The town of George at the foot of the Outeniqua Mountains was founded in 1811 and was the first town to be established in South Africa by the British. It was named after King George III. The town is the main commercial town on the Garden Route and is often just used by tourists as a stop over. It is also where visitors will find the Outeniqua Railway Museum where the Outeniqua Choo Tjoe steam train is based. Unfortunately the…
While visiting Janet and Mr P (Greetings from Gauteng) for lunch during my Johannesburg trip, I asked them for suggestions on things to do while in the area. Mr P suggested I look up Liliesleaf Farm close to Sandton.Liliesleaf Farm was purchased through an overseas contact of the SA Communist Party to be used in secret by African National Congress activists in the 1960s. A white family was put in the main house as a front while activists came and…
The Port Elizabeth Museum at Bayworld has a great collection of artifacts from shipwrecks found around Algoa Bay on show in the Ship Wreck Hall. The centre piece of the display is a number of canons and ship guns that has been recovered over the years.
We visited the Port Elizabeth Museum at Bayworld today in celebration of International Museum Day. I love museums. To me its like an exploration every time I enter one. I also have many fond memories of the PE Museum and the countless visits there when I was still small. Not much has changed over the years at the PE Museum, but I still get excited when I do get the chance to go and visit. Over the next few days…
My favorite art gallery in Port Elizabeth is the Ron Belling Art Gallery on Park Drive close to St Georges Park. I recently also did a post about it on The Firefly Photo Files.Ron Belling (1933 - 1998) was a Port Elizabeth architect, aviation and marine painter, and an authority on aviation history, aircraft design, aircraft camouflage and markings. The most amazing fact about him was that he was a self taught painter who could do the most amazing things…
Going on a photographic expedition for a project we are doing at work, I got to visit a couple of the museums and attractions around Port Elizabeth last week. I just realised again how many interesting places there are to visit. The problem is that most of these places don't have the funds to be really marketed to the extend that they need to. So I will do my bit and feature them in my blog. The South African Airforce…
Very few people would have heard of the little dusty Karoo village of Nieu-Bethesda if it wasn't for The Owl House. Nieu-Bethesda is situated about 3 1/2 hours north of Port Elizabeth close to the town of Graaff Reinet. The house belonged to a woman named Helen Martins. Martins became bored with her "dull" life and resolved to transform the environment around her. She began an obsessive project around 1945 to decorate her home and garden and used cement, glass…
I think I have said so before, but in case not here it is again. Port Elizabeth is part of the metropolitan area of Nelson Mandela Bay along with the towns of Uitenhage, Despatch and Colchester as well as all the surrounding country side. In the 1980's the area was known as the Detroit of South Africa due to all the motor industries in the city. Today we still have quite a lot of motor related industries in the metro.…
If i suddenly dissapear for a couple of posts, don't worry. I seem to be loosing bandwidth somewhere and have a feeling that somebody is tapping in from somewhere. I'm hoping the problem will be sorted out soon. Anyway, on with the tour. One of the most popular tourist attractions on the Garden Route is the Outeniqua Choo Tjoe steam train. Its usual route between George and Knysna was damaged very badly a couple of years ago and its furure…
Red Location is one of the oldest settled Black Townships of Port Elizabeth. It derives its name from a series of corrugated iron barrack buildings, which are rusted a deep red colour. Building materials for these sheds stem from the First South African War (1899-1902) structures - the Boer concentration camp at Uitenhage as well as the Imperial Yeomanry Hospital at De Aar.Visitors to the Red Location Museum are not treated as consumers but active participants. The conventions of representing…