Arrivals and departures

Apologies for the dearth of posts recently. With Jessie’s arrival on the 5th October in Upington and Little’s failure to return to school on 4th on account of tonsillitis, it has been a crazy but very enjoyable few weeks.


Catch up time for the blog.


Jessie spent her first week at the farm managing to catch some rays [the pool although sparkling, is still a touch cold to plunge into], The most exciting things that we did during her stay at the farm, were her being driven around the farm in the bakkie by Little, who has now decided that he can drive the real thing. Off Road of course.Bongo was very irritated not to have been allowed to join them in a quick sortie around the drying slabs.

A white water rafting trip on the Orange river..no photos as I didn’t want my camera drowned. As it was, the river was at its lowest and slowest point for months and Jessie regaled me with stories of the river otters and the amazing bird life.

WE all went on Gerrits safari car and did a Game drive around his 2000 hectares. It was great fun. I had forgotten that he had a pair of stunning Namibian giraffes. And we saw a beautiful pied kingfisher by the lake as well as a pile of freshly laid ostrich eggs, which Gerrit raided and gave us one. Assuring us, that in the absence of a male ostrich it did not have a baby inside.

Pied Kingfisher searching for breakfast

Not an uncommon sight on the roads here





Big disappeared on his month long Europe and USA tour, followed by Little flying back to school. Jessie and I got set for our road trip down to the whale coast. Such a civilised drive, we set out early on Tues 12th October with a large flask of freshly brewed coffee and delicious banana bread baked by Jessie the day before. This nourished us for the 550 kilometre drive to Clanwilliam.

We stayed overnight at a pretty little guest house and in the morning , the lovely owner Wilma, filled our flask up with more fresh coffee and we took the morning to cover the next 200 kilometres to Franschoek, turning off the main road and taking the scenic route.

We lunched in one of SA most famous restaurants RUBENS and went to the national exhibition of ceramics being held at Grand Provence winery. We became terribly distracted by Franschoek and left rather later than we had intended at 4.00