lairdandjonelle

Finally home — after SIXTY-SEVEN HOURS of travel! We left our wonderful flat, which I already miss (except for my own bed), in Dana Bay on Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. SA time and got home on Saturday at about 9:00 a.m. SA time. We spent 30 1/2 hours in the air and the rest in airports. Our only rest period was overnighting at the City Lodge at OR Tambo airport in Joberg, though we got up early to meet friends for breakfast there — and how happy we were to see them! The Doha airport has quiet rooms, but ours was anything but — one man having a very loud cell phone argument (we suppose; it wasn’t in English); the woman next to me chattering away, seemingly to herself; and the man behind us snoring very loudly. Laird got some sleep there, plus he can sleep on planes; however, I seem incapable of sleeping when traveling — though by the time we were in Dallas, waiting for about 9 hours, and on the flight to ABQ, I was poleaxed by fatigue, but only for seconds or minutes at a time. Oh, the good old days when we could fly directly to OR Tambo from DC, Atlanta or NY at an affordable price — actually cheaper than what we paid for this one. It must be because South African air is no longer competing. Bummer!

Galaxy met us at the ABQ Sunport . Timing was perfect. We deplaned, J got a wheelchair and took the two backpacks, so I ran down the escalators to the baggage claim and then went outside. With at most a 15 seconds wait, I saw an Audi  driving by just as the driver saw me. It was Galaxy. I suggested she take another loop, which she did, and by the time she came around, we were on the curb with baggage. Previous blog we mentioned that we’d posted two largish boxes from Mossel Baai, but we still had three bags — mostly pressies and electronics (some clothes). International, you’re allowed 20 Kg, and the baggage tags indicated that the three bags totaled 59 kilos. We were overweight by 14 kilos on the Mango leg from George to Joberg, but fortunately, they didn’t weigh the backpacks. We had a wheelchair at each airport, although in Joberg, we had to walk from the City Lodge to the check in counter. The  woman at the check in counter managed to change our seat assignments to the back of the bus from Joberg to Doha and from Doha to Dallas. I was in a window seat and Jonelle was in the aisle seat in the same row. For both legs, we had the middle seat empty which was an unanticipated boon.

I’m (Jonelle) home a month earlier than planned so I can get cataract surgery — oh, to see again! A low-vision vacation is definitely not the best kind.
But, as always, we love being with our friends and being in South Africa — everyone should put it on their bucket list and then accomplish it!
By the way, we recommend Qatar (NOT pronounced Cutter as some people think, but Ka-tar, as spelled) airline over Emirates — there’s a reason they’ve been voted Best 5 years in a row.

So we’re home till next time, when we’ll tell you all about it again. Safely home, still travellogged, jm & lg

OK, I hope you’re going to have some lovely flower,etc pictures of Namakwaland.   The young man and woman were our guides, Mike and Marne.  The marvelous dog is Sarky, who belongs to them.  Who knew that a Jack Russell could be so well trained????  I think the first picture is one from the shoe factory we went to.

OK, let’s try this again. I hope the first one is of the beaded leopard climbing down a beaded tree — from our favorite artist in Cape Town. What magnificent pieces he had this year! Oddly, I don’t think I bought anything at the waterfront this year — so VERY unlike me! The other place I liked, the teabag place, didn’t have those wonderful little bowls and I wasn’t all that impressed with what they did have. Another disappointment. Next are pictures of Groot Constantia, the oldest wine estate in South Africa. It now belongs to the government, part of the museum system I think and a contractor operates the vineyards and winery. VERY GOOD wine, as you can imagine. The museum, which is the Groot (great) Constantia mansion is heavenly — god, I love Cape Dutch architecture! Also included are a couple of pics from Allee Bleu, what had been our favorite winery. Alas, that is no longer true. We were disappointed not only in the wine (still good, but not the best we’ve ever tasted anymore) and particularly in the lunch — it had been so fantastic before; now it has moved locations and it’s mostly a sandwich menu — uninspired.

Daniel, the kimono is for you — it’s in the winery, along with some other fantastic art.  The street scene of painted houses is the only picture we have of Bokapp, I think.  Sandy, the lighted planter is for you — isn’t it a great idea???

OK, next post will be Namakwaland — that’s the Afrikaans spelling.

Here’s a random selection of pictures from our trip to Cape Town and Namakwaland, and whatever else I find. A couple will be of fantastic bathrooms we found in SA. The first, I think, is the floral display around the sinks at the gas station on our way to CT. The very colorful ones are from the Zeitz museum of contemporary African art.  Every time we want to post pictures, it’s like tabla rasa (or however you spell it).  So let’s see.

