A Little Local Wildlife and Tribal Culture

Today we travelled south-east to Etosha National Park (still in Namibia), where the relatively open plains allowed some spectacular game viewing from our elevated truck. We stayed at two different campsites/lodges - Halali and Okaukuejo (which we can really recommend for your next trip, Roy and Nini, assuming you haven't already visited of course). During our two days there, we managed to see 6 or 7 lions, though none of them very close; several hundred plains-zebra (the difference between this and their mountain cousins being that these are 'blek, wite and rrrrust', rather than simply 'blek and wite', to quote Gettie; one usually very elusive leopard, having an exciting stand-off and skirmish (but not quite an all-out assault) with a cheetah, who was obviously guarding her 4 young, we soon realised; a white rhino, and one of the more rare black rhinos; thousands of springbok, as well as eland, kudu, oryx and .... ; a secretary-bird and a kori bustard (the latter being the largest bird in Africa, if not the world, able to fly); several elegant giraffes, hundreds of blue wildebeest (gnu); a mangy-looking jackal; one lone, rather aroused bull elephant, and another who walked slowly but purposefully towards our truck and across the road right in front of us. So, rather to our amazement, all the 'big four' for Namibia, which has no buffalo (which would have made it the 'big 5') were out to play.  

Yesterday, en route to Etosha, we stopped at a petrified forest (where all the trees had turned to stone several millenia ago, and where we saw some fine examples of Namibia's national plant, the Welwitschia, which can apparently survive for more than 2,000 years, despite desert conditions, high winds and nibbling animals of all descriptions!.

Before that, we'd had a fascinating visit to a village where some of the semi-nomadic Himba tribe now live. They are a pastoral people of between 20,000 and 50,000 living in Kunene region - and possibly amongst the most photographed tribe in the world. They wear scanty goat-skin clothing, heavily adorned with jewellery of shells, copper and iron, according to the tribal hiearchy. The distinctive red colour of their skin and hair is a mixture of butter, ash and ochre, which protects them from the harsh desert climate. We were horrified to learn that, after the young girls/women have their first menstruation, they are never again allowed to wash themselves with water, despite slathering this horrible-sounding mixture all over their bodies, hair and headresses; instead, once a week they 'bathe' using smoke from a small fire lit in a little bowl, holding the bowl close to their chin, under their arms, under their headresses, and other body parts which we won't mention here, as their way of ridding themselves of parasites. It really doesn't bear thinking about! Apparently, both the livestock they own and some of their ceremonies around the central 'holy fire' - one of which is this bathing ceremony - are pivotal to the Himba belief in ancestor worship. As a village, they seem to have little in the way of material goods, and their tiny mud-built schoolroom was more basic than anything we'd seen on previous travels - and yet, this particular tribal village, near Kamanjab, apparently has visits from tour groups on a pretty regular basis, and we were assured by our guide that the tour companies do pay for this privilege. Makes you wonder .....

Okay, tomorrow we head off to the capital, Windhoek, for one last night in Namibia, before crossing the border into Botswana on Monday, where we'll visit the Chobe National Park as well as the Okavanga Delta.

Shake, Rattle 'n' Roll!

(Editor's note: we'll need to publish the next two posts without any pictures, due to the lamentably slow, wind-up internet connections in Namibia. Even slower than at the Quadrangle! We'll bring you up to date with pics as soon as technology allows).

I keep thinking of this song as we travel, in our Nomad truck, along these dirt and boulder-strewn roads which sometimes run for hundreds of miles in a straight line through nothing but rust-red (and occasionally more 'sand' coloured) Namib desert. From time to time the noise the truck makes as it clatters, swerves and lurches over these seemingly cobble-stoned ' highways' stops dead any kind of conversation, even between two people sitting next to each other! Our driver, Martin (or Matin, as pronounced Zimbabwean-style) laughingly refers to the experience as an 'African full-body massage', for which we should be paying extra!

