June 18: Boulders

Today was our next class excursion out of Stellenbosch! Going to Boulders Beach and Cape Point I didn't really know what to expect. When I first started thinking about going to South Africa, I did some research on the cape region, and I learned that penguins live down here! In fact, Boulders is famous for them! I was really excited about that. I thought it would be so cool to see penguins living in the wild. In Africa, of all places! (And I'm not going to say that the thought of seeing penguins living on the beach didn't influence my decision on where to go just a little bit.)

It was another early morning today, and we drove about an hour and a half outside of Stellenbosch to the sea at Fish Hoek. We took two busses, the first went to Cape Point, the other to Boulders. I was on the Boulders bus. The beach we were at was a sort of wildlife preserve, and we first walked along a boardwalk  above the beach and got to watch the penguins from there. Then about six of us found an open area of the park where the park employees said we could walk on the beach with the penguins!

The first penguins that we saw when we arrived at boulders.

This guy was really friendly. He was sitting so close you could almost touch him!

I guess this is where all the penguins go to hang out!

This is the beach that we were able to go on. I guess nobody really knows about it! Although there were several people in the park, we were the only ones on this beach!

This guy was only two feet from me. He's actually as close as he looks in the picture!

It's hard to tell in this picture, but there's a penguin and its baby. The baby has really good camouflage.

This is why it's called Boulders.

These two  were also on the beach. They didn't mind humans at all, they just walked past  us and didn't even give us a second glance.

Pretty cool!