Last week I took a group of students on a walking tour around the Donkin Reserve and Route 67 and just realised again how much history Port Elizabeth has. The Donkin Reserve is a combination of history and public art and lining up the mosaic with the pyramid and lighthouse like this shows how easily you can incorporate the two.
A few months ago we spent a weekend on a friend's farm near Darlington Dam and he took us for a quick drive to see what the dam looked like. Unfortunately we didn't get to go to the dam wall itself, so my picture is of the runoff below the wall. Darlington Dam, also referred to as Lake Mentz is located off the main road between Kirkwood and Jansenville and was completed in 1922. The primary reason for the dam being…
I'm really enjoying the trail behind Schoenmakerskop lately. It's nice and flat, open all around, yet fairly sheltered from the prevailing south-easterly wind.
One of the things I realised during lockdown that I was missing out on was seeing the aloes in bloom while driving through the Eastern Cape's Karoo Heartland. It's definitely one of my favorite things to see on a road trip and the thought of missing out on it this year kinda depressed me. Business travel opened a little while ago and suddenly I had the opportunity to make a quick trip up to Nieu-Bethesda for work. Yay, yay, yay!…
I've been doing a lot of walking on the jeep track trails behind Schoenmakerskop lately and climbed the one koppie on Sunday afternoon to get a better view of the coastline, the village and surrounding scenery.
Driving up Heatherbank Road between Charlo and Lorraine, one could easily make a head move and think you are driving past a farm and not necessarily still in the middle of the city.
One of my favorite things about driving through the Karoo Heartland during the winter is seeing the aloes in bloom. But there is another Karoo succulent that grows between the aloes that most people don't really notice called Noors. The Noors is a type of euphorbia and found especially around the town of Jansenville. They are smallish, thorny plants with milky sap and the reason that the region is called the Noorsveld. The origin of the name noors is…
A week or two ago I had to go on an urgent work-related road trip and popped into two of my favorite villages, Nieu-Bethesda and Hogsback, before heading down to East London for the night. It was literally whistle-stop visits with no sightseeing. All business. Barrelling along the N2 between King William's Town and East London the sun was setting behind me and the best I could do was snap a pic in the car's side mirror at a hundred…
A couple of weeks ago a number of containers full of export oranges fell of a ship in Algoa Bay during a storm and those oranges have now made their way to the beach, washing up along the Wild Side, Schoenmakerskop, Sardinia Bay and, in this case, landing up in a rock pool at Beachview. Unfortunately the time these fruit spent in the ocean means that they aren't good for human consumption anymore and people are discouraged from picking them…
The Boardwalk buildings reflecting in the lake on a windless morning