The truck (we keep getting corrected when we call it a bus) has no shock absorbers - because the hydraulics would burst on the bumpy roads apparently - and occasionally we get lifted out of our seats, especially when sitting near the back of the truck, landing with a bit of a thump just a second later. But, despite all this, it is still surprisingly a great and exhilarating experience (I'd stop short at calling it comfortable, and yet it is not entirely uncomfortable either ). Also, I don't quite know why, but it somehow feels very strange when, after several hundredx of kilometres driving in a dead-straight line through this almost feature-less, traffic-less and arid terrain - albeit with several small undulations as we drive into and out of the many dried-up river-beds - we then arrive and stop at a crossroads, even though there's obviously nothing coming in any direction for maybe a hundred kilometres, and then if turning right or left, take a really sharp right-angle in the required direction. You might think that a little, or even lengthy, meander to cut the corner occasionally might be in order, or that it wouldn't actually be necessary to come to a full stop before turning - but no.

Also, the truck is amazingly functional. Most days we stop on the road and assist the crew to make lunch, wherever they can find at least two trees together to give enough shade (not always easy in this vast desert). Then, out of all sorts of drop-down hideaways on the sides and back of the truck, emerge a large two-ring bottled-gas cooker, several huge pots and pans, tin plates and cups, cutlery, trestle tables and chairs, as well as crates of food, and, whilst the rest of us go and find a 'bush toilet', the crew starts to rustle up an amazing meal for us. Sometimes this is a salad with cold meats, cheese and bread rolls, etc, but once or twice we've had cooked meals like spaghetti bolognese, miraculously produced within a mere 20-30 minutes of setting up camp. Despite having no air-conditioning, the truck is also very well ventilated, so that, once we pick up a bit of speed, there's usually a coolish - or, in the early mornings a very cool - breeze flowing through. We have to be careful to open all the small slidey windows at the top of the truck to allow all the dust and sand to blow in, and then again out, otherwise it would all collect in the cabin. It's then surprisingly unnoticeable just how much dust blows through whilst we're travelling, and yet, at every stopover, when we collect our bags stored in the lockers in the back of the truck, we have to beat them like rugs to get all the dust and sand off before we can start to unpack.

Since our last posting, we've travelled several hundred kilometres through West and Central Namibia. We've:
made an early-morning attack on the summit of the famous, dramatic, rust-red sand dunes (Dune 45 in our case, over 170m high) at Soussouvlei, against the backdrop of an unfeasibly blue sky, in the Namib-Naukleft Park. Here we also spent a couple of hours with a !Xung (San) bushman, who showed us how 'easy' it is for the bushmen to navigate their way through this seemingly feature-less desert, to survive in this hostile terrain with their impressive hunting skills (hunting for certain insects and bushes as well as game), and ways of storing water in ostrich eggs - sealed with beeswax and buried in the sand with just a straw marker to indicate their location - for up to 9 months at a time. And we also learned from him that in the wet season this year (July and August) they'd had an almost unprecedented 200mm of rain (as against 2mm the year before, for example), which explained why there are so many millions of small, grey-green spiky bushes and grassy hummocks dotting the desert this year - the first time since for 40 years we were told ).
walked through the Deadvlei ('vlei' means a valley where water is sometimes found), but where water is no longer found, and where there is now a standing forest of dead, but not yet fossilised (or petrified) trees;
visited a big cat enclosure in the farm whose lodge (Hammerstein Lodge) we were staying in - and where one of the Cheetahs took a real 'licking' to Andy (see the photo below);
explored the Bavarian-looking coastal town of Swakopmund, with its wonderful ethnographic and natural history museum, beautiful old railway station now converted into a 6-star hotel. Whilst we had a relatively lazy stroll around the town, some of the more adrenelin-loving members of the group went sky-diving, quad-biking on the dunes, or sailing trips to see the dolphins and seals just offshore. Shortly after leaving the town, we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, and of course stopped for a photo-call (or Kodak moment, as our Cambodian guide always called it);
taken 2-hour, very hot, midday hike in the Brandberg mountains near Khorixas in Damaraland to see some beautiful cave paintings, discovered during the 1970s and dated back to around 1500 years BC.
Now we're having a rare post-lunch relaxation in our accommodation (the Oase Lodge in Kamanjab) before we go out to meet some people from the nomadic Himba tribe this afternoon, and then on to the Etosha National Park tomorrow.

Oh, but we just thought we'd share a little sad news - particularly with those of you who followed our past travel blogs from South East Asia. We learned by e-mail yesterday that Neville, the very entrepreneurial Director of the New Futures Orphanage in Cambodia, where we'd worked for some weeks on our last two visits, died suddenly of a heart-attack just last week. We're now waiting to hear from the volunteer 'community' with whom we are still in touch, just what the future might hold for New Futures now. Will keep you updated if and when we hear anything (though internet connections are few and far between here in Namibia, you might be surprised to hear!).

