holiday and beach (J1)

We are back in Gabs again, after a really nice holiday in South Africa. We started our trip on Friday morning, and took a scenic drive through Free State, going south of Joburg and Pretoria towards the east coast, with as final destination St. Lucia. J2 has drawn this little map to show our route.

Even with real maps, the route was not always clear to us, since we were not following the main motorways as usual. We even encountered some gravel roads, our poor Honda went places where it was not supposed to go. To break the nearly 1200km drive we stopped overnight in a small place in Free State, called Memel. A small village with approx 200 people, but a really nice B&B.

During the drive through Free State we saw loads of big empty spaces, big distances between small (agricultural) towns, and very dry and brown fields. The next day there were about 4 hours driving left, and upon arrival we spoiled ourselves with the Neptune Platter in the local restaurant and bar. How is that for some seafood?

St. Lucia is a very unique area and is a heritage site. The river is joining the Indian Ocean through enormous wetland areas, which host all sorts of wildlife, including most of the big 5 animals. The hippos and crocodiles are right at the edge of town, and enjoy their sunbathing just as much as the people! More about this a little later.
The town has a great selection of bars and restaurants, where we enjoyed Greek food, Italian, Portuguese, and loads of seafood. Of course also the necessary alcoholic refreshment.
On the nice days we enjoyed the beautiful beaches, this picture is of the beach in Cape Vidal, 25km from St. Lucia in a national park. We encountered Rhinos on our drive to the beach.
Two days were less sunny, which gave us a nice opportunity for some shopping, reading, and mountain biking.

Besides the hippos and crocodiles, there were of course many many monkeys everywhere.

Our lodge was called Amazulu lodge and was a really amazing place, nice rooms, beautiful setting, thatch roofs, great breakfast, on the edge of town, and walking distance to the beach.

The rooms are all located around this 'inside' area with pool, jacuzzi and a 'boma' at the top, complete with bar.

To help us not miss our own dogs too much, a very sweet 'resident' cat kept us company nearly our whole stay. J2 named him Pufpuf.

As I mentioned before, the hippos and crocodiles were on the edge of town. Hippos normally come out of the water at nighttime to graze, and go back to the water when the sun comes up. The can walk over 3 kilometers away from the water, and back. In St. Lucia that means town is within reach easily. The hippos have discovered that the green areas in town provide nice fresh grass, and the come INTO town at night. On one of our night when we walked back to the lodge from a restaurant, there was one right along the road, and on our last night this one was right outside our bedroom! Remember: Hippos kill more people in Africa then any other animal.

After our week in St. Lucia we were nice and rested, finally had a chance to read some books again, and were totally ready for some action.....RUGBY ACTION. More about that in the next post.

J1

New Hair and Time Off

Hello from the Mrs.

It's been a long time since I've contributed to much of this, but as I am on the "summer break" for my studies at the moment, let me use this free time to catch up.

First of all, I have a new haircut. For most people this wouldn't be a big deal, for me, I've been sporting the "plain, long, brown" look for too long. Irine (my gorgeous Zimbabwean hairdresser) finally earned my trust and I let her have her way with me.

Fresh out of the salon: feeling a wee bit Carol Brady, but bearable.

From the side:

Day 2: still not too bad! More "Karen" from Will & Grace, less Brady.

From the side, so you can really get the layered effect.

Next up: time off!

We are heading down to the east coast of South Africa, on the border of Mozambique this friday, for our spring holiday. Staying in a nice lodge close to the beach where other people will feed us and clean up after us and bring us bellinis with little umbrellas in them. Finally! Some time alone, time to be spoiled, time to relax, and time to forget all about WORK. We'll be on the beach from Saturday to Friday, then off to Joburg for the big AUS vs SA rugby match, and then back in Gabs by Sunday. I am really, really looking forward to it.

Birds

As mentioned previously, we have recently become members of the local birdclub. For their website please click here. J2's family was so kind to pay our first years membership, which was a necassary push for us, we had been meaning to become members for a long time...

So far we have managed to join them on one of their trips, unfortunanely we brought our binocultars, instead of our camera, so no pictures. We did however receive this compilation of local birds from J. recently.