Aren’t they BEAUTIFUL?!?  The penquins were on the way, at Rocky Point in (I think) Betty’s Bay.

Well, that didn’t work out like I hoped.  After the bathrooms, therre’s street art, the Zeitz and a sculpture from a storytelling exhibit.

The picture frame frames Table Mt.

OK, we’ve done our part (again) to clean up the beach! The Dana Bay event is at 2:00 p.m. today, but Marita and Laird have to watch the Springboks vs. the All-Blacks (New Zealand), which have won the last TWO rugby world cups. Marita wasn’t sure whether she would be hooting like a mad woman in celebration or downing a six-pack in despair, but we all decided it was better to go do our part this morning. (Update at 14:30 … the Springboks lost 23-13 on the back of some inappropriate kicks by Steph Du Toit and a couple of breakdowns in the defense. There were a couple of injuries to key players, which is not good news for future games.) Plus at 2:00 it’s going to be hot. We did OK, but, really, the Dana Bay beaches aren’t very littered (well, except for cigarette butts) because municipal workers clean them every week. But, I got an old t-shirt, several coke bottles, a big can and some other stuff and Laird even got an old jacket among his stuff, and several broken bottles — not a good feature on a beach..

Yesterday, we went to George because Marita wanted some shwe shwe for serviettes to go with her Nigerian cloth tablecloth and I wanted more Nigerian cloth to make shades for my bathroom.  It took us FIVE tries to find the place:  first was the GPS on the phone (which almost doesn’t count because we decided early on that it was wrong), then directions from someone at the tourist information place, then calling Noekie, then back to the information place and finally, in semi-defeat, we went to Fat Fish for lunch along with clearer directions.  Laird and I were so happy to get some sushi; it was wonderfully, wonderfully fresh.  I had kingklip, a dense white fish that I’m not sure we have as an other-named fish.  It is quite delicious; Laird had a poke bowl, with more tuna and Marita had what she said was the best fish in fish and chips that she has had in a very long time.  Yea for us on the lunch front!  FINALLY, we found Jackson’s, the fabric store. — only Fat Fish folks told us we had to go through a sort of mall “alley” to get to it.  And damn if they weren’t out of the fabric I wanted — bummer.  But Marita got a lovely shwe shwe pattern for serviettes.

Laird is working on pictures, so I’ll post some while he’s with Marita watching rugby.  Words fail me when trying to describe how much I HATE watching sports!  Beach-cleanly yours, jm and lg

Friday, we got on the tour bus at 8:00 a.m. for our new adventure. To see the flowers, it must be sunny and hot — or at least not cold. In Cape Town and all along the route it was quite overcast and cold; we were fearing the worst. But our hosts, Mike and Marne (read with an accent over the e), entertained us with stories about the area and swore that, indeed, we WOULD see flowers before the time was up. Sandy, as you know, I take that black jacket you got me on every trip — it is my salvation from the cold! But I was wishing I’d brought my jeans and a warm scarf for sure. I’ve already forgotten a lot (OK, most) of what they told us, but a few things stand out. Marne is very funny, with a great dry humor. We have now had perhaps the best lamb (Karoo lamb; we’ve already told you about that!  They eat “herbs”, a seemingly generic term, not as we know it) pie in South Africa, as promised.  We started seeing flowers around Clan William, I think.  We stopped for a while at what must be the last shoe factory in the Western Cape. The whole operation is financially marginal, but a bunch of workers are employed. I bought a very nice pair of “Fellies” — which is how your generally pronounce the proper word for shoes which is “Velkskoens.” We continued until pretty late in the day and ended up in Vanrhynsdorp (pronouned von rains dorp). The map is in Marita’s car, so we are a little uncertain as to spelling.

Here’s one of the important things we learned:  As background, there is a cheap store in SA called “Pep store” — ubiquitous.  It’s kinda like a Dollar General in the US.  Anyway, Marne told us that there are three types of living places:  a plekkie, which is a “place”, just a settlement of some houses, maybe a garage.  But it doesn’t have a Pep store.  A dorp is a town and how you know it is a town is that it has a Pep store.  A city, on the other hand, has a Pep store AND a KFC!  If it has one without the other, it’s not a city; if the KFC is outside of town, it’s not a city.  She has written the president of South Africa asking that, along with their zeal of renaming things, that all the places with plek or dorp in their names but don’t meet the definition above be renamed.  So far she has not received an answer to her plea.  Where we stayed is a dorp, per its name, because it has a Pep store, at which Laird bought me a t-shirt for sleeping (I forgot mine in Cape Town), all for R49 — or about $3.00, but no KFC. At one point on Monday, one of the Afrikaner women made a special point of telling us that the PEP/KFC definition was “tongue-in-cheek,” and had no official validity. I assured her we understood. Afrikaners seem to us to love a good story or joke more than most other groups we ever hang out with.

