Okay - while in South Africa we hired a driver and a van one day to take us up the Stellenbosch wine route to go wine tasting. In order to also satisfy the kids, we stopped at this amazing place called Butterfly World. Our driver suggested it and it was magnificent! It is a 1000 sqm green house filled with butterflies. There are a few other animals as well but there are 10,000+ butterflies just flying all over the place. It is magical. If you sat still for long enough (which our kids couldn't do) they would land on you. I just read on their site that they bring in 500-800 butterfly pupae every week all year around. This is how they have so many. I have thousands of photos of our amazing South Africa trip over x-mas so I'll slowly play catch up. First, here are our photos from our visit to Butterfly World - a must stop for anyone in the Stellenbosch, Western Cape (just north of Cape Town) area.
they also had these adorably tiny and friendly monkeys climbing all over the place. we loved them. you could pet them and our guide even managed to get one on his shoulder. they are mischievous (like the one in Night at the Museum) as they try to pick pockets.
hand feeding the birds
and, now the reason we went. check out a few of these snaps of the main attraction.
on the right is the famous Owl Butterfly - meant to be the largest butterfly around.The video below is all the Pupae hanging and the butterflies actually being born. We could sit there and watch them. Incredible! We were most surprised to find out how short their life spans are - only about 1 week. After all this work they go through to hatch, they only live about a week long... shame.
