We had breakfast at 8am. On walking back to our rooms after breakfast, S got lifer number 400! The hotel has various organised activities during the day. B, S & A went on an organised walk and H & I decided to do our own walk rather so we could bird. If you elect to do your own thing then you need to inform reception so that they can send out a search and rescue party if you don’t make it back for some reason. Our forest walk was meant to take 2 hours though not entirely sure how that is possible given H and I did a very slow walk as we were stopping for birds all the time and we made it back in an hour and 15 minutes. It was a lovely walk through the forest and up the mountain a bit so eventually you were almost in line with the canopy. We added some trippers and H added one lifer.

We relaxed for the balance of the morning in the room with H sitting on the balcony enjoying the sun before we start making our way back to rainy Cape Town. Lunch at 1pm was a buffet of salads, cottage pie and vegetable bobotie followed by apple pie and custard or ice cream & hot chocolate sauce. I lost track of how many deserts A at lunch today.

B, S, H & I went for an after lunch walk to the dams which are next to and below the hotel. It was on the start of the same route that they took for their organised walk but this time we could stop to do some birding. We all added one lifer and I managed to get another one (which H had actually gotten earlier in the trip already). My trip list is now at 228 birds and I have added 19 lifers. As you would have seen, H passed 450 lifers, S has now passed 400 lifers, B has passed 350 lifers. It has been a productive trip for all of us. I had hoped for 10 lifers on the trip (and thought that might be a stretch) so 19 with a total lifer count now of 579 is definitely way more than I could have hoped for.

Dinner was preceded tonight by drinks and snacks (snacks provided by hotel). 3-course dinner as last night with salad and cheese. The clear favourite on the food side seems to be the ice cream & chocolate sauce which has now been eaten at 3 of our 4 meals here and I reckon if it was served at breakfast then a few people (H & A particularly) would have had it then too.

We all agreed that we could easily have spent another day here.

Until tomorrow …

P, H, S (400 lifers!), B, O & ………………………. A