Africa part 1

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Zie: http://gerardenpetraopreis.blogspot.com/2017/08/

Monday 16th of October 2017

Start of our Africa Tour4.0

4.00 a.m. the alarm clock sounds. Party Time. 4 suitcases and 2 pieces of hand luggage. All neatly weighted and maxed out to the limit. Spend 2 days packing dive gear, all kinds of useful stuff ordered at AliExpress, clothing for both hot and cold, 15 bags of adventure food, some toiletries, lots and lots of cameras and electronics with accompanying batteries and chargers. 2×23 kg pp + 12kg hand luggage seems a lot but it only just fits. The children clothing I gathered from my colleagues is packed too.

Our friend Bas brings us to Schiphol where Junior is seeing us off.

We have to do the bags check-in ourselves and that takes a long time. The machine is more finicky than I am. Only when a stewardess changes the label from the one handle to another the machine accepts the last bag. Next is security check. This also takes a long time. 12 kilo of equipment and wire needs to be taken out and double checked. They almost forget to give us back the chargers! They call us back from the line at customs when they find a whole tray just standing there!!!

Schiphol is a real shopping Walhalla. It’s as crowded as a Saturday afternoon in the Kalverstraat (Amsterdam). We go t-shirt hunting for our favourite car rental agent and stumble across a wall of Mondrian stuff. What a way to start a trip.

We booked a direct flight with KLM to Cape Town. And that’s a good thing because it looks like a ball pit. I count 17 kids under 4 years. Fortunately, the entertainment system is top notch and 5 films later we land in Cape Town on time. Left 10 a.m. land 9.30 p.m. and no time difference. The customs officers have little desire to inspect our luggage. One makes a half-heartedly attempt and wants to know what I have in my duty-free bag. When I proudly show my Mondrian tea towel, I’m waived thru. He is not the least interested in my Mondrian cup and Mondrian peppermint box. I assume he’s not a fan of Dutch painters.

At the exit a taxi driver is waiting holding a sign ‘Gerard & Petra’. I love it! It’s a very friendly guy from Zimbabwe. I found the taxi service on TripAdvisor. We’re dropped off at the Brookston Cottage where we immediately roll into bed.

Tuesday 17th of October 2017

After a wonderful night’s sleep we meet Alan the owner. He gives us travel tips and advises us against driving to West Coast NP. The park is nice but the rest of the road is boring. For the wow effect we better drive through the Cedar Mountains via Ceres and Die Dorp Op Die Berg.

Jacques Malan comes to pick us up at 9 a.m. Very nice to see him again and he loves his T-shirt. The new, temporary Berg4x4 location is nearby. The Rhino is awaiting us, packed with a roof top tent and a roof rack, but there is a problem with the table. It is broken and still needs to be repaired. Also, not all border cross documents are ready yet. For the rest, he has done his best to get everything I put on my list from straps to clothespins, new pillows and new sleeping bags, 3 jerrycans, 2x20L water containers, multifunctional scissors, a new tire pump, new air mattress, Tupperware boxes and a seed net to put in front of the radiator. He even got the drive moz sticker, plus 4 brand new heavy duty tires. The rhino is nice and high on the wheels and that is necessary to overcome the sand in the Central Kalahari. He also happens to have a few carton boxes that we can put in the back seat. 

At 1 p.m. we have gone through everything and we’re on our way to Glencairn, a ‘hamlet’ of 3 streets next to Simons Town (known for the penguins). On the way we drive along Muizenberg with the famous colourful beach shacks.

In Glencairn we booked a room at De La Hilcremat, chosen by Gerard. It turns out to be fantastic. Once a garage, now a stylish unit with a balcony and a great view of False bay. Next we drop by the Dive Centre to discuss tomorrow’s schedule. We’ve booked a 2 dive package with one dive with sea lions and one dive with sevengill sharks. It turns out that the sevengill shark or the cow shark has not been seen for a long time. Same goes for other sharks we’re told. At 4 p.m. it is time for a late lunch or early dinner. We had already seen a restaurant en route with many touring cars in front. This restaurant turns out to have a high rating on TripAdvisor. So we need to check it out. All tourists, 6 buses full, have fortunately left when we arrive. On the menu bitterballen, smoked sausage (Dutch Rookworst) and pea soup (Dutch Erwtensoep). We go for ‘biefstuk met patat’. The meat is very tender but the fries are not well done. The neighbour has ordered the bitterballen. They look good but are so much bigger than ours in Holland.

After dinner we head to the supermarket. We work through a few aisles until the cart is full. At our room we enjoy a lovely sunset. We empty all suitcases and sort everything. The car is next to the room and that is very pleasant for repacking. The owner Dean drops by to inquire if everything is to our likings. He obviously has never seen his place so packed full of stuff before. We manage to give everything that was sorted out on the bed a place so that we can get into it ourselves.

