yay Poachers captured!!

Hi guys, had a good chuckle at your comments about the new car. Isadora said it reminded her of Chicago ganster movies, hehe, never thought of it but you are so right! It does have a sort of retro look like the PT Cruiser (which I have been mad about since they first came out) but when it came down to it, I could have gone for the Cruiser now, but when we looked inside it was snug to put it mildly!



Tom, you are right about the ground clearance, it is going to be an issue because the front bumper is lower than most curbs, so I will have to to avoid misjudging, which is tricky because it is impossible to see the front of the bonnet. Will just have to experiment until I have a true sense of the space around me in the car.



We all went out for dinner last night to celebrate, and the kids couldn't get over how much room there was in the back, so that's cool. I bought 2 cane easy chairs for the new studio today and they fitted in the back with ease! (Bought from one of the Zimbabwean craftsmen on the side of the road, I have featured them before, and love to support them when possible.)



Since she is black, we thought a nice Xhosa name would be apt, so she is Thandi, (pronounced tun-dee.) Thandi is a Xhosa word that means "nurturing love", which might sound a bit corny for a car's name, but since she is not a sporty model like Bloublitz (blue lightening BTW) and is full of safety features, it is not too bad. I'm afraid any loving nurturing from my side will extend to regular services, but is unlikely to include much in the way of clening if my past track record with cars is anything to go by!



Speaking of cleaning, I took Bloublitz for a farewell car wash yesterday.... she looks great now that most of the paint and food are off the seats (bashful blush), but it was an amazing coincidence. She is not a common car, especially in that metallic blue, but as I pulled in, the car next to me was almost identical, except he didn't have a skyroof but he did have very fancy new mags. I saw the owner looking her over, and eventually he came up to me and asked if I wanted to sell her.



I told him that even a week ago, if he had asked me that, the answer would have been no. The Kadett 200IS is something of a cult car, especially amongst young guys, and over the years so many have asked me to sell her, I have even been stopped at a roadblock so the cop could ask me if I wanted to sell to him! So this guys timing was perfect!

He said he has an identical twin brother, and it would be cool if they had identical cars. We chatted for ages and I gave him a 24 hour first option, it might all have been bull, but who knows.... let's see if I hear from him!



Anyway my phobia about washing my cars (born out of growing up with a fanatical father who was so obsessed with his cars that family came a very poor second) was vindicated, because when I got in to leave after the car wash, she was as dead as a post. I thought it was the battery, but the central locking was also playing up. It came right later after standing in the sun for a while, so I think they must have got some water onto the electrics or something. Anyway it just goes to prove that a dirty car is a happy car! Hehe.



On a completely different note I am DELIGHTED TO REPORT that some of the Perlemoen poachers operating in St Francis that I told you about last week were captured and arrested yesterday! It was apparently quite a show, the headline in this morning's paper said "Dramatic sea raid forces poachers to throw illegal bounty overboard." Luckily, a SA Air Force helicopter was on the scene and divers jumped from it into the sea and managed to retrieve it before it hit the seabed. So now they have the rotten so and so's red handed. Both blue rubber ducks, with trailers and diving equipment were seized in the operation.



I have a meeting with a member of the special Marine Task Force tomorrow, to give them copies of all the photos we have taken on our last two visits to St Francis, showing faces, car registration etc. I hope the law makes it stick to these guys.



It is time to take a stand against greedy individuals who plunder the earth's resourses for their own gain, with no thought of future generations. Shame on those randy Asian men who pay a fortune for Perlemoen (and also Rhino horns) because they see it as an afrodisiac, and thus keep the illegal trade going. Imagine what a sad and pathetic speciman of humanity you must be to happily send another species into extinction, just so you can get a bit hornier?



Anyway well done on catching them guys, and I hope you continue to have success in stamping out this trade.

A drive in the country part 3

Yesterday we paused our journey among the lovely wild flowers on the mountaintop. From the top of the mountain, we get glimpses of the Gamtoos River Valley, which is a very fertile farming area.

