#Nature

Yesterday I spent the morning walking around the central section of the Melville Koppies Nature Reserve. Most of you know I visit the Koppies often, but this walk was special.

The Melville Koppies reserve is divided into three sections: East, Central, and West. The East and West sections are open to the public, and I usually walk in the East section. The Central section is normally closed to the public except for guided tours, due to its rare biodiversity and archeological sites. (There is a well-preserved Iron Age furnace in the Central section.)

After spending two days overlooking the beach in Plettenberg Bay (see part 1), our group of lady journalists took a quick hop over the Outeniqua Mountains to spend two days in the desert town of Oudtshoorn.

I visited the Swartland – a wine region about an hour northwest of Cape Town – almost two months ago. My visit was mostly about wine, which I wrote about already, but I have all these other cool pictures and memories from the trip that I wasn’t able to share in that post.

In April 2016 I published a blog post about the Wilds, a park near downtown Joburg. That post felt kind of controversial at the time because most Joburgers considered the Wilds to be a horribly dangerous place where no rational person would ever go.

I recently received an invitation to participate in a blogging campaign called #Stellenblog. #Stellenblog is an annual weeklong event in which bloggers/social media influencers from around South Africa and the world go to Stellenbosch – a university town outside Cape Town that is the center of South Africa’s wine industry – and hang around eating/drinking/having fun.