J1

photos (J1)

As promised in the previous blog, some photos of the horse safari:

Me on the horse called "Magic"
Jill and her horse "Amstel"
Hyenas
After the horse safari we had dinner in the restaurant, with Mopane worms on the menu!

This weekend we walked from Gabs to Gabane, something we have done on a few previous occasions. Gabane is approx 12 km from Gabs, and is a village which hosts quite a few bars. One of them does steaks and papa every Saturday and Sunday night, and there is nothing nicer then a cold beer and a big steak, after a long walk.

Mountain rest in Gabane.

J1

Spring (J1)

It is officially spring in Botswana since Friday. We can notice as well, temperatures during the day are getting up to 27 degrees C, and it does not get as cold anymore at nighttime. We have not had a fire in the fireplace for over a week. I guess this is a good thing, as our gardener tells me there is not more dead wood on our plot.....

What have we been up to in the last weeks? I think I will just summarize:

- I finished another part of my course last weekend, waiting for the results of my final assignment. Jill is also still waiting for her results, she finished her semester a few weeks ago.
- Loads of kennel related stuff
- Work, too much work.
- Visitors, but this was already explained in the previous post
- A horse safari in Mokolodi.
- A stargazing night.

There is probably more, I just can not think of it right now.

One last think, we have become members of the local birdlife club (thanks to the family H, who were so kind to sponsor our membership for the first year), and we went out on a birding trip with them a few weeks ago. It was really nice, we both enjoyed it and really want to get to know some more birds around us.

I will post some pictures during the week.

J1

Visitors etc

It's been a long time since I've been able to post something on here, but J1 has been keeping the thing going, thank goodness.

My parents were here from Missouri for 5 days, and at the moment we have 2 18-year-old girls namely the sister-in-law and her best buddy.

We've been camping and sight seeing and out to eat. During the daytime they have been keeping themselves busy with shopping and drinking coffee and sleeping late! The life of luxury!

There are lots of photos to share, so I'll let them do the talking.

Our "loo with a view" at the SA game reserve just over the border.

The girls first rhinos - these were walking all around our camp, too.

This is only about 1/8th of the snake...

Sitting around the camp site

From this point, you'd think all we do when camping is read!!

More to come about our previous visitors and long weekend to come, later!

New office

Now that we have been in our new office for a few weeks, most things have found a place again, and we have settled at our new desks. The shorter drive to work is certainly a joy, and our good hound in the office is as well.

A few pictures:

This shows the front outside of our office. The photo is taken from the parking area inside our complex. The whole complex is in a U-shape.

This is inside the main office, with the directors busy discussing something very important....
J2 very busy, but Reggie even busier of course....

This is the front reception area of the office, with Reggie 'on duty' as our receptionist

The above map shows our complex and directions, as we have also sent to all our clients.

J1

Evacuation complete? (J1)

We received an email from the auctioneer who was handling our house sale, before we left Ireland. He asked if we could please get in touch with him. A developer had contacted him, and wanted to buy our house.

The timing was quite good, as we had recently been thinking about maybe trying to put it back on the market. Unfortunately house prices had been dropping over 6% in Ireland in the last year. But the developer really wanted our house, and we ended up agreeing a price higher then our asking price last year.

We have been here before, and I do not want to get too excited about it until contracts have been signed. Our solicitor is currently preparing the contracts, and hopefully we can sign within 4 weeks.

If the sale goes though, we would have officially completed our evacuation from Ireland, as this blog has suggested. I have proposed to J2 to change the name of the blog. Lets wait and see.

J1

Delta and Maun (J1)

A few weeks back we had to go to a place called Gumare. It is located on the west side of the famous Okavango Delta, Botswana's biggest tourism attraction. Unfortunately the west side is more where cattle is held, where as the middle and east side is where all the wildlife is. Our work assignment was to check out a new site for the development of a hospital. We figured, as work brings us up there anyway, we might as well spend the weekend in the famous Delta, relax, and see some wildlife. This was until we started calling around for prices.....Everything is priced in US Dollars, and the cheapest we could find in the Delta area was $750 per person per night! On the top end $2000 per person per night was no exception.

