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Mauritius was good, relaxing place to finish the trip and to get rid of the traveling tiredness. We stayed there for the two last weeks of our actual big trip.
Chris’s friend Alex ended up to Madagascar around same time when Chris moved to Finland, and then later moved to Mauritius. So we went there to see him, and stayed at his friend’s place with a nice pool. As Alex was working during daytime, we mainly really slept and applied for jobs for the first week. On the weekend and during Alex’s days off we drove around the island and visited few places. Mauritius is surprisingly big island. The island is mainly French speaking, even though only 2% of inhabitants are from Europe. Creols present 27% of the population, and quite surprisingly Indians are majority with 68%. Indians were brought to the island after slavery was abolished in 1830’s.
We have definitely been spoiled during this year, as we felt that the sea temperature in Mauritius was almost cold, but nicely refreshing though. We could notice that we couldn’t appreciate anymore the sun and the sea so much after having sun nearly all the year and having visited so wonderful places for snorkeling. We actually even started to miss the cooler temperatures back in Finland! For the second week of our stay the weather was mostly cloudy and rainy. Someone said that the climate change has brought more clouds and rain also to Mauritius, same thing as in Finland. Our friend Sandrine finally got her flight attendant shifts arranged to match with our trip route, so she came to see us in Mauritius, and we spent the second last evening with her. That was really nice finish for our big trip.
   
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Our blog doesn’t however finish yet here, we will still tell a bit about our return to Europe and back home.

In Cape Town we couch surfed by two great hosts. They helped so much to plan our visit in South Africa, and we had great food and wine every night. Chris had to get used to South African wines, as that is just about the only wine you can find there. Luckily it is good. :) We got the honour to be the first ever couch surfers by the first couple. They live very close to the new stadium built for next summer’s football world cup, so we got to see that too.

On the way to the Cape of Good Hope we saw our first animals in Africa. Guess what they were? Elephants, monkeys? No, penguins! We didn’t even expect to see penguins in this continent, so that was quite a surprise.
Cape of Good Hope was definitely one of the most windy places we have visited. It was a wonderful place especially by its flora, and you can easily spend hours in there. Because Cape of Good Hope is not the southernmost point of Africa, we also later visited l’Agulhas, which is.
   
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We climbed up Table Mountain, which dominates the landscape of Cape Town, of course at the hottest time of the day, as we could not get up early in the morning after long evening. The climbing takes around 2 hours.
   
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We didn’t stay up very long admiring the sceneries as we had tickets booked for the afternoon to Robben island, where for example Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years.
   
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Our second destination in South Africa was Kruger national park. On the way there we stopped for a day in Hermanus to watch the whales from the shore. Yes, so we finally got to see whales :) They even gave us a very nice jumping show just before sunset.
   
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From Cape Town to Kruger we drove around 2000 kilometers. We had plenty of time to look at the landscape. Fauna and flora are beautiful in the Free state.
   
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In Kruger national park one can drive around without a guide and spot the animals. Already during the first day we had seen antelopes, buffaloes, elephants, zebras, giraffes, rhinos, hippos, crocodiles, warthogs, a turtle, leopard, and plenty of birds. In a guided night safari we saw on top many hyenas, which came really close to us, plus in a distance lions, which kept big noise fighting with hyenas. We also woke up another leopard, which posed to us very lazily for a long time.
   
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On the second day in Kruger we tried to spot a cheetah, the only one of the main animals there we hadn’t seen yet, but they stayed hiding.
It was really funny to spot all the animals from the Lion King movie. Especially warthogs (Pumba in the movie) looked really funny when they were running their bottoms up. Instead of spotting a cheetah we experienced exciting moments when an elephant almost attacked our car. We were filming it when it suddenly turned, looked at us and started running towards our car. We were really in a hurry to back up, didn’t feel like staying as a toy. We managed to create a traffic jam when cars had to queue while waiting for the cranky elephant to move away from the middle of the road. Chris got this episode on a film, just a hint in case someone happens to have a boring day.
   
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Before flying to Mauritius from Johannesburg we stopped by for a day in Pretoria for shopping and sightseeing.
   
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South Africa is an amazing and special country, which got us very excited even in the end of our travels. Wish we could have stayed longer than two weeks, time passed really fast. Even though you hear warnings about the security in South Africa, we didn’t feel unsafe or threatened. Of course we didn’t take unnecessary risks and we didn’t stay in Johannesburg. We kept car doors locked all the time, that’s about it. Cape Town seemed very wealthy and nice place.

Videos from our trip in Malaysia are ready to be enjoyed on Khrystube.

Hong Kong feels like a big ocean of high buildings. Hong Kong includes more than 200 islands. We spent 3 days in this tax-free shopping paradise. So shopping was a must there, but to be honest we spent most of time in the internet, since we had free WIFI in the guest house and we had lot to catch up. Hotels is Hong Kong are expensive, but the guest houses are very good budget option. We stayed in funny Chungking Mansion building, looks awful outside, but inside is tens or even hundreds of different guesthouses, at least in ours the rooms were really clean and newly renovated. We walked around a bit in Kowloon and the main Hong Kong island.
   
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See you in South Africa !

Videos from our trip in Thailand are ready to be enjoyed on Khrystube.