Cintsa: Room with a view and animals

Wendy with her new friends at the school concert.
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Cintsa is a small town on the eastern cape, and when I say small I mean it has a convenience store which is a 20 minutes walk from the one backpackers.  Other than that there are a bunch of vacation homes, and 20kms of natural beachfront.

We were put in a cottage, about a minute walk down the hill from the main house, towards the beach.  The cottage had it's kitchen, living room, bathroom, and 4 bunks.  The little patio area was had a direct view of the bright blue waves crashing into Cintsa's river mouth.  Needless to say we loved it, though it did have it's down falls.

The school concert.
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There were lots of free activities, like canoeing, beach volley ball, rock climbing (all of which was either non-opperational or we did not partake in).  One of the free activities was a trip to the local school (literally a 1 room school house) to hear their weekly chorus practice.  The school was on a high cliff, from which you could see Giralffe eating in the distance.  The children's voices were amazing, they did a lot of local songs as well as "Heads, shoulders, knees and toes." At the end of the preformance they put up a world map and had all the visitors point out what country they were from, and had us sign a visitor's book.  We decided to donate that night's beer money to them.  Lately, we have been using our beer money for either donations or laundry wash.

The view from our deck.
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The second day our room got infested with ants, and when I say infested I mean, 1000s in my bed, in Craig's (other guest in the room) pants, on the windows... everywhere.  At the same time, we noticed two hornet/wasp creatures taking over Wendy and my (tovah)'s room. The desk brought down some spray (keep in mind this isn't a 5 star hotel, the location is prime, but it's about $10/night to stay there).  After fumagating the cottage, the ants came back and more than ever.  We sprayed again and headed off to the front desk to see what they could suggest.  All they offered was to move us to a 12 person room, with no bathroom or kitchen.  Kirsten (San Diego chick also rooming in the animal kingdom) talked them out of the move with "but we have dinner plans, we need the kitchen." So we stayed despite the creatures after weighing our options.  The next morning, after Wendy and my morning walk, we discovered a sparrow had moved into the room and it took about an hour to get it to find the door.

The beach.
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Other fun activities included the 4pm free box wine and sport hour.  John (the hostel's intern- here they call them "work-study"- in charge of picking the activity) picked cricket.  So 2 aussies, 4 americans, a south african and a dutch guy headed down to the beach to learn cricket.  The game is really rediculous and wendy and I kept getting confused about the lack of bases, but the wine did what most box wine does and after awhile we were laughing and falling in the sand.  Kirsten even got knocked out sumo style when two people (on the same team) went for the ball.  By 7pm it was time to head back, so we hijacked the left over wine and ventured to make dinner in our cottage.  After putting the rice on and stewing the beginnings of the veggie stew, I grabbed wendy by the arm and said "Wendy, you have to take it from here."  Then I snagged my sleeping bag from the fumagated zone and found a nice ant free surface on the couch to sleep on.  Mind you it was 7:30pm.  Wendy got a few pictures of this, which I reserve the right to not put on the blog.

Boxed wine til sundown
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All in all Cintsa is beautiful, the waves are fantastic and we started to get a base tan.