We stayed in a very old hotel owned by Mike’s sister and brother-in-law.  We had DELICIOUS country-style food for dinner each night.  They even made tongue on Sunday night that was good and normally I hate tongue.  Breakfast was pretty much regular breakfast stuff.  For lunches, we had picnics in an interesting place wherever we were that day.  The food was Fantastakie, as they say (but may not spell),  all made by the wonderful kitchen crew at the hotel.

How to describe the flowers????  Words pale before their beauty, their thousands of varieties, their innumerable strumpet ways to attract pollinators!  Laird will work on getting the pics ready to post.  There are over three THOUSAND varieties of flowers, more than half of which occur only there in Namaqualand.  OF COURSE the names were in Afrikaans!  Of course we couldn’t keep them in our minds!  Many times we heard Mike say, “there’s Pig Snot over there”.  So we have decided to just call them all Pig Snot.  Actually, for some reason we did not understand, pig parts feature prominently in Namaqualand flower names.  One flower, that looks like Star of Bethlehem, is called Chittering Cheese (or some version that sounds like chittering — but definitely I heard cheese; what a terribly inelegant name for such a beautiful flower!)

YES!  Those great swaths of orange or yellow or white that you see when you google Namaqualand flowers are real.  We didn’t see them until Sunday, but when we did, we stood in awe and our hearts soared at the sights!  Friday and Saturday, we saw mostly very tiny flowers spread out.  The land is unbelievably inhospitable in the summer — temperatures in excess of 115 F!  And NO rain.  Only winter rains, and if it doesn’t rain enough then, the flowers don’t open come spring.  The annual rainfall is about two and one-half inches of rain a year — or that’s what we think they said.  Yikes!  Makes New Mexico look like the tropics!  Actually, there is a similarity in landscape except even with so little rain there are more bushes, but virtually no trees.  For all of you folks on Facebook, go to Toere Namakwa to see beautiful pictures while you’re waiting for us to post.  If you aren’t on Facebook, you can go without having an account by, I believe, going to http://www.facebook.com/toerenamakwa (not sure if that is one or two words; try both.  Also try namakwatoere (again one or two) if the other doesn’t work.  It’s well worth the effort.

On Saturday, we went to a quiver tree forest — google them, too.  Amazing sight, even though they had already bloomed and were in “shut-down” mode.  They are tree aloes and I SO want one!  Sandy, you will, too, when you see them!  They are named quiver trees because the Khoi-san made arrow quivers from them because without their water, they weigh almost nothing.  Interesting thing about them:  when the summer is intolerably hot and they have used up almost all their water reserves, they amputate their own arms to conserve what little water they still have.  Isn’t that gruesome?  Baboons, the bane of flora and farmers all over South Africa, like to eat quiver trees for their water.  Namaqualand is definitely a dog-eat-dog world!

Look on a map, if you can, for Nieuwoudtville. It’s in the Northern Cape, a little ways north of the Western Cape boundary. We got off the N7 road onto a gravel road and drove for about 45 minutes in a very sere landscape. All of a sudden, we crested a hill and the flowers smacked us in the eyes. As Jonelle wrote earlier, it is almost unbelievable, because it is so like the pictures in ads for Namaqualand tours. The only thing lacking was a gemsbok or a bontebok chewing on the flowers. I guess there really isn’t enough water for a profusion of buck. I asked our driver to tell the story of “why here?” What he said was that the flowers are self-seeding annuals. When this year’s seed has set and dropped, the sheep are then let into the field to graze. The following spring, the farmers lightly plow the field and that encourages the flowers to germinate and grow. If there has been little water, the germination rate is low. But following adequate moisture at the right time, the seeds sprout and they get a carpet of color.

I took a bunch(!) of pics, but the pics are flat and 2-D, whereas the reality is magical and 3-D. I’m hoping to use software to stitch together several individual pics into a panorama. This may give you all a sense of what it was like to tiptoe through the Namaqualand flowers.

Our guides — both Mike and Marné – are near as dammit botanists. And linguists. Imagine knowing scientific names, Afrikaans names and some English names of several thousand flowers.

We’ll bring this to a close. We drove in from Capetown today. We left Capetown at 9:30 and didn’t get to Dana bay until 5:30 pm. Ordinarily, it’s a four-hour drive, but we made several stops and were caught at road construction projects. But still, we don’t really understand how it took us 8 hours to make a four hour trip.

