Love them or hate them, the vuvuzela is become part of soccer in South Africa and the craze is slowly starting to spread across the world. The vuvuzela is a plastic blowing horn, approximately one metre in length, and commonly blown by fans at football matches in South Africa. It requires some lip and lung strength to blow and emit a loud monotone sound like a foghorn or an elephant. They are generally hated, but is growing on the South…
Today is the start of the 2010 FIFA World Cup here in South Africa. I will be posting most of my World Cup photos on my Port Elizabeth Daily Photo blog, but some will make their way here as well. The posts on here will continue business as usual. These photos are of the new soccer ball structures on the traffic circles outside the Port Elizabeth Airport. They are beautifully lit up at night and while I was there taking…
Today is the start of what must be the biggest event ever staged on the African continent. The 2010 FIFA World Cup opening game between Bafana Bafana (South Africa) and Mexico takes place in Johannesburg this afternoon (11 June 2010) while the first of 8 games in Port Elizabeth is tomorrow (Saturday 12 June 2010) between Greece and South Korea. The games in Port Elizabeth take place at the magnificent new 48000 seater Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium next to the…
The Hill Presbyterian Church in Central silhouetted against the bright blue sky For more "looking up towards the sky photos", visit Skywatch
A couple of hundred meters down the Sacramento Trail from the Schoenmakerskop side you will find a monument marking the site where the Portuguese gallion Sacramento ran aground on 30 June 1647. 72 survivors set out to walk the 1350 km to the closest port which was in Mozambique. Of the original 72, only nine arrived in Delagoa Bay on 5 January 1648 and of the nine only four made it back to Portugal alive. The wreck site is also…
On Sunday afternoon I joined a group of photographers for a photo walk on the Sacramento Trail in Schoenmakerskop here in Port Elizabeth. (And no, I wasn't intimidated by all the big cameras. Size doesn't matter.) We went as far as the Sacramento wreck monument and then headed back to Schoenies to get some sunset photos. It is amazing how everybody came up with different angles and compositions for their photos. Here is one of my favorites from the walk.…
On Sunday afternoon I went on a photo walk with a couple of other photographers on the first section of the Sacramento Trail. The Sacramento Trail stretches along the coast between Schoenmakerskop and Sardinia Bay over a distance of 4 kilometers which means you would have covered 8 km walking it there and back. The trail has some awesome view points and follows a route that will take you right down onto the rocky coastline as well as through the…
When we visited Oudtshoorn in December I got to go to the museum in the home of the former Afrikaans writer CJ Langenhoven for the first time since I was in primary school. His house, Arbeidsgenot ("the pleasure of work") was left to "all people with a love for Afrikaans" by his widow after her death in 1950 and was opened as a museum in 1955. Cornelis Jakobus Langenhoven was born on 12 August 1873. He started out working as…
Driving down Brickmakers Kloof (and over the new bridge), the historic St Mary's Cemetery is situated on the right hand side across the road from the old bus sheds. Very few people notice that between the road and the St Mary's Cemetery there is a number of graves. They seem to be Muslim graves, so I popped into the South End Museum to see if they had more information. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a lot of info available…
I found these petite little mushrooms in my back yard the other day and I realised. Fairies and pixies also need umbrellas to hide under when it rains.