The Drakensberg Mountains

This past weekend we went to the Drakensberg mountains. We stayed in this isolated little B&B (above). Our room had a walk out door to the back patio and I woke up early one morning and sat outside to watch the sun come up. There were tons of birds flying around and singing all their different songs and a one of "africa's deer" came frolicking up to the pond in our back yard. It was my favorite morning by far. It was so peaceful there as we were away from pretty much all noises except for nature and an occasional car that drove by. If you look at the last picture on this post it shows the view we had from our back patio.
Saturday we went for a couple of hikes. The picture above and the two below show some of the beauty we say while on our first hike, The Blue Grotto trail. It took us through a very dense rainforest-like area of the mountain and we pretty much followed a stream the whole way until we got to the "grotto" (picture below). This area was absolutely stunning. There were two waterfalls (the one in the picture below) and another bigger one. The water was ice cold, however, so we could not swim in it. After we left the grotto we hiked up for a little ways and came out of the forest on the top of one of the mountains (much, much smaller than the Rockies) and had a spectacular view of all the mountains surrounding us. Our hike back down was through a field and was not our favorite part. We did almost have a run-in with some baboons towards the bottom but we made it back without incident. We went on one other hike that day to a gorgeous waterfall but the hike itself was not too exciting unfortunately.
We went back after this and had a glass of the most delicious wine and took a dip in the pool as the sun was setting. It was lovely. That night we went to a buffet dinner at one of the golf resorts nearby. They had some great food and a huge selection. They called it a mega buffet. While we were eating we met some people from Cape Town who were there for a conference. They invited us to have a drink after dinner so we hung out with them all night. It was fun to talk to them and to learn more about South Africa from another perspective.