Wildlife

Last week’s trip through the Eastern Cape may have yielded some excellent experiences and sightings, e.g.:

and:

…but urban Cape Town fought back this morning at breakfast with a mischievous baboon troop passing through the Groot Constantia estate, much to the delight of the tourists and the chagrin of the restaurant staff.

The local baboons aren’t really dangerous – indeed, they would rather have absolutely nothing to do with us humans – but they can be a pain: emptying rubbish bins and damaging the vines.

Watching the estate staff attempting to chase them away with compressed air guns, whoops and shouting was interesting. A real battle of wills, with the staff happy that they were moving the baboons away from the restaurant areas, while the baboons seemed pretty much unphased by the noise and the commotion, and were content to grudgingly head towards the mountain, but very much at their own pace.

More pics of more wildlife (and other autumn/winter photos) here.

Learning curve

Lunch at Ons Huisie was a revelation. The Wes Kus Potjie was utterly fantastic. And while I was well aware that the fishermen north of Cape Town were big on prawns, mussels, calamari and kingklip, I didn’t know that they enjoyed quite so much garlic. Apparently, they like a lot of garlic.
Anyway, if Ons Huisie were going to make an truly authentic Wes Kus Potjie, surely they would have somehow slipped some loose women and illicit liquor in there. And some poaching gear.
Although the neoprene would have made the dish a little chewy.

Yesterday I also found out that there was a zebra in the Nativity story. Regular readers will know that I don’t consider the Nativity to be real, just like I don’t consider the Famous Five to be real but I am still well versed in the tales of Dick. And Julian, Anne, George and Timmy the dog as well. So, I know the basic story of the Nativity having had it drilled into me from an early age: Mary, Joseph, Archangel Graham, Donkeys, Cattle, Shepherd, the three Wise Men/Kings and the lack of any sort of stripy African horse.

Those of you with particularly sharp vision will also note an elephant, a giraffe and a couple of springbok in there. I was less sure on these than I was on the zebra, so I checked the bible and they weren’t in there either. But the kids enjoyed it and in entirely unrelated news, I’m told that the school production of The Lion King last year was amazing.

Big Hole by night

Now that I’ve started writing this, I realise that without a “before” photo, this “after” photo won’t mean a huge amount to anyone. But, for the record, suffice to say that if it were taken a few weeks ago, the majority of this particular photograph would have been taken up by my big tree, which fell over in high winds earlier this month.

I now have a Big Hole to rival Kimberley’s Big Hole (this is a reference to Kimberley in the Northern Cape and not Kimberley on Sea Point Main Road) (although she does also have a big hole) (allegedly).


My garden minus the big tree, yesterday evening.

While I was taking that photo, I took a couple of others – one with a smaller, barer tree that we can now see and another which captured a rare visit by a zebra to our garden.

What? This is Africa, you know?