Cape Town in the Spring

To celebrate Thom's birthday, we planned a little getaway for Columbus Day weekend. We ended up driving to Johannesburg on Friday, spent the night at a hotel close to the airport, and then flew down to Cape Town on Saturday. We love Cape Town. It's so refreshing to be on the coast or down town at the Waterfront. It's a special treat after spending months in the desert.

This time we stayed right on the beach in Camps Bay. And we managed to lose our camera so all of our photos for this blog are borrowed from other websites.


We stayed at the Fairways which was nice.


But the best feature of this hotel is the restaurant Luigi's. We had dinner there Saturday night and it was unquestionably the best Italian food we have had in a very long time.

Our other fabulous restaurant experience was Codfather's. Codfather's was recommended to us by a friend who had also given us the driving directions to Johannesburg and we're just not sure if she was trying to kill us or not. After the driving directions experience we were somewhat skeptical of the restaurant she recommended. It turned out we were pleasantly surprised. At Codfather's, you get to pick your food from the fresh seafood case and you can mix and match and then they cook it perfectly. We had tuna steak, sword fish, local mahi mahi which is called something else, and prawns from Mozambique the size of lobsters (they're truly too big to be called shrimp). It was a delightful experience.

It was a just a bit too chilly and way too rainy to really enjoy being on the beach. It rained all day Sunday. We tried going down to the Waterfront and even made it to the Green Market Square craft market in a break in the rain:




The craft market experience is similar to many places in Africa and many of the "shops" have the same stuff that everyone else has. There's the typical hard sell approach because you'll find the same thing at the next shop and maybe they'll make you a better deal. When we first got there, everyone was pressuring us to come inside their booths and look at there stuff more closely. As soon as it started raining, the message changed to "buy something and then you can come inside to get 'free' shelter".

We ended up going back down to the Waterfront and spending several hours in a very nice mall to stay out of the rain. Debra was happy. Thom, not so much.

We're looking forward to going back in February when it should be hot and steamy.

Time to Build an Ark

They say it's a good sign when the rains come before Botswana Independence Day (September 30). Well, the rain came Thursday, September 28. According to some reports, we had more rain that afternoon than all of last year.

Since Thursday, we've had showers every day. Today, we're having quite a lot of rain. This is a pretty big deal. Botswana is a desert country. The currency in Botswana is the "pula". The word for rain in Setswana is "pula". See the connection?

However, some of us, accustomed to the bright sunny days with endless blue skies, are starting to feel a little depressed. Will the sun ever shine again????

This is what the Thursday afternoon storm looked like from our patio (after it got light enough to take a picture):