I got a bit scortched on our five-hour hike up Helderberg Mountain today. I prefer to think of it as a stong base tan rather than, as someone described it tonight, “looking like a ripe tomato.”
It was a beautiful hike, made even better by the great meal at Guardian Peak restaurant on a vinyard just below the mountain after the descent. It’s amazing the quality of food and wine you can get here for next to nothing, at least compared to Seattle prices.
Above is a map of the Cape Town area. I’m staying in Gordon’s Bay, which is about a 40 minute drive from the city center. Most of the area between the two is developed as suburbs. I’ve added a few other areas that we’ve traveled to (or, in the case of Table Mountain, will be going to in the next week).
Photos of our hike in the Jonkershoek Nature Reserve have been posted to Flickr. Same for the trip down to Betty’s Bay and then back up through Franschhoek and Stellenbosch the other day.
We’ll be heading into the city to stay for Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Looking forward to an international design expo that’s taking place this week.
Betty’s Bay, near Cape Town. This is just a series of still shots, not a movie.
This is a travel map for the trip as it stands now (click the image to see a larger version on my Flickr site). The driving portion of the trip is still in the planning stages. The route shown on this map roughly corresponds to the route that will bring us back to Cape Town from Nelspruit.
Despite being long (around 30 hours of flying time over 42 hours of travel time), the trip to Johannesburg was comfortable. A shower, dinner and drinks at the Hong Kong airport made that five-hour stopover enjoyable. (On the return trip, we’ll have time to go into the city when we land in Hong Kong.) I slept for 11 of the 12 hours between Hong Kong and Johannesburg.
We arrived in Johannesburg around 6:30am and got through the airport quickly, though without my checked bag. It got lost along the way, but was delivered to me the next morning with everything in good condition.
It took at least four days to get over the worst of the jet lag, but we had a great host in Johannesburg who made the transition very comfortable.
I’ve got my local mobile account up and running here in South Africa, so I’ll be posting daily snapshots from my phone camera. I also just uploaded photos from my regular digicam, which is something I’ll only be able to do occasionally. The first batch covers Johannesburg through the first day in Cape Town.
I leave in about four hours for South Africa, where I’ll be spending six weeks. In honor of my new adventure, this web site has been resurrected from the dead. As you can see from the previous entry, it’s been more than two years since my last post.
I’ll be arriving in Johannesburg at some unspecified (long) time in the future. Two days? One day? Who knows. It’s going to be a long flight, with a brief stop-over in Hong Kong. There won’t be much here for the next few days, but after that I hope to be adding words and photos often. Come back again when it’s more interesting.
What a difference a little sunshine, blue sky and shot composition can make.
I first arrived in Kotzebue in January 1993, landing in the winter darkness in the midst of a snowstorm. I meant to only stay for several months, but ended up living here for two and a half years—first as editor of the local newspaper, then striking out on my own doing desktop publishing work.
I’m back, now, for two days, and it’s much milder weather today, if you can call temperatures in the mid-40s in July mild. As the plane landed around 11 a.m., the local temperature was 39 degrees—I was wishing I hadn’t left my jacket behind as I rushed out of the house in Anchorage this morning.
Kotzebue is a town of about 3,000 people—mostly Inupiat Eskimos — located 30 miles above the Arctic Circle and not connected to the rest of the world by road. The only way in and out of the area is by plane—Alaska Airlines flies several 737 jets a day between Kotzebue and Anchorage, 550 miles to the south. The town is located on a gravel spit at the tip of the Baldwin Peninsula, which juts out into Kotzebue Sound, which in turn leads into the Bering Sea.
Kotzebue itself is not what you’d call picturesque (the beautiful areas of this region are across the Sound on the mainland). But I was lucky to have a bit of blue sky blow in tonight, so I went out to see if I could capture some shots that would put a good face on this excellent little arctic burg.
Despite (and maybe because of) the fact that I lived in Alaska for about 16 years, I’ve never been a big fan of the weather. Most people would take that to mean the winters are cold and miserable — which they can be. But I’ve never thought much of the summer weather, either. The best I could say for summer in most parts of Alaska is that sunshine and warmth are more likely than in winter. That’s not saying much.
This summer has been an unusually nice one in much of the state. But again, that’s relative, and there’s still plenty of bad weather, as well.
We got lucky with weather on our trip out into Denali National Park. Our warm, sunny week was sandwiched between two storms that dumped unusual levels of rain in the interior of Alaska, where Denali is located.
Floods slam Interior a 2nd time
Anchorage Daily News
Road crews struggled Monday to keep parts of the Parks Highway open while cabin owners near Denali National Park and Preserve tied steel cables to their structures to keep them from floating away after a storm dumped more than five inches of rain on parts of the Interior over the weekend.
The storm caused flooding along several creeks from Cantwell to north of Fairbanks, the National Weather Service said.
The photo on the left in the collage above shows an evening last week when we dined on the patio of the Creekside Cafe, near where my mother lives outside of Denali. The photo on the right is from a few days ago, after rains swelled nearby Carlo Creek and flooded the area.
Alaska has some amazing things going for it — weather is not one of them.