We begin to leave the flower covered mountain top, and the rolling hills on the coastal side of the road take on a barren look.

Trees are few and far between, especially indigenous ones like this pretty acacia thorn tree.

But as we decend into the valley, we begin to see signs of lush farmlands. There is a string of little farming towns running through the valley, their produce watered by irrigation from the Gamtoos River, which eventually runs into the sea through a wonderful dune field that creates miles and miles of unspoilt white beaches.

We are heading for Patensie, a delightful citrus growing area. As we descend into the valley, there is one farm that really catches the eye. The farmer has enclosed his entire orchard with netting! In the picture on the right you can see the extent of it behind the people walking along the road.

These little rural towns have a charm all their own, and Patensie is still a very clean, well organised area, with a massive citrus co-op. Trailers wait along the road verge next to an orchard, while farm workers are taken home after church on a trailer.....

By this time it was 3pm, and apart from the fruit we had eaten nothing since about 6am. We were ravenous, so imagine our delight when we saw a sign directing us to a farmstall/restaurant.

What made it even better was seeing these two beauties outside!

It turned out to be just as charming inside as it was outside......

.....and even better, they were still serving lunch, and the food was great! After the hot windy journey, it was such a treat sitting in a cute cool restaurant looking out over peaceful farmlands. The placemats were laminated pages from vintage farming magazines (Landbou Weekblad from 1960) so it was really entertaining reading the old adverts and readers letters from that era while waiting for our meal.

From there we travelled home through the valley, stopping briefly at the town of Hankey to visit the grave of Sarah Baartman.

This is a fascinating story, of a woman who was enslaved and degraded, treated as a freak in her lifetime, and whose body was recently returned to the place of her birth so that her dignity could finally be restored.

The grave is on top of a kopje (small hill) just outside town, so it offers views across Hankey. In this part of the Eastern Cape, aloes are a very typical sight.

And, as the somewhat unique sundial seen from the Kopje pointed out, it was time to head for home.

Hope you enjoyed the trip as much as we did.

A drive in the country part 2

Well yesterday I left you standing on the sand river bridge overlooking the supply dam. So lets have a quick drink of water which Mr Farty thoughtfully brought along in two cycling bottles, and a nectarine and a naartjie (tangerine..) to keep the wolf from the door, it is really hot and dry outside, thank goodness for the air conditioner... (are we sissies or what?!!!!).


Right, let the intrepid adventurers continue on their way. We are still travelling through farmlands, but things have changed in this area over the years. It was a productive wheat farming area many years ago. But the annual average rainfall has fallen to the point where farmers stopped planting wheat (global warming again??) and have allowed their fields to revert to grasses for grazing. We saw quite a lot of cattle as we went along.


This is how a typical Eastern Cape farm looks in this area. Unpretentious farm house overlooking the lands, barn nearby, with a river nearby for water. Note the old contour banks from the wheatfields are still visible under the grazing grass which now covers them, to the right of the picture.


Moving on and here is a treat for those of you who love derelict old buildings. As we came around a bend, we were first struck by the lovely white backlit flowerheads on the grass, then we noticed what was behind them and did a u turn.


It was worth the stop. While Max took some interior shots, I was scrambling around over barbed wire fences to get this exterior shot.




It seemed like everytime one of us looked up, there was the other running around with camera clamped on face!

This quaint old bridge supported the "main road" near the cottage. Seems like the river had seen grander days.

moving on, there were still signs of civilisation, but fewer and further apart.



Like this cute little chapel, built in 1950 according to the date on the surprisingly fancy gable.

But the further we got from civilisation, the worse the roads became. As you can see, it is a while since a grader passed this way. I enjoyed the challenge of negotiating the rocks and gullies, while Max photographed it.