TTFN

Grand Canyon - Eat Your Heart Out!

 

 

We've just spent part of the third day of our 20-day 'Nomad Adventure Tour' hiking around the Fish River Canyon here in southern Nambia. It is staggeringly awesome! It's arguably the second largest such canyon in the world after the Grand Canyon in Arizona - 'arguably' second, because there's apparently another one in Ethiopia which challenges for second place. Frankly, and having never been to either of the other two, we don't care whether it's 1st, 2nd or 3rd in the world - it's just spectacular!!! - and the three exclamation marks are definitely warranted. For those of you who might care about these things, Fish River Canyon is 160km in length, 27km in width, and the dramatic inner canyon reaches a depth of 550m.  

It's part of the !Ai-!Ais Transfrontier Park (the exclamation marks this time represent a complicated clicking noise in the local Nama language, though they're happy to accept the European version pronounced 'eye-ice'). The term means 'burning water', because of the hot thermal water spring, rich in sulphur, chloride and fluoride, which bubbles up from the ground at an average temperature of around 65 degrees C - hot enough to boil an egg in 3 minutes, should you wish. (Some people say that !Ai-!Ais didn't always mean 'burning water' but that became its meaning after the first San bushman, having dug down to seek water, scalded himself badly and shouted a kind of expletive in shock and anger.) The spring emerges at the base of the mountains right in the middle of the encampment where we've just stayed for the night. Apparently, the place has in the past been used as a military base camp - by the German military during the Nama uprising of 1903-07, and again in 1915 by the South Africans licking their wounds after the South-West Africa campaign. Now, however, it's a beautiful spa resort and national monument/conservation area. After our lengthy, and very dusty, truck journey, and the hike around the Fish River Canyon, it was just wonderful to get to Ai-Ais in time for a swim in the indoor pool, which was as warm as a bath - cooled down from its 65-degree heat before it fills both the outdoor and indoors pools here - and which was a good appetiser for the braai (BBQ, of pork chop, mealie-pap, and Afrikaans version of sauerkraut) which was cooked for us by Gertrude, our wonderful Zimbabwean chef/guide/trouble-shooter and diplomat, and Ella, her German kitchen assistant, here on a student internship.

Before we got to Fish River Canyon, we'd spent our first two days of the trip travelling vast, dusty distances through the Northern Cape of South Africa and into southern Nambia, stopping at a San Bushman's educational resource centre, !Kwa ttu, to learn about their traditional ways, and at a winery in Piketberg in the Northern Cape for a very interesting tour and wine-tasting, every one of us coming away very happy with a free bottle of wine of our choosing! On our first night in Nambia, we stayed in some lovely African huts right beside the Orange River, which rises in the Drakensburg mountains in Lesotho, forms part of the international border between South Africa and Namibia at this point, as well as several provincial borders within South Africa on its 1,800 km route to the Atlantic. In the morning, on the little patch of well-watered grass right outside our hut, we were visited by a number of small birds, with bright red heads and backs, which we're still trying to identify, but which were pretty tame, coming right up to just a few yards from where we were sitting enjoying the early morning sun and the views across the river where more intrepid travellers were heading off in brightly coloured canoes.

The landscape over the past 3 days has been absolutely fascinating - from endless acres of veld/scrubland dotted with thousands of small and very caustic/poisonous 'milk bushes' to increasingly almost barren desert. Occasionally, we've travelled through some really rugged mountainous areas - many of them as flat-topped as the more famous Table Mountain. Apparently that's because the rest of the land through which we've travelled has actually sunk as a result of erosion during the ice-age, leaving behind vast tracts of much higher land which once covered the whole area, but which now appear to be mountains. (I'm sure there's a more geologically-correct way of explaining all this, which doubtless Carole in our book-group could give, but which I'm afraid I can't - must read up about it).

Travelling through this empty landscape, we've seen virtually no people at all, hardly any settlements or towns, and not a huge amount, given the acreage we've travelled through, in the way of wildlife. This might sound odd, given that since we started this safari tour we've spotted several ostriches, oryx, kudu, eland, springbok, mountain zebras (slightly different from their plain-dwelling cousins), feral horses, and one lone black-backed jackal.

The group we're with seem an interesting bunch. We're the only two Brits on board the truck; there are several people about our age - one Dutch couple, a German couple, another German and two Belgian men - as well as several much younger people probably between mid-30s and mid-40s: four fun-loving young German women travelling together, a Portuguese couple, and a Swiss woman (called Barbara, I'm delighted to report - it's unusual to find anyone that young with that name any more!), as well as a fascinating 80 year-old Polish woman who fled her country to escape the Communist regime, and took up residence in Sweden many decades ago. She's a much-travelled woman too - mainly travelling solo to very remote parts of the world. Her story is that, some 30 years ago, she had a terminal diagnosis following a mastectomy and chemo for breast-cancer. She decided then that, against all medical advice, she would travel and see as much of the world as possible before she died. 30 years on, she still travels adventurously several times a year, and seems to have covered most of the world, including just about every African nation, most of the central Asian 'istans' (apart from Afghanistan, which she's going to next year apparently!), Australasia, Siberia and Antartica. During these 30 years, she's had another mastectomy, an operation to remove a cancerous tumour from her spine, several chemo- and radio-therapy courses, and recently a knee operation following a road accident. She's convinced - probably rightly - that her longevity, despite all the prognoses, is down to her determination to keep travelling. She's a diminutive, tough, and possibly cantakerous woman - and a real inspiration!

Oh, and before signing off this blog, it's perhaps worth sharing a little anecdote with you . A few times during our travels, our guide, Gertrude (or Gertie, though with her Zimbabwean accent it sounds more like 'Gettie') has once or twice pointed out little settlements or small towns which she explains, with absolutely no hint of irony, were started by missionaries "for the benefit of" the Namas/the Khoi Khoi/the San people, etc. Each time it reminds me of the following quote from that wonderful Archbishop, Desmond Tutu:

"When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the bible and we had the land. They said 'let us pray'. And when we opened our eyes, we had the bible and they had the land."!!

Can't you just hear his infectious high-pitched cackle as you read those words.....?

　

Oh Gosh - You Should See Kirstenbosch!

We spent most of Sunday at Kirstenbosch botanical gardens - with probably the most jaw-droppingly gorgeous backdrop against which these fantastic gardens are enjoyed by people, parties and picnickers from all over the world. There were literally hundreds of small and larger groups - families in their Sunday best, a small group we spoke to being there to celebrate their daughter's first birthday and christening; another work-group saying 'farewell to you, boss' on a huge banner and dozens of blue-and-white balloons; couples and children gambolling and picnicking on the wonderfully landscaped stretches of lawn, or enjoying Sunday lunch in and around the Moyo restaurant. And yet, it never once felt crowded - so vast is the space in which these gorgeous gardens are set. They've also really capitalised on the fantastic setting, the surrounding mountains forming the backdrop for the outdoor stage they've installed, and where, every Sunday evening through their summer, there are live music events of very high quality, from international and African rock, pop and hip-hop through to jazz, opera and classical; the wonderful Hugh Masekela will be performing in a couple of weeks' time - but after we've left for Namibia, unfortunately for us. I did get up on stage for a very brief debut performance, and managed to draw a large crowd ...... of ducks and ducklings!!

It's probably best on this particular posting just to let the photographs do the talking for themselves:

Oh, and on the way to Kirstenbosch, we stopped to explore the Houts Bay fishing harbour - where we enjoyed yet another performance from a small family of seals being fed by a local young boy, in return for a few coppers from the tourists gathered around.

Most of Monday was spent visiting Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 prison years, for many of which he was forced to do hard labour in a quarry, and was allowed 1 visitor per year for a total of 30 minutes! Robben Island was interesting , but a little 'sanitized', with all of the cells and cell-blocks sparkling in their shiny-new pale-blue and white paint, and with virtually no artefacts of any kind left behind, not even the 'cell-stories' by former prisoners which we understand had once papered the walls of A-Section. However, the speeches by the island-tour guide (everyone gets shepherded onto fleets of buses as soon as the boat docks, for a tour around the island itself), and by the former inmate who took us into the cell-blocks (and who had spent 7 years in prison there - some of it in solitary confinement with its associated beatings, tortures and 30-day starvation regime - for daring to join the ANC at a time when it was a 'banned' organisation) were very moving, echoing Mandela's dignified defiance of the petty rules, as well as his eventual leadership philosophy - that it must not be usedas an excuse or vehicle for recriminations or violence in the transformation of South Africa into a full democracy.

