Honeymoon Part 1

Finally I get to do this. Married life or life in general has been busy so far, so I'm really pleased to finally get some time to post about our gorgeous honeymoon.

We stayed at various places along the upper north coast of South Africa, so logically each place will have the title of a different part.

On the Monday after our wedding we left a bit later than we had hoped, probably about 6:30 in the morning, to our first destination in Blythedale Beach. Blythedale Beach is a fairly secluded area and whats nice about it is that they have very strict building regulations, so no high buildings to take away from the deserted look of the forest-like area, which is beautiful.

We arrived in about 7 hours at Palm Dune Beach Lodge where we would be staying for 5 nights. The place was lovely, but not really what we had been expecting (Mauritius had set our expectations too high maybe). After being moved to another room we were still a bit dissapointed but settled in as nicely as we could.

Here's some pictures of the lodge



Rain had been predicted for the entire week while we were there which really put a damper on things. The lodge offered numerous activities which we were interested in (kayaking, forest walks, etc.) but due to the weather weren't able to partake in any of them. So for a week we spent a lot of time driving to various places to do stuff, which worked out perfectly in the end as we did a ton of things we would ordinarily not have gotten to do.

Some of the highlights were:

Visiting Crocodile Creek, a crocodile farm, where I stroked and sat beside an alligator (not a croc).


Horse riding in Umdloti through the sugar cane fields with the beach on our side. My horse was a bit mad though. He'd suddenly eat all the sugar cane that he could then tried to galop away. It was so much fun!


Doing the Karkloof Canopy Tour in the pouring rain. It was amazing! This is what the "tour" is "The canopy tour involves traversing from one platform to another along a steel cable suspended up to 30m above the forest floor. The tour comprises seven platforms and eight slides that zig-zag down a pristine forested valley. The scenery and bird life is spectacular and professional guides provide interesting facts about the forest ecology during the tour." We were so high up and there was so much mist and rain that we didn't get to see too much of the forest but the whole experience of being put in a harness and "sliding" down huge cables through a dense forest was too good to be true. We were soaking wet when we finished, even our socks were muddy and wet. But on return we were greeted with lunch and hot chocolate, which warmed things up.



Management of the lodge where we were staying really did do their best to make our stay memorable. On our first night we got a complementary dinner and wine. Twice during our stay we'd return after a long day out to champagne, chocolates and flowers (and sometimes muffins) in our room. And on our last night we had a private dinner with more champagne on our patio complete with our own waiter standing by the whole night.