While Alex is writing a long welcome-to-our-blog and here-we-are-in-South-Africa post, I thought I could jump in with some photos of the beasties we’ve encountered. (By the way, if you are a friend of ours, you may get to see a few more pictures in our Flickr stream if you add us as a contact than you would as the general public.)

On to the bugs. First up is a huge cockroach we found in the office. We thought about killing it, but we know how messy that can be and besides, it looked like it was big enough to fight back. There’s an awful lot of detail on the hairy legs. I hope he didn’t come back and scare the office manager!

Next, we have a centipede of some sort (or perhaps a decipede would be more accurate since it has about 32 legs). Alex spotted it under the dining table, and trapped it under a glass, but it was upside down and apparently they can’t breath if they are upside down. We put it outside where it was moving but not very much, and when we came back later it was gone. A tasty dish for something bigger, perhaps.

And finally a mammal. We went down the cape to Kalk Bay, a fishing village about ten minutes away from Muizenberg with a beautiful working harbour. This seal was sat next to a fish-gutting stand, looking decidedly lazy. There was another seal in the water outside the harbour diving very successfully for fish.

That’s all for now – hoping to catch some monkeys, baboons and penguins before we split for the Eastern Cape.