The alien vegetation is much sparser now, and the indigenous fynbos is blanketting the hillsides. It is beautiful all year round, because it is such a rich and varied floral kingdom, and there is always something in flower. We were lucky that many of the Ericas (heather) were blooming.

In fact, they were so dense in places that, at a distance, certain patches of the hillsides were purple.



Although this wasn't the season for most proteas, there were some members of the family doing their best to put on a fine show.

And we will leave it there for now, next thrilling installment, and a much needed stop for lunch at Patensie to follow.... watch this space.

Over on PE Daily Photo, we are posting some of our best pictures of this trip, so do hop over there and check out the last couple of days. You can also see more of Max's photos on his blog

A drive in the country. Part 1

On Sunday, Mr Farty and I set out early, (ok it was 10am, but hey, after all it was SUNDAY, so that is early! And I had done 3 posts and some blog visits before we left!)


We decided to go on a dirt road we last travelled 25 years ago, past the Cockscomb Mountains, to the little citrus farming town of Patensie.

It's a good thing we were in Max's bakkie with higher clearance than my car, because the road was really dry and dusty, and in Part 2 I'll show you how hectic it got when we were crossing the mountain top. We were wishing we had a fabulous old Landrover like Tom's, everytime we scraped the bottom on a rock!

We have a few photos from that first time, with Karen and Ian looking tiny and cute in the foreground. (We were quite broke at the time, and film and processing were real luxuries to us then.) The kids are now a mommy and a daddy respectively, and instead of a few photos, this time we went bezerk! Oh I DO love digital!! Here is a map to show you where we travelled, you can also see it in relation to St Francis which we are always rabbitting on about! I have marked our route in green.


We turned off the main freeway to Cape Town at the Van Stadens/St Albans offramp, and headed towards Rocklands, which is near Uitenhage.

On the corner of the old Cape Road, and the Rocklands Road is the huge St Albans prison.


This is a view of the guard tower at the maximum security section, through layers of security fencing.

I must be honest and say that the Rocklands area has never particularly appealed to me. It consists of a series of run down looking smallholdings with ugly houses along the road.

Despite the jumble of old cars, and even a grader of sorts in the overgrown yard, the person who built this place clearly had delusions of grandeur!

We turned onto the Eland's River Road, and at first, I was quite disappointed. There was a heavy sense of gloom and neglect hanging over the area. I literally felt it as a physical knot in my stomach, it was quite oppressive. And the area was uglier than I remembered. The properties were more neglected, the wind was howling and it was unusually dry, and the alien vegetation had taken over in a big way.

To add to this, a devastating fire swept swept through the area about 2 years ago and the regrowth was punctuated with the skeletons of dead trees. Sadly, most of the regrowth consists of the Australian Port Jackson Willows and Black Wattles, which are noxious weeds here. As they have no natural enemies, they are rampant, killing off indigenous vegetation and using up a lot of vater in the little valleys. This continued along the road until approximately the second arrow on the map (below where it says Groendaal Wilderness Nature Reserve.)

All I found that was worth photographing was the odd lonely tree against the skyline.

As we got to the place where the road crosses the river, at the Theo Crou Bridge and pumping station, things fortunately began to improve a little. If you are interested in this and want to find the spot on Google Earth, the co-ordinates are S33 47 45, E25 10 49.

The old stone house has a commanding view over the valley, and is quite quaint looking.



The River was extremely low, and just a little trickle could be heard,

but looking downstream. there was evidence of severe recent floods. The low level drift was washed away, and uprooted trees were still lying in the river bed.

Leaving the valley, we continued climbing towards the Groot Winterhoekberge (Afrikaans for Great Winter-corner Mountains.)

The next thing we came to was a large dam, with a wonderful old peeling barn on the hilside, and an interesting old structure, missing its roof in the valley. (S33 43 36, E 25 05 59)

As you know by now, I am a sucker for a tatty old building, and took shots from many angles, which will no doubt emerge in future paintings! We'll leave it there for now.... more crumbling buildings and stunning views to follow.... watch this space!