More tomorrow, with pictures.

On Tuesday, we went to Grot Constancia, the oldest winery in South Africa. Oh, the museum building is the most beautiful Cape Dutch I’ve seen — even better than what I think that house in Wilderness might look like (and I LOVE that house!) So much yellowwood, which mostly doesn’t exist anymore, or at least not in any quantity, certainly not commercial quantity — though we did buy a small (as it’s very young) yellowwood tree for our friends — though it will take a couple of hundred years for it to get impressive. Anyway, what a lovely, lovely house, built sometime in the 1650s, I think. Part of it, mostly the roof and the furniture burned up in 1925. The whole winery belongs to the government and someone leases the vineyard and wine production facilities. We went on the winemaking tour and then had the wine tasting — VERY good wine! If you ever see it, buy it (though I don’t think it is exported to the US). That building has a beautiful art collection. Our lunch was Cape Malay, an assortment of curries, in another impressively wonderful building. While we waited for our taxi driver to come get us (a very nice man from Congo by the name of Bled — all three of our taxi drivers in Cape Town were from Congo), we thought we would freeze — the day turned bitterly cold and we were dressed more for summer. Yes, yes, we know the CT weather changes rapidly, but we underestimated the time it would take Bled to get to us. While waiting, Marita saw a man with a gun and asked what he was doing. He said he was off to shoot baboons. We were horrified. He came back relatively soon after and I looked at his weapon; it didn’t look like any gun I had ever seen so I asked him about it. It is a paintball gun that they use to scare the baboons away, not kill them. We immediately felt much better! The critters apparently eat the new leaves emerging on the grape vines, which significantly cuts down on the grape crop.
On Wednesday, our holiday club resort provided a lovely morning tea for the guests and we met several very interesting people. One woman, maybe in her late 70s, told me about her father, who was something of a Renaissance man, into astronomy, engineering and several other things. He and she have minor planets named after themselves — how cool is that?!? She grew up in Cape Town and lives in Joburg, which she hates. She was showing an English friend around South Africa. I don’t know, but I bet she’s a terror on the roads!
We moved over to City Lodge next to a big casino preparatory to going off on our Namaqualand flower tour tomorrow — it rained this morning and has been cold and dismal all day, so really hope the sun comes out tomorrow (hey, that should be a song!) Speaking of that, we went to our friend Jannie’s school last night (Wednesday) for a most terrific student and teacher concert. The public school’s name is Gene Louw elementary. Concert was lip synced, but the dancing was AMAZING. Cast of hundreds, great costumes, and incredible choreography that required everyone to be doing the same thing at the same time. Selections from several musicals, including Cats, Chicago, Annie, the Greatest Showman, Grease and Mama Mia among others that I have forgotten. The students were 4th through 7th graders and they were fantastic — always spot-on with the very complicated choreography. Very impressive. Even the teachers were pretty good! We saw the THIRD performance of the day, and after at least one other day, maybe two, and their energy was high the entire time — at least two full hours, no intermission.

Today started cold and rainy, so we hung out at the hotel until 11:30. Our driving goal was to visit the Franschhoek Motor Museum. We were there a couple of years ago and were gobsmacked by the quantity and quality of the vehicles. They keep them in running condition (except for one race car that had to have its entire motor replaced before each race). Alas, we spent most of the day driving the R102 — stop and go and robots (the SA word for traffic signals), then trying to find the Russian Tea Room for lunch and discovering that the restaurant was closed for a private function having something to do with the Cape Town International Airport. After a delightful lunch of pizza (I jest re: the “delightful” part) at Belleville winery that ended at 4:00 pm, we gave up the idea of the Rupert Museum (aka FMM) and kept wandering around the roads near Stellenbosch until we finally hit the N1 highway and managed to make it back in one piece to the hotel. (Sidenote; our server at Belleville was named Hetso, which is Shona for “Unique”.

We’ll be happy to relinquish the driving for the next three days on our tour — driving (or even riding) in Cape Town is one of the scarier things to do in one’s lifetime! Laird astounds me with his driving, along with his uncanny ability to figure out where and how to go. The taxi drivers wear headbands with Kamikaze Japanese pictograph symbols that express their desire to die in a high speed car crash. (Just kidding about the headband — the desire, probably true.)
Fingers crossed for beautiful weather; otherwise, the daisies won’t open, which would be a total bummer! Forecast is for cloudy Friday and Saturday, but sunny on Sunday. We get back Monday at 6:00 pm (or 18:00 in local parlance.)  Here’s hoping the forecast is overly pessimistic!  Hopefully yours, jm & lg

