Best wishes for 2008 from South Africa!
This is our third New Year in South Africa and we are still not used to celebrating Christmas and New Year in the middle of summer! Hot weather (the last few days it has been approximately 30C/86F) does just not seem right for this time of the year. Particularly when you see Christmas trees, hear Christmas charols and people shoot fireworks for New Year. We celebrated by making several trips to the beach and going swimming in our pool at home … in the mean time we are hearing about cold weather in Europe and the US. What a different experience!
All of this will change soon: in February, we will move to Switzerland where Johan will take up his next position in the company. We will move out of our current place by the end of January and will make a little trip to Cape Town, both for leisure as well as for work, before we make our final move. The move may prove quite a shock as we will go from summer weather in South Africa to winter weather in Switzerland, which will take some adjustment!
A couple of weeks ago we visited Wavecrest, a beach resort on the wild coast in the Transkei, approximately two hours drive from where we live. Going to the Wild Coast is always a great experience as it is one of those places where you really feel like you can have a whole beach for yourself. You also drive through a more remote area to get there and experience a very different side of South Africa. Here are some pictures of our experience. As always, please select the picture to see a larger version.
Panorama of the lagoon and the beach – click on the picture to get a full screen version and experience the location!
We use Panorama Factory to create our panorama’s. Not only does the tool do a fantastic job at stitching pictures together, it also works under Linux and Mac. As both of us run Ubuntu at home, this is an important criteria!
Pretty rocks by the beach:
Two people canoeing on the lagoon:
In order to get to wavecrest, you drive on a dirtroad in the remote Transkei area. The Traskei is a hilly, green area and feels very remote and poor. This picture shows one of the the views along the way. Judging by the size of the dwelling, the family living here must be of pretty well of:
Driving on dirt road takes some getting used to. You have to drive carefully as there are animals on the road, such as this cow:
