Sunday, July 20th, Breakwater Lodge, Cape Town, South Africa

In our last day in Cape Town, we chose to go to the Kirstenbosch Gradens. Kirstenbosch was established in 1913 to promote, conserve and display the extraordinarily rich and diverse flora of southern Africa, and was the first botanic garden in the world to be devoted to a country's indigenous flora.

Kirstenbosch displays a wide variety of the unique plant life of the Cape Flora, also known as fynbos, including sugarbushes , pincushions and heaths . Plants from all the diverse regions and biomes of southern Africa are also grown at Kirstenbosch, including a near-complete collection of cycads . The Botanical Society Conservatory is a custom-built glasshouse to grow and display plants from the arid regions that cannot survive outdoors.

There are over 7 000 species in cultivation at Kirstenbosch, including many rare and threatened species.  Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden lives up to its reputation as the most beautiful garden in Africa and one of the great botanic gardens of the world. Few gardens can match the sheer grandeur of the setting of Kirstenbosch, against the eastern slopes of Cape Town’s Table Mountain.

Tomorrow, we leave for our second tour.  We'll be traveling for four days up the west coast of South Africa, eleven days in Namibia, four days in Botswana, and the last two in Zimbabwe at Victoria Falls.  Stay tuned for lots of photos and commentary.

To see the photos we took there, click on Kirstenbosch Gardens.