South Africa: Gordon's Bay, Betty's Bay and Hermanus

My last full day in South Africa was also the first day that we stepped more or less in line with some sort of conventional tourism. The day didn't have much of a plan, in fact traveling to Hermanus was only whimsically suggested the night before after dinner and a (fair) bit to drink. With this change of tact, a flagrant disregard for the GPS's suggestions and very little purpose, this is exactly where you may expect luck to turn south.

What followed was instead one of the very best days of a holiday I've ever had.

We gave up on the GPS at about the Strand choosing to get off highways and instead follow the eastern coast of False Bay from Gordon's Bay to Betty's Bay, putting us firmly in "spectacular coastline" territory complete with a tight and windy road that had the motorcyclist in me beyond excited.

Stopping semi-regularly (once every four or five bays) "wows" were exchanged and shutters hammered. Perhaps it's important to note about now that from Gordon's Bay to Hermanus the patch of road following the coast is signposted as "the whale route" as it surely forms part of the reason why we found a good quality pair of binoculars abandoned at a vantage point we stopped at for photos.

Our good fortune was only warming up.

So it turns out that Betty's Bay is host to a penguin colony. Following a boardwalk we were led past thousands of penguins at various stages in the moulting process. Comical and as occasionally cute as they were, the thing about penguin colonies (in my sample size of three) is that they smell bad. Somewhere between Cliff's room and Cliff's car bad.

By the time we'd arrived at Hermanus (a further forty km) the smell was long forgotten.

I'd actually been to Hermanus before, on the way back to Cape Town from shark diving in Gansbaii in December 2011. Our guide Brian had stopped the bus there to talk a little about the town and let us wander the cliffs overlooking the water before moving on. Essentially, Hermanus is a seasonal tourist town (August - November) for one very simple and wonderful reason, you can watch whales from the pubs and hotels situated on these cliffs. They breach and lobtail so close that were you in the water, you'd be in violation of the maritime exclusion zone around them.

Finding binoculars was lucky but they were really quite superfluous.

Bianka won the whale spotting race, spying some broken water beyond protruding rocks in the bay, maybe 150m from us. I'd actually already seen it and at her pointing it out, dismissed it by suggesting that it was just some surf over submerged rocks related to the protruding ones infront of it.

Moments later I was eating humble pie as a whale spectacularly breached and flopped on its back, right where the broken water was.

I'm also a little ashamed to say that it took maybe forty minutes to discover that a pub over our shoulders offered much the same vantage point and beer.

Our afternoon disappeared into a few hours with whales for entertainment. There were at least three of them, one favouring breaching, another lobtailing (sometimes in concert) and a third most certainly only a calf. With the afternoon winding down and the light beginning to get warmer with the setting sun, we headed back to Paarl on the same route, my hope being that I'd be able to get some photos of False Bay with the Cape Peninsula silhouetted by yellows, oranges and pinks.

We pulled up at a spot I thought best and Bianka spotted a southern right whale calving at the bottom of the cliff while I was looking for a place to have a piss.

We really were stupidly lucky.