On Monday evening, our wonderful host, Nicky (mother of Jacques, whom we haven't actually met), very generously invited us and two other German guests (Eva-Marie and Willie) to have dinner with her and an old friend of hers from schooldays (Fiona) who was visiting from Pretoria. We had dinner together in her beautiful home, into which Andy and I had already moved, from the apartment next door, after our first week here. It was a really wonderful, and hilarious, evening: it was just great how Fiona's sometimes ascerbic and satirically witty comments - about everything from our Royal Family and sports teams to Angela Merkel's dismissive way with other world leaders - managed to meld together and unite the three different cultures represented at the table, over a glass or six of fantastic South African wines!

Today (Tuesday), we're having a lazy day, before our early start tomorrow travelling with Nomad Adventure Tours for 3 weeks through Namibia and Botswana. We've had a wonderful time here in Cape Town, and now we just can't wait to get out into the 'Africa' we've longed to see.

　

　

A Whale of a Time!

Well, what a fabulous few days we've just had, roaming all over the stunningly beautiful Cape Peninsula!

On Friday, we took a guided tour to Hermanus to look for whales - and we did see two: a Southern Right mother and her calf cavorting in the choppy waters of the bay, tantalisingly close to the shore and showing their heads or tails for just a few seconds at a time over the course of about an hour. Unfortunately for us, although the weather was gorgeously sunny, it was very windy that day, and our planned boat trip was cancelled at the last minute because of the sea swell, which meant we had to watch the whales from the nearby cliffs instead, and the choppiness of the water did mean that it was not easy to see what they were up to below the waterline. While we were waiting and watching, we did see a school of about 30-40 dolphins swim rapidly by, and we also learnt that, had we been there a couple of hours earlier, we'd have seen 8 or 10 mothers and baby whales performing for the crowds, rising out of the water much more dramatically and clearly than 'our' two!

As part of the meandering tour back from Hermanus (where our car was literally stopped in its tracks by a large family of baboons who were larking around right in the middle of the road),

we stopped by a Cheetah Project, whose objective is to try and protect the rapidly dwindling cheetah population from farmers in particular - they being one of the cheetah's most dangerous 'predators', happy to shoot any large animals who prey on their herds. As cheetahs happen to be mainly day-time hunters, more of them get killed by farmers than any others of the big game predators around. So, instead, this project concentrates on breeding and training huge hunting dogs alongside cattle and sheep, so that they develop a familial 'bond' with them, and will bark aggressively (but not necessarily attack) when they smell nearby predators, thus deterring most attacks from other game, and hence obviating the need for farmers to shoot them. As the cheetahs in this project are, for a variety of reasons, never likely to be allowed back into the wild, they are fairly tame, and we were even allowed to get up close and personal with one of them, stroking its head and back whilst the handler talked soothingly to keep him calm.

On Saturday, we used Jacques' car to drive all over the Cape Peninsula, right down to Cape Point itself, stopping for brief sojourns on our way south in Kalks' Bay and Simonstown. Simonstown is a picturesque fishing town and harbour, with a small naval base, and we explored a Saturday-morning market at its 'Just Nuisance' area - named after a dog who had befriended and guarded the naval ratings stationed there during WW2, and whose statue is displayed proudly on the seafront.
  

Close by Simonstown, we also stopped to see the penguins in their protected colony at Boulders Beach. We saw literally hundreds of African penguins (about half the size of the more famous Emperor penguin), mainly standing stock still, looking fairly bored, or shuffling comically around each other on the white-sand beaches and boulders, often only inches away from us. We saw only one or two actually take to the water (but wow, do they swim sleekly and swiftly when they do!), as our visit coincided with their 3-weeks'long moulting season, during which time they lose their waterproof coating, and have to stay on land until waterproof again once the moult is completed. During these three weeks, they therefore cannot eat anything, since they can't swim to catch fish, so they'll have spent several weeks beforehand gorging and fattening themselves up to cope with this food-free diet period, and we assumed that their relative lack of activity was in order to conserve energy during this time of fasting.

During the trip, we also saw loads and loads of Cape Fur seals, either basking on harbour walls or rocks by the beaches, or occasionally performing all kinds of wonderful under-water acrobatics, ballet sequences (which we could see very easily this time in these by now clear and relatively calm, turquoise waters), including at one place a kind of 'synchronised swimming' routine in circular formation worthy of an Olympic gold.