Left Dana Bay Friday morning for Cape Town, with a couple of obligatory stops along the way –particularly the one to get the BEST roosterkoeks, which is a thick bread cooked over charcoal — ohso yummy! You can have them sweet or savory; mine was bacon and egg since it was still morning when we got there. On the radio, two announcers, a man and a woman, were reading the names of the girls and women who have been killed in SA this year. They would say the name and then a sentence about her: [name]. She was eight months pregnant. [name]. She was the tallest girl in her class. [Name} she was six years old. On and on it went, punctuated with poignant music. The day before, or maybe Wednesday or Tuesday, women marched on the parliament building in CT and the police responded with water cannons! The next day there was a picture in the Cape Times that showed a picture of a SEA of people demonstrating — it looked like absolutely every person in CT was there!
We’ve been to the Victioria and Albert waterfront, taken a city tour on the hop-on hop-off bus and had a wonderful lunch at the Winchester Hotel on the beach in Seapoint near where we are staying. Daniel, I had seafood bobootie, which none of us had ever heard of and it was incredibly delicious. Wee ate in a lovely, lovely patio garden. On Sunday, we met our friends, Jannie and Frieda, at the waterfront and had a lovely meal with them. Jannie is a teacher of 6th grade English and we’re going to his school’s concert on Wednesday evening.
Today, we went to the Zeitz museum of contemporary African art — an amazing facility in a renovated/repurposed concrete grain silo (much bigger than you could ever imagine). Zeitz is a German philanthropist who had been the chairman of PUMA and then Kuring; I forget his beginning. I believe he basically paid for the whole thing, but I could be wrong. He has loaned the museum a lot of stuff from his personal collection. There is a yearlong exhibit by William Kentridge that basically seems to take up most of the museum — two floors worth! I don’t know whether he is the most prolific artist in history or it’s his whole body of work. His work is about the colonization of Africa — very powerful, but overwhelming. Lots of mixed media, mostly film and music and the most astounding panoramic presentation that I guess is film, but not like you, or at least me, think of as film. One of his “films” is a “flip book”of a dictionary, with drawings and words laid over. He has the best words, a poet as well as a fine artist. Anyway, you should google him.
Tonight we’re going to make lemon chicken with capers and olives in our Instant Pot we bought. Gotta go find the recipe.
Museumed out, jm and lg

Here are eel pictures from our last trip. Don’t know whether any of these guys had their heads bitten off; if so, it is very sadmaking. I can’t believe otters would do that! Gotta be river otters — cutiepie ocean otters wouldn’t behave so badly!

First, the spelling of the material is shwe shwe. Second, the material of the pants Loret and Helmein made for me is not shwe shwe, but Nigerian fabric. Not that it matters, but now I know that what I really, really love is Nigerian fabric. Shwe shwe is patterned, but much tamer than Nigerian, and not waxed. I have some, but I want more of both. There is a FABULOUS pattern that I want to make bathroom curtains or shades out of — I’ll be the envy of the neighborhood for sure! Or not. But I will love it. Helmein told me about a shwe shwe sewing project in a settlement that I understood to be next to Groot Brak. Wrong! We had to go to hell and gone trying to find the place, but finally we succeeded, a long way away from Groot Brak. Alas, they don’t sell shwe shwe, they make things, so I bought a bunch of buttons and what Laird calls a Zulu One Pot — a fabric “oven”. So you can cook rice in 1/2 hour after it boils instead of 20 minutes. No wonder they also call it the Wonder Pot, which was apparently very popular in SA awhile back. Turns out both Marita and Noekie have one. Now I do too. Made out of shwe shwe. Aren’t I lucky?!?
Tomorrow is Eel Day at Stillbaai. No, not eating them, petting and feeding them. Our friend, and my miracle worker, Carina is going with us, so I expect we’ll have a great day. Shwe shwely yours, jm & lg

Before we start, we have to tell of seeing what we think was a cape gray mongoose on the road to Emily Moon, a resort just outside Plett where we wanted to go for a meal. We don’t know if it is rare in the world, but it is definitely rare in our world. The only one we’ve ever seen!
Now for Plettenberg Bay adventure pictures. Don’t forget to notice my SWELL Tswai Tswai (uh, schway-schway phonetically) pants at Birds of Eden.  The house on the beach is a beautiful 1933 Cape Dutch in Wilderness.  I WANT THIS HOUSE!  P.S. I have NO IDEA why this is formatting the way it is, but I’m just hoping that the pictures publish.  Bird is a Knysna lourie, the little animal is a duiker.  The dog is Gustav.  See previous posts for info about all that.

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