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:
Christmas and New Year in summer … what a concept!
We are still strugging getting used to summery weather and activities for this time of the year. In fact, we didn´t really get into Christmas mood until a few days ago. Either way, Best wishes for the festive season and all the best for 2006!
We spend our Christmas enjoying summer, going to the beach and Baking Christmas Cookies. Here are some of the pictures:
In yearly tradition, we baked “Russion Tea Cakes”, or Christmas Cookies. Here is a picture of the resulting cookies:
Christmas Cookies
If you would like to make those cookies for yourself, here is the recipe:
RUSSIAN TEA CAKES
1c butter (1/2lb 226g)
1/2 c powder sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp salt
2 1/4 C flour
3/4 C fine chopped nuts*
cream sugar and vanilla
add dry ingredients and mix.
Add nuts
Make 1″ balls. Bake at 350f/175c 8-10 minutes
Dust with powder sugar warm, then again cold.
* traditionally pecans. Also try pistachios, sunflower seeds, cashews, etc.
Here are also some pictures from our beach visits. On Gonube Beach, someone was Kite Surfing, where they use a kite to propel themselves. Looked really exciting and something we may want to do sometime during our stay in South Africa. The picture shows a normal surfer and a kite surfer in the same frame.
Whale trip album
In July we went to Knysna with as primary goal to go on a whale trip. The Whale season is between June and September as the Whales migrate during that period from Antarctica to South Africa and beyond to mate.
We went on a trip on the Indian Ocean where we were lucky enough to see Southern Right Whales, Humpback Whales as well as dolphins and Jackass Penguins. Seeing the whales is quite an experience: they are huge and come very close to the boat. Impressive!
Unfortnately, it is quite difficult to get good pictures from the whales as they tend to be underwater for long periods of time and even when they come up you only see a fraction of their huge body. We managed to get some lovely shots though, and by clicking here or on the image above you can have a look at some of our favorite pictures!
We will post the pictures of the rest of the trip, where we visited places such as Robberg, Tsitsikama and, of course, Knysna, in a separate album. Coming up soon!
Have you ever found that you are quite interested in looking at what is happening on the Wanderers but never know when new content will be on the site? It gets frustrating to check all the time and not find any new content, but you also don´t want to miss anything!
We added a feature to the website that will help you greatly with this: You can now sign up to automatically get a weekly e-mail with all the latest headlines of what was added to the site. If there is no new content, you don´t get an e-mail. Simple as that. This cool feature will help you with knowing when to check and stay up to date with our adventures.
In order to sign up, simply enter your name and e-mail address in the navigation bar on the right hand side and click the “Subscribe” button. You will get a confirmation e-mail confirming your subscription.
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What a fabulous weekend … nice and warm (27-30 degrees Celcius/80-85 Fahrenheit), sunny and the pool is warm. It has taken us a while to get here, but it finally appears to be summer! We spent a while in the pool yesterday as it was so nice and may go to the beach later today. South Africa IS a nice place to live!
The odd thing is, when you go in the stores you hear Christmas Charols, see inflated Father Christmas´s and notice Christmas decorations all over the place. This seems so wrong for the time of the year, especially if you see sleighs, christmas trees with socks hanging from them and pictures of snow. I guess we will get used to it eventually!
Port Elizabeth Album
We made a trip to Port Elizabeth last weekend. Port Elizabeth is the closest city to East London and is always a pleasant change from being in East london. It takes about 3 hours to get there over some uncomfortable roads so we don´t make the trip too often. We decided to go for an extended weekend last weekend (3 nights), but unfortunately we both got sick on the second day from something we ate wrong, so the trip was not very successful.
Click here to see photos from our various trips to Port Elizabeth. Port Elizabeth has some good shopping, some pleasant beaches and just more people than East London.
It is not that common to get a picture of us together, so I thought I would post this recent picture at the Family day at the company:
Johan and Karl
It would seem that we have been transported back to the Northern Hemisphere … The last few days (and the next few days by the weather predictions) have been cold (15-18 degrees Celcius/60-65 degrees Fahrenheit) and rainy. A bit like a typical November day in Belgium, except that I have been told the weather there has been very nice the last few days.
It is supposed to be almost summer here, and last year we were swimming in the pool about every day at this time of the year! Not that we didn´t need the rain as we have been having many veldfires lately, but still …
What do you do on a miserable day like that in East London? You go shopping and go to the movies (together with everyone else). We went and saw Flightplan with Jodie Foster. The movie had an interesting plot about a woman who looses her husband and transports his coffin back on a plane together with her daughter. On the plane, the daughter disappears completely and nobody appears to have seen her. The movie had some interesting twists, but overall the movie didn´t make that much sense. A good movie for a rainy November afternoon, but not much more than that!
Wild Coast Album
A couple of weekends ago we visited the Wild Coast. We drove up on Saturday to hotel Seagulls, crossing the river at Kei Mouth and driving a bit around in the Transkei, one of the poorer parts of South Africa. Hotel Seagulls was very disappointing. The hotel was nicely located at the beach and we had a lovely beachwalk, but the food, including their “seafood extravaganza”, was poor, the rooms very basic and we didn´t appreciate the Karaoke during the night until well after 11pm. We wouldn´t recommend staying there, especially since it wasn´t that inexpensive (704R for both of us Dinner Bed and Breakfast).
The next day we drove back, stopping over at Morgan Bay which was stunningly beautiful. Particularly nice was the Double Mouth Nature reserve right by Morgan Bay. Very worthwile a visit.
Click here or on the picture above to see the pictures from this trip and another trip I did a few months earlier to the same area.
The Wild coast is Wild, but incredibly beautiful. Although only 70km or so from East London, it is a completely different world with a high degree of poverty, more traditional houses and a very different coastline. The Wild Coast is in the Transkei which is seen as a more dangerous area of South Africa, so you do have to look out where you go although it would appear Umtata and Port St. Johns are the main areas to avoid.