil. After an hour or two we felt we knew that though and had lunch. We met some of the other guests, including Gramps Rasta with his family. Awesome guy who were very hospitable and although we didn’t quite follow his sons’ explanations regarding the relation between the length of his deadlocks and his ability to see in the future (he was not kidding) they were really cool and a bunch of those people you wish the rest of the world had more of. Saying our goodbyes to the family who drove off in a packed car after celebrating their Christmas at Dave we did some brief quad-biking followed by a little air gun shooting.

Mona was quite good at it but yours truly managed to hit the empty beer-can every time despite us continuously increasing the distance. Luck or some skills left from my military training, who knows?

We then chilled with Dave and the others working there in the shadow, as we realized that we had burned ourselves nicely on the sun, while waiting for Vernon who would pick us up at 1715 or so. He came around 1820, not before Dave had called him and had a quite intensive discussion – probably Dave was not very happy by the service Vernon had provided. As we were to leave Dave refused to accept money for the beers we had despite we explained that he had nothing to do with the tour-mixup and shouldn’t have to loose money on us because of others mistakes.

We decided that we would take the discussion with Lungile rather than shoot the driver and thus when we got there, already delayed with the taxi/shuttle waiting, and explained our memory of the deal and that we were not happy with getting something completely different. Bibbi in the reception was very surprised to hear we didn’t go to Addo Park since her memory of the deal was the same as ours and called up Vernon to verify this. It seems that Vernon tried to get a larger profit than usual this day and were caught with the fingers in the cookie-jar. However Bibbi couldn’t really take money from her pockets to return to us (and Vernon flatly refused) without hearing all sides of the story and getting approval from her boss. Did I mention that we were asked by the taxi-driver to pay her 5€ since she had been waiting for an hour? Bibbi promised to sort all this out somehow but as we were leaving we would get any money from Island Vibe which we were heading to since they shared owners as well, Bibbi would e-mail us the outcome of her discussions. Fair enough – she did what she could but why she didn’t beat the living shit out of, ass-hat of the day – Vernon, I don’t know – perhaps her boss and Vernon were best mates. We will see what happens though…

We had a really nice cab drive to J-bay since the lady driving us apparently were in the same business as Vernon but didn’t know him and were intrigued by what she had overheard from our discussion at Lungile. It ended up a good hour of trash talking idiots around the world, grumpy passengers and people trying to rip others off. We finally got to J-Bay and we crossed our fingers that our booking was solid (the reception guy who booked us yesterday was more than a little tipsy at that time – the staff parties with the guests here and it was Christmas celebration). It would be an epic ending of the day trying to scout for empty hotels at night but the room was there and we even managed to place an order for a pizza home delivery. Awesome.

As we packed up our stuff both the items I had misplaced earlier during the trip, i.e. the luggage tabs (see 19th of december for details) and a tube of toothpaste suddenly popped back into existence from *drumroll* – Mona’s packing. So after all that hassle with the luggage it appears that the boarding-passes I threw away were perfectly fine to throw away, the fact that it felt good to be perfect again removed the need for any harsh comments to my sometimes slightly lightheaded girlfriend 😉

Today we both managed to get some sleep and after some slacking outside next to the pool we headed off for another breakfast. We went back to the Boardwalk and checked out their somewhat posh-looking café/bar called The News Café. It had very very nice fruit shakes, as well as pancakes with yoghurt and I had some fried Halumi cheese together with fried tomato slices to my perfect eggs sunny side-up, yummy!

Impressed and completely full we strolled back to spend some time in a park called “Happy Valley” where it was not allowed to drink alcohol (or burn fires, or five other things) according to signs. South Africans have a thing for signs. Not in the way you can see in Japan with cartoons for everything but it just seems very unorganized. Big placards with information about e.g. a Cafe – and then there is no café to be found with that name within a block. Not mentioning their fear for getting sued – signs such as “Use the Safe at your own risk” or “Use the Steps at your own risk” seemed somewhat over the edge. Regarding unorganized, these awesomely designed stairs deserves some kind of prize. The idea is that one walks up to … a wall?

We chilled in Happy Valley for a couple of hours and when I found a statue that more or less said “Climb me and ride me” I followed my gut feeling. Watching the photo from my phone after Mona snapped it I realized that I wore the exact same tank top, similar but not exact same pair of shoes, shorts and sunglasses as on a photo from Ulf’s and mine trip to Japan were I rode some robotic dog or similar. Feels good that me turning 30 didn’t erase all the personality traits at least 😉

As we went back to Lungile to perhaps try out the pool in the nice sunny weather it of course got cloudy and instead we made plans for the upcoming day and sorted out accommodation in J-Bay for the following days as well as the first three nights in Cape Town. It really helped that Bibbi in the reception called to all places (for slightly more than an hour) rather than us doing it from a payphone or using e-mail. We thought we would eat more than one meal today and when arrangements were finalized we headed off to a place called Gondwana Café for a quite nice meal as well as a couple of drinks. The bill ended up at 22€ for two people spending an evening there – very nice. The idea of leaving for Addo Elephant park tomorrow before 07 and pack our stuff before that seemed like a less ideal plan after the drinks than before but well well – no rest for the wicked.