South Africa Part 2 – Intaka Island and Undersea Cables

On day 2, our plan was to go to Intaka Island. And then if we had time and energy afterward we would do something else (turns out we didn’t 🙂). Here we go!

Intaka Island

Intaka Island is in a part of Cape Town called Century City. It’s an inland, human-made island with a canal around it, and it’s basically a small nature park/wetland. It has amazing birds, which is what put it very high on our list of places to go!

We arrived around 08:30, purchased admission, and in we went! Our first stop was a couple of bird hides that people really like. A bird hide is a little building where you can watch the birds through open slots. The birds can’t see you very well so they don’t get nervous, and often come quite close.

The most popular one, the Kingfisher Hide was facing a small but active pond, and sure enough, there were already several people (photographers) there when we arrived. It wasn’t crowded, though. We got great views of several good birds, including the Malachite Kingfisher, some Egyptian Geese (which don’t actually come from Egypt), a Cape Wagtail, a Purple Heron, some Yellow-billed Ducks, a pair of Eurasian Moorhens with four adorable fuzzy little babies, and a pair of African Swamphens. A pretty good haul for our first stop! Everything was very active in the morning, and so it was a lot of fun to watch. We went back later in the day as well, and also saw the Pied Kingfisher.

The nearby Heron Hide, was also pretty good. It looked out onto a larger pond with some large nesting structures where Great Cormorants were nesting. There were also many Sacred Ibis, Blacksmith Lapwing, Red-knobbed Coot, and more Moorhens. Later at that pond we also saw a Reed Cormorant and an African Darter.

We wandered around Intaka for several hours, seeing quite a variety of birds. Another notable one was the Cape Weaver. They build a very interesting nest that hangs from the branch of a tree. The male builds the nest to try to attract a female. If a female comes and she likes it, she will mate with the male and use the nest. If she doesn’t like it, she’ll destroy it! And he has to start from scratch.

We saw several existing nests, but while we were there we also saw a male constructing a brand new nest. I’m guessing he got unlucky with his previous one 🙂

We saw several species of doves, of which the Red-eyed Dove was most prominent. The rhythm of their song sounded to me like “Yoo-hoo! A red-eyed dove”.

There were many Southern Double-collared Sunbirds, which are kind of like our Hummingbirds in the Americas, but a bit bigger. Fun fact: Hummingbirds ONLY exist in North and South America. They aren’t found on any other continent.

We also saw several Swallows flying around, and a lot of Hadada Ibis, which were pretty but obnoxiously loud! It wasn’t a huge island, but there was great diversity!

Between our first day in South Africa, and our Intaka trip on day 2, Sarah had recorded over 50 species already! Some of which she had seen before, but most of them were lifers.

Lunch…and the First Sign of Trouble

We had lunch at a nice little restaurant closeby called the Brick Lane Eatery. Sarah had a really good sandwich with bacon and cheese and avocado, with “sweet potato” wedges. But not the type of sweet potato we’re used to at home in Nova Scotia! I’m not sure if it’s a completely different thing or just a very different variety, but they weren’t orange, more the color of a typical potato, and also tasted completely different. Good though!

I had a Poke Bowl with chicken, couscous, cucumber, carrots, edamame, beet root, feta cheese, avocado, and probably more things that I’m forgetting about. It was delicious, but waaaaay too big for lunch! We both ended up bringing leftovers back to the Airbnb.

During lunch, oddly enough, both of our cell phones stopped connecting to the cell network. Fun fact, I was trying to look up how to pronounce “Poke Bowl” (turns out it sounds like Pokeball, from Pokemon) and I couldn’t get connected. I figured maybe there just wasn’t very good signal at the restaurant area. But when we got back to Intaka, we still couldn’t connect, even though we had definitely been connected before. I’ve had some SIM cards act a little finicky in other places as well, so I figured it was just a glitch…although it was strange that they both stopped working at the exact same time, especially since we got SIM cards from different companies. That said, they were on the same network (Vodacom).

Luckily, Intaka Island’s main building had wifi that we could use to get an Uber back to our Airbnb. On our way back, I still couldn’t connect to the cell network! So when we got back to the Airbnb (with working wifi), we checked to see if others were reporting issues. They were, and the reports had started coming in right around the same time we had been disconnected.

So we looked at Vodacom’s account on X (formerly Twitter) and they had a message there:

Certain customers are currently experiencing intermittent connectivity issues due to multiple undersea cable failures affecting SA’s network providers, including us. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

What? Seriously? Undersea cable failures?

Yep! There were already several news articles about it. There were widespread internet outages along the whole West coast of Africa because of these cables that, for some reason, had started failing. Possibly because of damage. Thankfully, whatever internet provider our wifi at the apartment used was still working!

Luckily for us, Vodacom got their network traffic rerouted pretty quickly, and we had cell connectivity back later that evening. It sounds like several other African countries were much more negatively affected, though.

In any case, after spending most of the day at Intaka, we were spent! We stayed in, ate some fish and leftovers, and got ready for the next day. Stay tuned for Part 3, where we head to the beautiful Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, and then to the top of Cape Town’s majestic and imposing Table Mountain!