"A birthday party with 20 kids! Are you mad?" Just one of the comments I got when I told people that Chaos Boy has invited 20 kids to his birthday party this past weekend. "What are you going to do with them? They'll wreck your house!" Another couple of comments. Well, I asked Chaos Boy what he wanted to do for his birthday party and he decided that he wanted to take his friends to go and see the penguins…
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. What does this have to do with Port Elizabeth, you ask? After all 571 passengers on board was rescued, some of the lifeboats floated south-west along the ocean currents with one of them washing up on the coastline at Schoenmakerskop. I got to visit the lifeboat for…
The well in the courtyard at No 7 Castle Hill must truly be one of the highlights to kids visiting the museum. Not because of the hole in the ground, but for the pump that gets the water out the hole. The date on the pump is 1849 which means its been in place for over 150 years already. Rain water collects in the well from the roof and kids are encouraged to try it out. According to Grizel Hart, the…
Earth Day gets celebrated annually on this day, 22 April, to demonstrate support for environmental protection and is celebrated in more than 192 countries every year. The name and concept of Earth Day was pioneered at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco by John McConnell in 1969 . He proposed 21 March 1970, the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere., for the celebration of this special day. A month later a separate Earth Day was founded by United…
Geocaching is taking me to all kinds of places I haven't been to before. And here I was thinking I've been everywhere. This specific Grannynasty cache took me a bit off the beaten track along a dirt road just west of the Van Stadens Bridge to the old Sunnyside Station, 29 1/2 miles from Port Elizabeth. The station is on the narrow gauge railway line that runs from Port Elizabeth all the way to Avontuur in the Langkloof. The line which used…
The VW AutoPavilion is an absolute heaven for any car fanatic with some great Volkswagen related exhibits covering the whole history of VW. Outside the front entrance of the museum is a roadhouse and garage that may take some people back in time a little bit. But so will most of the exhibits inside the museum as well.
Close to the N1 highway in Midrand between Johannesburg and Pretoria, with views of Sandton and Johannesburg in the distance, stands the magnificent Nizamiye Turish Masjid. And magnificent it truly is. The mosque is the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere and was built as an Ottoman structure and modelled on the Selimiye Camisi mosque in Edirne, Turkey (completed in 1574 and today a Unesco World Heritage Site). The project was the brainchild of Ali Katircioglu (known as “Uncle Ali”), a 74-year old,…
The Southern Kings are back in town after their four match New Zealand and Australia Super Rugby away leg and on Saturday (20 April) evening takes on the three time champions Bulls in front of a sell out Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium. The picture was taken at their second home game against the Sharks which was also in front a sell out crowd.
I'm usually behind the camera taking pictures for my blogs or occasionally assisting visiting television crews with info about the city, but on Pasella's last visit I actually got to be in front of the camera as well. Here the crew is filming the presenter asking questions at the Cape Recife Lighthouse before I got my turn to tell them more about the history of the lighthouse and surrounding area.
Late last year the crew from SABC 2 magazine programme Pasella was in town to shoot a couple of inserts. The one day was spent in the Cape Recife Nature Reserve where I was one of two guides taking them around showing off the coastline, history and plants in the reserve. One of the stops was at the South African Marine Rehabilitation and Education Centre (SAMREC) where they were told more about the work the centre does with African Penguins. …