Wednesday 18th of October 2017

We wake up well before sunrise and see it turn light. Fantastic  bed with a great view. We watch the sun rise over False Bay. Clear blue sky and little wind. Coffee. Dive gear in the car and at 9 a.m. we arrive at Pisces Divers. It is busy. With a full boat we sail for 20 minutes to Partridges Point for our sea lions dive. When we arrive the waves turn out to be huge so the dive plan is changed. We go back a bit and will make a dive near some rock.

Dive:

So, that water is cold! Visibility is additionally very poor. Not even 2.5 meters. We don’t see the guide, only a vague shadow of his fins. The bottom is full of empty shells, large and small starfish. There is fish but visibility is too limited to estimate how many. I see something that looks like a white lobster but can’t take a picture because of the swell. We also have to be very careful not to lose site off the others. I’m looking at a yellow/brown fish on a stone when suddenly a torpedo shoots by. Sea lions. They are fast. After 5 minutes they are gone and we exit the water.

We are going to pick up new bottles in the harbour. We had to book 2 dives in advance and they don’t refund. Gerard refuses to do the 2nd dive. He claims he does this for fun and with this cold and this shitty visibility he doesn’t like it. There is another dropout so we go for the 2nd dive with 4 only.

Dive:

The guide is holding the hand of the Ukrainian women during the dive. That says something about her diving capabilities. Viz is still crap. My buddy is from Haarlem and she has already made 16 dives in not the least of places like Indonesia, Maldives and Hawaii. But she’s not familiar with these circumstances. The second dive is even worse than the first and we drop to 16.5m! Cold. Swell. We started with 2.5m viz but after 10 minutes we only have 0.5m and it is the guide who recommends to go up after 15 minutes.

Fortunately the sun is shining. Sailing was fun. At the diving centre we get a croque monsieur for which we of course paid a lot.  Before I can speak my mind, we’re made an offer. We are allowed to make a shore dive in February to compensate for the last dive. Well that’s nice and makes up for the chaos on the 1st dive and the shitty viz during the 2nd dive.

We drive to the post office in Simonstown and get a diving license which we will need later. We drop off our diving gear in our room and drive to the supermarket. For the next 2 hours we struggle through the remaining aisles and stock up with sustainable food. The sun is already setting. We drive to the Dixie Restaurant and have a small pizza and a salad.

Thursday 19th of Oktober 2017

Glencairn, Falsh Bay, Cape Town

Beautiful sunrise, then clouds emerge. We load the car. I just want to stop by Sea View Glencairn. I have chosen this apartment and we will be here for another week at the end of the trip. Small competition between spouses. Gerard picked a room and I the other one. They appear to be only150m apart. The red-haired hostess likes my pre-visit. The apartment looks great and the pool in front of the rooms is overlooking Flash Bay. Absolutely fabulous, looking forward to our visit already. We continue towards Cape Town. We stop at the Blue Route Mall in Tokai. We have some more items on our shopping list. We find a nice parking attendant who looks after our car. Costs 5 rand, 30 (euro)cents. We get a prepaid phone card from Vodacom with minutes and data. Costs 3x nothing. I also score a yoga mat for on the road workouts. Next we drive to Jacques. We arrive at noon. He has his men ready and they pull out the backseat. Now we have a lot more storage space in the back. The 3 large carton boxes fit perfectly. Here we want to put the 5 litre water bottles. Necessary luggage can go on top. Things we don’t need daily as well as the diving gear go in the back/trunk. We get the border documents and the table is there. They couldn’t find my wallet, which I had forgotten in the rush last year. It had been in the safe the whole time but ended up somewhere else after the move and Christo the owner does not know where. It’ll pop up again.

Off to Riebeek-Kasteel, a small friendly wine village. Because we’re late again, we’re not driving by Stellenbosch. Does not matter to us because I don’t care about wine at all, on average 1 glass a year, and Gerard does like wine but prefers beer. The car trip is nice. Riebeek-Kasteel is not more than 4 streets, a square and a church. We go to the tourist office for accommodation and we barely manage to find something under 1000 ZAR. We arrive at the Thin Red Roof (riebeekkasteel.co.za), receive a very warm welcome and get 1 of the 4 rooms in the cottage. At first I have doubts because it smells rather musty, but this turns out to be the huge fireplace. The owner immediately offers a nice discount on the room rate. They will light the fireplace for us in the evening. We are the only guests. We have a drink (sparkling water and some bat piss) in the cosy garden and then drive to the local butcher. The store is located in a white building on a big estate. We see the in-house staff do their groceries. Here we buy some steak, smoked chicken fillet and minced meat. Gerard will then re-load the car. The 3 jerry cans go on the roof rack next to the 2^nd spare tire. They are windcatchers, but on top is always better than in the trunk. I am having a workout in the garden among the yellow weavers. We have a delicious meal in the restaurant where the cat is on the table and the dog on the couch. (This is how we lived at home for many happy years). Here too, a fireplace is burning. In the cottage we enjoy ‘our’ huge fireplace. I sit on the couch and write a few more lines. In our bathroom there is a colossal corner bath with a note next to it requesting to be economical with water due to drought.