It’s amazing … out of all our Instagram images … cheetah, lion, owls … this photo of Mokala National Park got the highest votes! When we first visited, what we weren’’t prepared for was the scenery —— wild as Kgalagadi and colours as deeply saturated. Lying just southwest of Kimberley, the park is a synthesis…
Read More

It takes a lot of pushing and shoving by all of us — a boatful of snorkellers — to shift the Rubber Duck into the shallows before we all clamber clumsily in. With a spurt of engine power, the boat slices through cresting waves towards heaving walls of water that appear insurmountable, yet the vessel…
Read More

“You can do this, Mariëlle,” said our world-travelled, seasoned-hiker friend. “It is really not smelly. Besides, it has the best sea view.” He was talking about the compost loo at the isolated Fountain Shack on the Robberg Peninsula in Plettenberg Bay. And he knows how I recoil at anything that doesn’t scream gleaming scrubbed porcelain,…
Read More

The occupants of a number of stationary vehicles alert us to cheetah in the grasses. With much focus we make out two dark heads framed by sun-backed grass. They’re sitting still, alert, backs to us as they watch a nearby herd of springbok wandering by, clueless to the danger just a single pronk away. One…
Read More

Reflection … the projection of mirror-like images … alternatively, careful/long consideration or thought. The two don’t appear to have much connection, do they? South Africa is engaging in much serious reflecting right now, since our national elections are just around the corner. Maybe it’s about thoughts being so long and considered that they’re eventually reflected back…
Read More

… to me! Thank you to the friends who gave me this card. My two strongest weaknesses in one simple statement. Love it, and just had to share it. x    
Read More

Anyone out there who’d like to test the integrity of your new all-terrain tyres? The interior suspension of your 4×4? Or you’re merely hankering after the head-banging joy of jackhammer corrugations (… and washaways, loose boulders, airborne dropoffs …). I have just the adventure for you. Actually, it’s a jeep track (and it says so…
Read More

Final instalment of our Overberg food and wine extravaganza … where else but among the truly lovely mountains of Hemel-en-Aarde? It’s a place of rounded green hills with rock knuckles pulsing through; neat graphic lines of vineyards swaying upward along mountain slopes; and even furtive glimpses through to a distant shimmer of ocean. This is…
Read More

Having got off my high horse (as per my previous post) and stepped down to street level in Hermanus, I was simply thrilled with what I saw. Hope you get a little thrilled yourself. And then there was our arranged tasting to get our wine-stomping boots into, at Hermanuspietersfontein (well, there’s the Kaalvoet Meisie [barefoot…
Read More

I admit it. I’ve been guilty of not being very nice about Hermanus after its rapid overdevelopment and rampant commercialisation across the years. Memories of ‘varsity days in a once-charming seaside hamlet and all that … Well, as one of our wayward willing friends said this last weekend (of a few of us in general):…
Read More