Mossel Bay, South Africa (Apr 7)

We arrived on Good Friday in Mossel Bay, a modest port town of about 90,000 in the Western Cape Province at the western end of the Garden Route, so many things (museum, gin distillery!, some stores) were closed. Mossel Bay was named for the plethora of mussels that were found there by early explorers. Despite the holiday, we got to see the “Post Office Tree”, a 500 year old milkwood tree where ancient seafarers on their way east left their letters for home in a shoe hanging from the branches for sailors returning home to Portugal would collect these letters and carry them to their destinations. There is now a statue of a large shoe under the tree.

The Cape St. Blaize lighthouse, built in 1864, is, until only recently, only one of two along the South African coast that was manned 24/7.