Well Readers, after an overnight flight I’ve arrived in Cape Town and met the rest of the group for our Naturetrek plant tour. Unusually, there are three couples and no less than five single female travellers, so I’m not floating around as a gooseberry. Everyone seems really pleasant so far, and we set off for our trip to the town of Worcester in high spirits. As you can possibly just see in the photo above, however, Table Mountain had disappeared behind a blanket of rain, and so the day continued. By the time we got to our lunch stop, the rain was absolutely torrential. And so we didn’t get to the Botanical Garden to see the tortoises after all, though hopefully there will be lots more tortoises in our future.

To get to the other side of the mountains, though we had to go through the Huguenot Tunnel, a rather remarkable piece of engineering – it’s  3.9 kilometre s long, and was completed in 1988. It’s named for the Huguenot refugees who came to Cape Town originally in the 17th century, after the Edict of Fontainebleu outlawed protestantism in France.

I was wondering what these structures were – apparently they’re made by mole rats (not the naked sort). Also known as Blesmols, these little chaps spend most of their lives digging tunnels with their incisor teeth, Rather like the moles in the UK, these animals are rarely seen, though signs of their presence are everywhere.

Blesmol 0r African mole-rat (Photo by By Sharry Goldman – Cropped from: Seney ML, Kelly DA, Goldman BD, Šumbera R, Forger NG (2009) Social Structure Predicts Genital Morphology in African Mole-Rats. PLoS ONE 4(10): e7477. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007477.g001, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8103555)

Tonight we’re staying over in Worcester, at the Habit Guest House. Why it has that name is anyone’s guess, but it’s a very fine building, though the omnipresent window bars and razor wire take some getting used to at first. Plus, this is a first…

So I’m off to make a cup of Roibos tea, and then it’s an early dinner and bed. The weather forecast looks much better tomorrow, so fingers crossed!