The cape environment

We are surrounded by possibly the most austerely beautiful scenes of nature that either of us has ever seen. I am sitting right now typing at David's desk on the second floor of our house in Kalk Bay, looking out his balcony at the stunningly green sea (maybe 50 yards away) and surrounded by immense mountains on three sides, with mountains also across false bay, barely visible through the mist. The mountains are like none I have ever seen, craggy tops jutting out for hundreds of feet above their green shirts. Many of the plants of the cape literally exist nowhere else on earth. The Cape Floral Kingdom is the smallest of the world's six floral kingdoms, existing only in south west ZA (compare this with Holarctic Kingdom, which basically encompasses every plant of the northern hemisphere). We've gotten to see all sorts of birds and on Sunday we went down to the pier where fisherman were bringing in their daily haul and got to watch seals playing by the docks waiting for the scraps to be tossed to them. 

David is fond of recollecting that we are here literally at the end of the world, at the very tip of the african continent, with nothing but water between us and Antarctica.  Speaking of water, we are in the unique position of being able to see two oceans within a three minute drive of each other. We stood at the shore of the Atlantic, drove over a hill, and found the Indian Ocean spreading out before us. It is winter here, but Abigail and I have resolved to find a warm day in which we can dip our toes into the Indian Ocean, as it is a sea we have never touched before.

We're going to borrow David's camera and then I promise we will share some pictures... (the Internet is much more of a spotty beast then I was expecting, so our blog updates will be a bit irregular, I'm afraid.)