We had a couple of birds visiting us which we had not seen around our place before. Karl took a beautiful picture of one of them. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Bird visiting

We regularly have fisheagles that come by and circle above the estuary by our place, looking for fish. Usually, they are too far to make a good picture of, but this one basically flew above our house, giving us a good chance to take some pictures. Unfortunately, the weather was overcast, so the colours did not come out too well. Click on the images to get a larger version:

We are wondering why we find a bird that is so similar to an American eagle here in South Africa. They look so similar that it would seem there ought to be a relationship between the South African and American counterparts.

A couple of days ago, the night sky was beautifully clear and the moon was mostly full so I decided to make a picture of the moon from South Africa. It was actually quite a bit of work since the picture kept coming out too bright, but I finally managed. Here is the result:

Nahoom Beach Album

We went to Nahoon beach in East London over the weekend and had our cameras with us. This album contains the resulting pictures with people and animals on the beach, including some great pictures of kite flying.

The best news of all is that I managed to get around the beach with my ankle, which means it must be getting much better. I don´t wear my cast anymore, nor do I use crutches. I still go to the Physio, though!

As always, click on the image, or here to go to the album.

Knysna Album

As mentioned in my whale post from December 19th, we made a wonderful trip to Knysna and visited nearby Tsitsikama national park and Robberg Peninsula in December 2005 (middle of winter!). This album contains a series of pictures from that trip. All three of these locations were very nice and definitely worth visiting!

Click on the image or here to see the album.

.. (almost 85 Fahrenheit) was the temperature of the pool last weekend! The last few weekends have been very warm and pleasant and we spent a lot of time in the pool. To give you an indidication, a pool is refreshing at 25-26 degrees celcius (77-79 Fahrenheit) an this is probably the warmest the pool has gotten since we moved to East London!

So for those of you living in cold climates, consider visiting South Africa at this time of the year!

South Africa is a very multicultural society. According to southafrica.info “Africans are in the majority at 37.2-million, constituting 79.4% of the total population. The white population is estimated at 4.4-million (9.3%), the coloured population at 4.1-million (8.8%) and the Indian/Asian population at 1.1-million (2.5%).” Unfortunately, on a day to day basis, you still see a lot of segregation with little real mixing of blacks, whites and coloured people. The different racial groups appear to live next to each other, but don´t really mix that much.

It is always delightful to see examples where kids of different cultural backgrounds actually hang out together. We therefore thought it was worthwile to take a picture of this engaged discussion between three boys of different colours at Gold Reef city:

How lame! About 4 weeks ago, I twisted my ankle at the gym from doing steps during the super circuit. This is not the first time this happens, but the swelling was definitely much worse than ever before and the nurse at work insisted I needed to go to emergencies. There they took X-Rays, which didn´t show anything, and concluded that it must be a badly sprained ankle with possibly torn ligaments. They gave me a removable “aircast”, some crutches, painkillers and anti-inflamatories. The specialist I saw the next day only could inform me that I would probably need to wear the cast for about 6 weeks and he may need to do surgery on the foot if the ligaments are actually torn. He couldn´t give me much more advise apart from the fact I needed to come back in 4 weeks (that will be next Monday!).

Six weeks seems forever, but the specialist may unfortunately be right. The first couple of weeks, I could hardly get around and I had to use a wheelchair during a visit to Johannesburg which we had planned weeks in advanced. Here is a picture taken at the Gold Reef City amuzement park that we visited:

The last couple of weeks have been much better, but the foot is still very sensitive and hurts at the slightest movement. I can now put pressure on it, but still need to wear the cast to support the ankle and avoid hurting the foot again!

Wearing a cast and having crutches has been an incrible frustrating experience – it is hard to do simple things like getting a glass of water and travelling or going to the beach has been out of the question. Today was around 30 degrees and sunny all day, so this has been particularly frustrating. Luckily I can go for swims in the pool! Guess we won´t be doing much travel this summer!

One of the birds you find quite commonly here in South Africa are mousebirds. They are distinguished by their brown colour and their long tails.

We live right next to a bush, with lots of birds. Today, a set of mousebirds were eating from a nearby bush, which offered a perfect picture opportunity. As always, click on the images to see larger versions!

We have really arrived in the summermonths here in the mean time. Today, temperatures went up to 32 degrees and the pool got up to 28 degrees. We went swimming in our pool twice as a way to cool down. In the late afternoon, temperatures dropped after a storm.

For the next few days, they predict similar weather, although it will be a bit cooler tomorrow.

For those of you who are in colder parts of the world, we cannot put any of our summerweather on the site, but we thought you might enjoy this recent sunrise picture, taken from our house: