For this post we are back to our South Africa travelogue and the next stop on our trip was Knysna. This had always been a favourite stop whenever we travelled the Garden Route back to Cape Town at the beginning of the University year and we had visited again a couple of times after graduating when heading back to visit friends. We had always been taken by “Under Milkwood“, a collection of wooden chalets under a stand of Milkwood trees on the edge of the lagoon close to the Knysna Heads, and had once stretched our meagre budget to spend a night there. When planning this trip we had booked 3 nights and were looking forward to revisiting an old favourite place and using Knysna as a base to explore from and unpack for a few days. The location is perfect with the Heads a short walk away, the lagoon for swimming and kayaking and a wetland a brief drive away for photographing birds so it felt like 3 days in paradise.

One of my aims was to try and get an image showing the ruggedness and danger of the passage between the Heads as I had been reading the Kindle edition of the English translation of Fiela se Kind by Dalene Matthee which Edin’s aunt had given her to read on the trip. The book is set in the Knysna area and the Heads and the sea between them has a significant role in the story. It is an absorbing book which I would love to read again in Afrikaans as there were areas where it was obvious that the translation was losing some of the beauty of the original language.

On the evening of our arrival we took a walk to the Heads and the sky was quite stormy with some rain squalls on the horizon and a yacht making its way in. The only way to the record horizontal angle that I wanted was using 3 images to create a panorama. These were taken with the Fuji X100 and assembled in Photoshop – the apparent 2 yachts being the same one at 2 stages in its journey. It’s a bit frustrating to present at web res as the full file has a lot of detail and texture.