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At Cape Point itself (again, absolutely breathtakingly beautiful - a superlative which could preface just about every other place we've driven through or stopped at this weekend!) we saw hundreds and hundreds of cormorants, oyster-catchers and other unidentified sea-birds often swooping at great speed in circles so absolutely perfect that you could imagine they were attached to a string at a single point on the cliffs below them - oh, and yet more dassies too!

Our route back to Cape Town on the western coast of the peninsula took us through Kommetjie and the stunning Chapman's Peak Drive to Hout Bay, Llandudno, Bakoven, and back to our apartment in Sea Point, stopping off for a meal at a seafront restaurant in Camps Bay.

Exploring Cape Town

Well, we must by now have walked our socks off - if we'd had any on to begin with. We've spent the past three days walking all around the City. We've explored :-

• the highly colourful, mainly Muslim, Bo Kaap area, otherwise known, if slightly misleadingly, as the Cape/Malay area - misleading because most of the freed slaves who were allowed to settle here were from Indonesia and India, rather than Malaysia - but an area which was, unexpectedly, very evocative in appearance of some of the tiny terraced streets around the North Laines area of Brighton (apart from the number of Mosques here in Bo Kaap, of course);

 

• the Robben Island museum (we're booked to visit the island itself in a few days' time) which explains the history of this penal/leper/lunatic asylym colony during the colonial/slave-trading centuries leading up to its recently more notorious history in housing many figures in the ANC's leadership - including of course Nelson Mandela, perhaps one of its most internationally-famous inmates, as well as one of the greatest thinkers and statesmen of all times;

 

• the Parliament/Company's Gardens central area (the 'company' being the Dutch East India company), which included the rather fascinating South Africa National Library;

 

• the Iziko Slave Museum, which also houses a fascinating history of the life of Oliver Tambo, a colleague of Mandela's, who always believed himself to be holding the ANC leadership 'in trust' for Mandela, and whose leadership style, integrity and philosophy (albeit, for many years a leadership-in-exile) still shines as a bright beacon for the rest of the world's leaders.

 

• and many more places around the Waterfront area which we mentioned in the last posting - and where, just yesterday, we bumped into an old colleague of Andy's from his BT days (his name's Kev Lewis for those of Andy's mates who remember him from the BT Wholesale team which met regularly in Chester). How small the world is!

 

We're also getting very familiar with using the rather bizarre mini-bus system here. It seems to be mainly used by Black Cape Townians and a few working- class Whites or foreign Backpackers, rather than the middle-class White South Africans. These sometimes rather dilapidated mini-buses career around the main streets at breakneck speed, beeping their horns or shouting out from the windows to get people's attention, stopping with a great squeal of breaks whenever someone hails them, and dropping people off wherever they want (as long as it's somewhere on the main routes they ply) for a flat-rate fare of R7 - about 42p - per person! We've used them at least twice a day since Monday, and have found their drivers and 'getter-inner' accomplices to be very helpful, cheerful and friendly.

Since the weekend, the weather has been a little cooler and cloudier, and we've had a couple of days of rain - which means that Table Mountain has been wearing its 'tablecloth' of cloud for most of that time. Oh, and we've also learned a little more about the dassies on Table Mountain, both from Mike's comments, and from Nini and Roy's e-mail, which explains that they are also to be found in the Drakensburg Mountains, which we're hoping to visit later on in our travels (so, you see, you can't always believe what you read on the information placards in tourist areas - which had initially convinced us that the dassies were ONLY to be found on Table Mountain, and absolutely nowhere else in the world!). 

 

(Editor's note: Dassies found the following day, while whale-watching! Great pics will follow.)

 

Okay, time for bed - we're off on a day-trip to Hermanus tomorrow, hopefully to do some whale-watching - even though it's right at the end of the migration season, we're hoping that the unseasonally cold and damp spring might have confused them enough to stay around for a little while longer. So, more anon......

　

The African Adventure Begins......

... with the first of the summer weather here in Cape Town, after what we are reliably told has been a wetter- and colder-than-normal spring so far. It's actually been a wonderful weekend, with clear blue skies and temperatures in the mid- to high-20s, and absolutely none of the energy-draining humidity which characterised so much of our time travelling in South-East Asia.  

