A weekend or two ago I found myself spending a night at Mount Camdeboo Game Reserve outside Graaff-Reinet before an early morning meeting. What is spending time on a game reserve without a game drive so we headed out for a drive late afternoon. The road took us right into the mountains on the reserve and how can one not prefer this over the busy rush of city traffic?
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3mMnBzvdEk&w=500&h=400]Last week I posted the new promotional video for the Greater Addo and Sundays River Valley area. This week I want to present to you the new video for the Karoo Heartland which covers the towns of Somerset East, Cradock, Middleburg, Nieu-Bethesda, Graaff-Reinet and Jansenville. The perfect weekend breakaway from Port Elizabeth and truly a place where the land meets the sky.
It's been a few years since I've been down to the remains of the Oceanos lifeboat at Schoenies, so last Sunday I decided to head on over and take a walk down for a change again. 4 August 1991 was a dramatic and fateful day on the Eastern Cape coastline with the sinking of the MTS Oceanos on the Wild Coast close to Coffee Bay, east of East London. After all 571 passengers on board were rescued, some of the…
Frederick Korsten, a Dutch entrepreneur, came to Algoa Bay in 1810 and over the following years established himself as a merchant, farmer and owner of a whale fishery. In 1812 Korsten purchased a farm called Papenkuilsfontein from Thomas Ignatius Ferreira and named it Cradock Place after Sir John Cradock who was the Governor of the Cape Colony from 1811 until 1814. The farm changed the commercial landscape and economic future of Algoa Bay dramatically during the 1800's. It also became the social centre for well-to-do visitors to Algoa…
I'm not a fisherman not an angler. I just don't have the patience for it. What with a spot of ADD in the middle age now that I've been called middle aged on a public platform. But do you know the difference between an angler and a fisherman? Apparently fishermen actually catch fish while anglers are the type of guy who just likes to sit next to the water with a rod in his one hand, a beer in the…
When you are young and in love you go out your way to be romantic. Flowers, movies, open the door, whispers in the ear, special dinners and and and. When you get slightly older and have kids, just spending a little time together on your own without the kids is seen as romantic. For us it is anyway. Now when you get to combine both of these, you know you have a winner on your hands. And a winner I…
One of the things that Port Elizabeth and Nelson Mandela Bay is very proud of and which gets promoted by Nelson Mandela Bay Tourism often is that the metro has 40 kilometers of beautiful white sandy beaches ideal for swimming, long walks and building sand castles. But what is in between because the metro has about an eighty kilometer stretch of coastline from Van Stadens River mouth to Sundays River Mouth when you exclude the area covered in dolosse between…
I went for a walk on the hillside above Kamma Heights yesterday in search of a Geocache and some alone time and this is the view that greeted me from the cache location.
I had 30 minutes on my hands yesterday afternoon and did a quick detour to Mangold Park to find a new Geocache on the edge of the Baakens Valley. From the parking coords at the bottom of a cul-de-sac there were two paths splitting off. A paved one to the right which I had to follow to find the cache and the one in the photo to the left. Obviously the call of the cache was strong andf I hurried…
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COrcRmcqGlI&w=500&h=400]The brand new destination promotion video for the Sundays River Valley and Greater Addo area have recently been released by Addo Tourism and ECTOUR showing how stunning this area right on Port Elizabeth's doorstep is. It also illustrates what I'vebeen saying for a while now, that Addo is a fully fledged destination now and so much more than just elephants. Please share it around on social media if you enjoy it.