Trying to Say Goodbye

Day 120:  Oh my!  The number shows that today is the 120th of our winter away.  I checked back in this journal and confirmed that although we left a day earlier, we landed in Dubai on the evening of November 10, 2024.  Imagine that!  Here it is March 10, 2025 already and we're still on vacation. 

So it seems a little fitting that we have to pack this evening.  Tomorrow, we hope to be on an 8:30 am bus from Durban to Johannesburg, South Africa.  It is supposed to be an eight-hour trip.  We have reservations for four nights at the Holiday Inn in Rosebank.  

We will have a little time to check out the city before flying back towards Vancouver on the 15th.  First we fly 11.5 hours to Paris and after a four-hour layover, we hope to board another 10 hour flight directly to YVR.

So although the final day count will be over 120 days, this is our final day in Durban.  It feels like the beginning of the process of returning home. We've been in South Africa since getting off our cruise ship in Cape Town on January 17th.

This morning was windy and a bit overcast but as Mitchell Park Zoo is right in the neighbhourhood, we walked up to say goodbye to some of the animals we met on a previous visit.  As seniors we had to pay an entrance fee of US$0.50 per person.  We figured it was worth it to day goodbye to the cockatoo and parrots.  None seemed to know how to say goodbye, so we had to actually say hello to them. They replied with a hello, perhaps knowing we most likely will never come back.

Oh, and the marmoset screamed but the tortoises didn't say much of anything.  The latter remain rather stoic when parting.