[This is part 2 of 2]

They did come back in an African summer that was their winter. While New York shrank and shivered in a cold early December, they flew south again and landed smack in the middle of beauty.

That second of many visits to Cape Point was a warmer outing and blue skies competed with turquoise seas. The wind, however, kept hauling.

They drove along misty cliffs towards the park. Olifantboos having become a ritual destination, they tracked and backtracked. Then they got back on the road to town, making an impromptu stop at Boulders Beach to pay the penguins a visit.

Boulders Beach penguins

The situation there was dicier. The poor penguins seemed to have bailed from heavily frequented areas of the beach, leaving visitors to their own endeavors. A funny spotted genet, fearless and emancipated, visited a garbage can on the path to the parking lot. A loud altercation with a rude biped followed. Rude bipeds don’t seem to care much about rare animals.

It was for them a sad reminder that the human race remains biologically diverse, and that while some strive to rise above the narrowness of our cave-dwelling past, many still live in darkness and fear the saber-tooth tiger, which nowadays looks like taxes, like the other guy’s church, like a skin color two tones from our own. So these cave-dwellers do the only thing they can: they growl.

Daring spotted genet

My two travelers got back in the car and drove away while one’s anger red-lined, and the memory of the park’s beauty momentarily curled and faded, like paper convoluted by the torture of flames.

But now, long after the fact, an ocean apart, worlds away, they look back, the pictures come alive and the beauty is revived. And so I get to tell you their story. They would want me to.