Sunday 9 March 2014

A weekend in Pietermaritzburg #ibmcsc South Africa

For our first weekend some for the group headed for the Drakensburg Mountains ( you can read about their adventures on Andrew's Blog ).   Three of us however (myself, Lou and Mirek) remained in Pietermaritzburg to explore a little of what there is around here.

On Saturday Lou and I headed for the Botanical Gardens

Me at the main gate

and had a fantastic time exploring these wonderfully diverse and well kept gardens.

Amazing clean trunks on these trees as the bark peels off
Small lake
Some sort of Aster perhaps?

As well as the plants there was also plenty of wildlife such as the Hadeda Ibis..
Hadeda Ibis
 ... a family of these ducks ...
Open to ideas as to what species this is....
.. and some impressive nest building.
Nest

We stopped at the restaurant near the entrance for our lunch and as we munched on our tasty repast we noticed a wedding party coming in to have their photos taken...
Spotted a wedding party coming in to have their photos taken

... and then another .... and another.... you can see 3 different groups in this photo.
.... and a third - not often you get a photo with 3 bridal parties in it at the same time

Clearly an understandably popular place to come for photos and I noticed that they even have special entrance prices...
Guess they get a lot of wedding parties - rates listed

Should you be so inclined you can find plenty more photos of the gardens on my photostream on Flickr

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