With a salary in Botswana Pula, we had to settle for something outside the Delta, closer to Maun, but still very very nice. Some pictures:

This was at Nguma Island Lodge, close to our work site, on the cattle side of the Okavango Delta. Hippos and crocodiles are still seen regularly here. We did not see them, but did hear them at night.
The accommodation was in luxury tents, complete with bathroom and shower. The whole thing is on poles above the water.

The Delta area, the only place in Botswana that has sufficient water. It made a great place for birdwatching. We had to leave our (rental) car in the nearby village, and were picked up by the lodge to be driving for 30 minutes through areas like in the above picture, just to get to the lodge.
We were the only visitors that night, and had the whole bar to ourselves. We enjoyed a lovely glass of port on the bar.

For our weekend we stayed here, at the Tree Lodge. The picture shows the main entrance. The whole thing was located in a private game farm of 200 ha.

This was our 'cottage', probably one of the nicest places I ever stayed at. The place had a huge bed, big corner bathtub, and outdoor shower!

The gamefarm was free for everyone to walk around, and had some beautiful trails. It had giraffe, kudu, springbok, impala, zebra, eland, warthog etc, just no predators. The picture shows J2 checking out the giraffes.

J1

an update, finally (J1)

I realize it has been nearly a month since the last update. Instead of listing excuses (again), I will try and organise what I would like to share on this blog from the past month:

• Our office move, images of our new place
• Our (work) trip to Maun and the Delta
• Our trip into the bush (Khutse) with A. and E.
• The sale of our house in Ireland
• More surgery for Reggie.

I will try and make a post for all of them this coming week, as we have some nice pictures. I will start with one now, on a saturday afternoon, in the office :(

J1

at last...

We have been running around chasing our tails for the last few weeks, resulting in no blog entries for too long of a period of time.

Let me list some excuses:

1) We are both very busy with our respective courses.

2) The shelter is taking quite a bit of our time

3) We have been extremely busy at work.

4) Our new employee needs a lot of training, to be able to relieve us from some of that work

5) We have had a re-newed offer on our house in Ireland, and might sell if it all works out.

6) We are moving our office to a new and bigger location, which means moving services such as phone and internet, breaking down walls and painting the new office, buying new office furniture, and of course moving accross town. Here is a picture of our new place. With a bit of luck we will be in operation at the new location in 1 week.

J1

Photos (by J2)

First of all, the best reason to own your own business:










(This particular day, Reggie got "employee of the month" and lots of congratulatory pats)



Next: Photos from this past weekend in Groot Marico.

First, our new favorite bistro (too bad it's 1.5 hours away and only open Fri-Sun):















It was lovely and dark and romantic and lo and behold we were the only ones there. Not because it's bad, but because there's only about 1200 people in the whole town! Saturday it was actually packed with visitors (which was fine because we braaied anyway), and then Sunday when we were there for cake and coffee we almost didn't get a seat because it was so busy.

The food was:
Steamed leeks wrapped in a crepe and drizzled with hollandaise sauce (starter)
Blue cheese and honey-drizzled walnuts on pear poached in red wine (starter)
Chicken stuffed with herb mousse and coconut+ coriander sauce (main)
Stuffed calamari with fragrant thai rice (main)
Chocolate orange mousse (dessert)
















Johannes reckons this was the best bread he ever had - and that was only on the side.

















Our cottage & braai out on the veranda.




































The grounds















Fruit trees & grapevines everywhere. I helped myself to grapefruit and oranges.



















Probably the only well-known thing about this little hole in the wall town is that it's very much the "Hannibal Missouri" of South Africa, i.e. a very famous folk author lived and loved and wrote all about the place. Rather than Mark Twain, of course, that author was H.C. Bosman.

We took a tour of the Bosman "living museum" led by this quirky old guy called Egbert. He is a true history buff and runs the info centre in town and knows alllllllllll about old man Bosman.

There was another group on the tour with us - all Afrikaners from some small country town nearby who were also making a weekend out of a trip to G.M. Since G.M. is in the heart of Boer country, the majority of the morning was very light on the English. It was a good chance to give my very rusty Afrikaans a workout though. Try as they may, they just kept forgetting 3 out of the group were foreigners. We coped just fine but I felt a little sorry for the Swiss German girl who was also with us.

The tour ended with him reading a few short stories out loud to us. That was definitely the highlight.