Blogs from Eastern Cape, South Africa, Africa

Dear All After a wonderful safari-style experience at the lovely Kudu Ridge Game Lodge and nearby Addo Elephant Park, I bade farewell to the former's very friendly and welcoming owners, and also to a lovely Dutch couple who had just arrived the evening before. While they were driving through Addo and then leaving their rental car at Port Elizabeth Airport to fly to Durban and pick up another rental from there, I was driving this long stretch of the road trip myself. I noted that most people seem to skip this bit out, and had a feeling that this part of my trip would be a bit different - I was not wrong. After having arrived at Kudu Ridge via a very bumpy, long and pot-holed dirt road, I was taking a sealed route back to ... read more

After Durban we have two sea days until we get to Port Elizabeth. The night before we are invited to the Captains Cocktail party. This occurs every three to four weeks. Normally the Captain talks to us about our voyage and tells a couple of marine themed jokes. This time he tells us that there is a special guest on board and introduced Sir Bob Geldof. We are very surprised and Bob Geldof talks about his father who worked on the original Queen Mary. He is going to give a talk before departing at Cape Town. We will miss that because we leave the ship at Port Elizabeth to do a three day safari. We leave the ship and Port Elizabeth and a mini bus is waiting outside for us and one other person. So we ... read more

“Out of suffering comes the serious mind; out of salvation, the grateful heart; out of endurance, fortitude; out of deliverance, faith. Patient endurance attends to all things.” – Teresa of Avila “A lockdown? This word is seldom heard or mentioned and conjures up an image of a maximum-security prison being placed in lockdown to keep unruly inmates under control. But here we are, restricted to our homes, trying to understand “social distancing” and many people trying to figure out what it all means.” This is a paragraph out of the very first Covid-19 blog written and published on 29th March 2020. It never crossed my mind that, 18 months later, it would still be a case of banging away on the keyboard for this 48th blog edition, trying to make sense of this pandemic which has ... read more

“With Covid-19, we’ve made it to the life raft. Dry land is far away.”- Marc Lipsitch (epidemiologist) March 2021 The above quote is appropriate; the daily outpouring of news on the twists and turns of this pandemic are never-ending and yet, many people across the globe have adapted to a “new normal” which largely translates to covid-19 fatigue and simply moving on. We don’t talk about it quite as much, there are many conspiracy theories and lately, the conversation has zoomed in on the “anti-vaxxers” who espouse all manner of theory, largely lacking in logic, but undoubtedly, they are putting themselves at far greater risk than those vaccinated. For many people, Covid-19 has slipped off the front page. A quick, around the globe review, strongly suggests that this virus and its little army of mutants, is ... read more

In the winter of our discontent - ”Despair is the state we fall into when one’s imagination fails. When we have no stories that describe the present and guide the future, hope evaporates. Political failure is, in essence, a failure of imagination.”- George Monbiot. C-19 continues to defy any form of linear progression and rages on relentlessly testing just about every scientific and medical theory that our so-called global experts have spewed forth into a highly confused populace. This can be neatly revealed by a quick scan of the current state of heightened chaos in countries around the world. What better place to start than China where they are experiencing their broadest outbreak since the shenanigans in the wet markets of Wuhan one and a half years ago. To compound their problems, it is the Delta ... read more