Advertisement
Published: December 22nd 2006
Edit Blog Post
Curtains are hot property you know..
The guy standing in the background is a car guard. For the benefit of those who haven't been here, they reside on every street/ parking lot & you tip them for pretending to guard your car from theives (and yes, they are rather annoying) There's been alot of electrical storms around recently. The place where we're staying (Dave's parent's while they are on holiday) is in a pretty secure complex. Or so I thought until the power went out the other night. Having no lights in the complex is a bit of a problem. Having the electric fences that border the perimeter out of service makes it more of a problem. Dave decided to bring the dogs in case they get poisoned by intruders. I started to visualise the scene in Jurassic park where the dinosaur plucks down the wires of the electric fence after the power fails…
Well happily, nothing that dramatic happened. Still, when you’re not used to living in an environment like this, it does make you paranoid. Especially after Dave informed me that sometimes blackouts are caused by less than accidental means. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me.
So we spent the evening playing scrabble. We actually enjoyed it so much that we haven’t put away the scrabble set yet. We’ve even graduated to monopoly, which is sitting mid-game in front of me.
In other news, Dave and I are currently
looking for work in Kruger national park. Im tired of living in the city and would like to go and do something a bit different. We have applied for a couple of assistant management positions and so are waiting for news there.
We have decided to spend New Years in Durban. I have found out to get there it will cost us almost as much in tolls as it will in fuel. Im a bit annoyed at the fact that the tolls are Aus $8-10 and that there are 4 of them each way. I don’t know how anyone can afford to do anything in this country. This is one of my general gripes, along with the fact that we have waited 3 months for our broadband to be installed. And this is not uncommon, someone we know waited 7 months for theirs.
We took a trip to Pretoria the other day to visit the transvaal museum. The black government has been trying to change the name of Pretoria to “Tswane” for a while now (in keeping with trying to remove the evidence of white occupation), but everytime they put up new signs, people come and spray paint
“Pretoria” over them. It happens so often that they use templates to do it. I would have thought that the government would have better things to do with their money (like.. I don’t know.. fighting violent crime for eg) than making “Tswane” signs, but apparently not.
But anyway, the museum was pretty cool. We took a picture of us inside the jaw of some extinct shark species, which made the jaws of the great white next to it look like it belonged to a goldfish. Note my new safari shirt by the way!
Just thought I’d mention a trip we made to a restaurant in Kruger Park. It is set up on an old railway station, with one of the original carriages of the last train through the park as the restaurants’ bar. I included the story (as shown by photo’s of the menu) for anyone who wants to read it, it’s interesting- at one of the stops some of the passengers exited the train and were herded into the bush by lions! But anyway, the night we went was cloudy and threatening rain, and by the time we rocked up, the temperature had dropped from 48 degrees
(celcius) to 15 deg in a matter of hours. That was odd in itself as the previous night at the same time (about 6:30 pm) it had still been 39 deg.
After we sat down, we spotted family there that we had met that afternoon on our leopard hunt. We had pulled up next to them in a little side road and they had pointed out some lions off in the distance. We chatted with them there, and again at the restaurant. They told us that they were camping and that this was their last night. They said they hadn’t had the best camping experience, as firstly, the nights had been over 30 deg consistently and the tent next door had parties until all hours of the morning. They also had a 1000 km journey the next day so they said goodbye and went off to their camp. Not 5 minutes after they left, the whole sky just opened and it poured down. And it was no ordinary rainfall, the restaurant gutters in the middle of the restaurant immediately started to overflow by the sheer volume coming down, the restaurant manager couldn’t believe it and said this had never happened
before. So, needless to say, we felt rather sorry for our camping friends…
Anyway, I hope everyone’s well. I will be at Dave’s parents house for xmas lunch, so nothing too exciting. I have included some other pics to make this blog more interesting (its hard to write interesting stuff when nothing’s happened for 2 weeks!)
Love to all, Kel
Advertisement
Tot: 0.117s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 7; qc: 48; dbt: 0.095s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
SnazzySmith
Deb & Russ
Yet another great read Kel. Although it is taking forever on my end for the photos to load I can see the little pic of my favourite Uncle In Law though...Hi Roger! I look forward to seeing the rest of your photos when they finally upload. Have an excellent Christmas and an even Happier New Year! Love Deb