Today I lead a trip to the Inverdoorn Game Reserve two and one-half hours west of the city.  It turns out to be a good decision to take on this trip because it affords the opportunity to see many species of wildlife in the enormous 10,000-hectares (approximately 22,000 acres) reserve of a desert biome completely different from other areas nearer to Cape Town.  The road we take stretches 1,000 kilometers on to Johannesburg in the northwest and goes through the longest tunnel in Africa.  Mountain ranges on all sides are spectacular, most of them consisting of very hard sandstone resistant to erosion.

The giraffe is pleasantly pregnant.

In the Tulbagh valley between Cape Town and our destination, rich farmland around the Touwsriver provides irrigation for abundant grape harvests for fresh eating and wine and orchards with deciduous fruits in Ceres.  But past the river valley the ecology changes to harsh and dry desert

A French family privately purchased the reserve land and now operates a safari lodge on its extensive grounds in order to fund conservation efforts, provide local employment for native people in a rural area, and rehabilitate lions and cheetahs.  Because people in rural areas are far more interested in moving to urban areas—and government authorities in the latter must fund housing and city services for those new residents—there is now far less money for conservation agencies in rural areas.  Thus, many parks and reserves have had to become ever more enterprising in order to survive.  Inverdoorn is an impressive project to welcome paying travelers and protect wildlife while conserving the environment.

For those of us on this day trip, it is a chance to do a mini-safari without the time and cost of the three-day and four-day safaris that many of our fellow shipmates have undertaken to much more remote locations.  The reserve is in the immense Karoo desert and the vistas are stunning.  We bounce around in modified land rovers peering closely in a landscape that does a pretty good job of providing camouflage for most of the animals we seek.  We do a good job—finding all of them except for the rhinoceros.  Although we find his tracks and his scat, he still succeeds in eluding us.

The springbok is a tough one to catch before they bound away.

All afternoon we drive and then stop to take pictures when we sight them: giraffe, zebra, waterbuck, oryx, springbok, hippopotamus (only the nose and top of his head peeks out of the water), korhaan, kudu, impala, eland, lion, ostrich and cheetah.  We spot birds, too:  white necked raven, cattle egret and Cape spurfowl.

Coming back into Cape Town we run into both returning Easter holiday and Jazz Festival traffic and there are three knotty jams, one of them in that very, very long tunnel through the mountains that we previously traveled quickly through on the way out of town.  By the time we get back to the ship the winds near the harbor are so strong that we can barely walk from the bus and the temperature is dropping.  We cannot complain.  We have had fantastic weather our entire stay.