Penguins in Africa

Did you know there are penguins in Africa? We went down to Boulders Bay in the South African Cape Peninsula National Park this weekend and visited the penguin colony.

This is the welcome sign to the park (note, no shaking hands with penguins is allowed):


This was the first penguin we saw. He came out to meet us as we entered the walkway to the park:

Then we saw all these penguins on a boulder in the distance...

And then we got really close to them!

See how close Debra is to the penguins! (but she is not shaking hands with them...)

These are the penguins sitting on nests:

If you look really close you can see some of the dark gray fluffy baby penguins:

These guys were such posers! Seriously they just stood on this rock and posed. We guess they make extra money doing that.

The Dark Ages

You may have read some of the recent coverage about the power shortage in South Africa (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7208628.stm). SA has recently determined that they do not produce enough power for their country and for the past several weeks have been doing rolling power outages throughout the big cities. Some of the stories that have been reported on the local news is that parts of Pretoria have gone without power for 8 hours per day; the cable car going up Table Mountain in Cape Town lost power and people were stuck in those cable cars for 3 hours; there are no generators left to buy in SA, etc., etc., etc. Directly related to this power shortage, the Rand has fallen to 7.4 to the $. Back in November it was 6.5 to the $. Thom's new favorite joke: What did they use for light in South Africa before candles? Answer: Electricity!.

How does this affect us, you might ask. Botswana relies heavily on SA for much of its electricity. There was already a plan for SA to decrease contracted power coming to Botswana and plans are underway for Botswana to begin producing its own power by 2010. So starting in January this year, we have a little less power coming into Bots from SA. That was manageable. However, Botswana also contracts with Mozambique for some power and that gets routed through Zimbabwe. Evidently Zimbabwe has lines down right now and has been very slow to make repairs and that along with the other cut has had a serious impact on life here because Botswana has had to initiate rolling power outages to manage the power shortage we're now experiencing.

Monday was the worst. We lost power for almost 8 hours (6:30 am until after 2:00 pm). Tuesday we were out from 3:30 pm until after 6:00 pm. Wednesday it was 7:15 am until 9:30 am that we had no power. No warning was given that power was going to be cut off. And all these outages affected home as well as work since we live so close to where we work. Friday evening we lost power in the middle of a party just as it got really dark. We managed to get more candles lit and served dessert before the ice cream melted so no real crisis.

Our friends and co-workers who have lived here for a long time are having the hardest time dealing with the recent development. Botswana has enjoyed uninterrupted power supply for decades and no one is prepared to go long periods of time without power. We, of course, are coping quite well, with only an occasional tantrum and/or melt down (for example, if the power goes out before the coffee gets made, that's a crisis situation). We could use a few more candles though...