We're staying in a delightfully-positioned, small apartment in the middle-class suburb of Sea Point (thanks to Jacques and his mother, Nicky, via the Airbnb website). It's about 3-4km from the Waterfront area - the main city-centre bustling harbour and tourist attraction, with its almost European/Mediterranean bar- and cafe-culture vibe. Indeed, had we not had to travel past the 'Cape Flats' shanty-town area just on the fringes of the city on our way from the airport, it would be hard to accept that we're in an African country at at all. (Actually, this was also the first 'challenge' to our determination to stay out of the politics of the country if we can - our very helpful Indian/Asian-looking taxi-driver, pointing to the Cape Flats shanty-town, remonstrated loudly about the hundreds of 'unwanted immigrants from all over Africa' who had settled here in recent years, 'most of whom', he said, are too lazy to work, and 'don't even want to pay their rents'! We did our best with a variety of non-committal grunts - it being only about 10 minutes into our time anywhere in South Africa, and breathed a sigh of relief when he changed the subject!)

Our 'landlady', Nicky, very kindly drove us to the Waterfront area after we'd unpacked and freshened up, and left us to explore this beautiful part of Cape Town for our first afternoon here, leaving us to walk 'home' along the very attractively lawned beach-road promenade in the early evening. (Oh, and it was really amazing to us that, as neither Jacques nor Nicky could be here when we first arrived, they'd left us instructions about how to find the apartment keys - which they'd left just inside the open kitchen window. Not quite the scary-sounding, crime-ridden place we'd been a little apprehensive about after all, then.)

Yesterday (Sunday, 2 Nov, and our first full day here) we took the open-top bus for a whistle-stop tour of the highlights of the City, which also allowed us to 'hop off' twice - once to catch the revolving(!) cable-car up to the top of Table Mountain, and again to have a beer overlooking the famous Camps Bay beach resort.  Here is a picture of Table Mountain from the Waterfront.

Table Mountain was even more breathtaking and beautiful than we hoped. We spent nearly 3 hours walking around on the flat 'table-top', enjoying heart-stopping sheer drops with views over the City, the busy harbour towards Robben Island, and across the beautifully blue Atlantic ocean. It was strange to think that there is no land between us and Antarctica, nearly 7,000 kilometres south of here. We enjoyed looking at the many beautiful flowering shrubs just opening up for the Spring, as well as several interesting birds and a few lizards - all of which we have yet to identify, once we've bought the appropriate wildlife-spotting books. Sadly for us, however, we didn't see any of the little 'dassies' - rather cute-looking furry mammals which seem a bit like a large guinea-pig or a small tail-less beaver, which apparently are found living ONLY on and around Table Mountain and nowhere else in the world, and which are apparently - and rather bizarrely - the closest relative to the elephant!   The following picture is NOT a dassie, nor an elephant ...

The stop at Camps Bay was also, but differently, enjoyable. This is the place where Cape Town's 'beautiful people' hang out, mainly pretty scantily-clad, and where 'Hello' and similar magazines have a permanent photo-journalist presence, in the hope of spotting and 'papping' the many celebs who frequent this very attractive, up-market beach resort with its many cocktail and sundowner bars. Fortunately, Andy and I were well disguised, so we managed to avoid too much attention from the paparazzi on this particular occasion.

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The first of these pictures is Camps Bay, viewed as we were descending from Table Mountain.   The second is Andy hiding from the Paparazzi in a beachfront bar.

After such a busy day, we were glad to be able to walk to the beach-front promenade here in Sea Point, where we enjoyed a very meat-oriented meal of a delicious blue-cheese-topped steak (me) and a kebab of Kudu and Springbok meat (Andy).  

Today (Monday 4 Nov) we shopped for fresh vegetables, fruit, meat and fish in a nearby Woolworths supermarket - haven't yet discovered if it's the same Woolworths as we're all familiar with, but it came highly recommended by Nicky. Prices (for foodstuffs, restaurant meals, accommodation, etc.) are somewhat cheaper than in the UK, but significantly higher than we've been used to in South-East Asia, so we'll be doing a lot more self-catering on this trip than in our previous two 'retirement adventures'.

Looking forward to a lazy evening now (at least for me - Andy's cooking dinner as I type this!), in the relatively cool heat of evening - though it's still T-shirt weather, and we'll be enjoying our meal in the charming little courtyard garden of Jacques and Nicky's place.

More news in a few day's time.....