As the night-time photos from Table Mountain Road (see Fancy a Game of Spot the Castle?) didn’t quite yield the result I’d envisaged (hm… this is starting to become a theme…), we got up really early two days later – just after dawn had cracked – and headed up Table Mountain Road once again. “If…
After all the bands had had an opportunity to go through their routines in the front arena during the day, it was time for all the different acts to be assembled together into a well-structured programme, with one act flowing nicely into the next.
When the early morning mist curled around the buildings and streetlights of Cape Town, creating a slightly eerie atmosphere, it gave no indication that it would become such a hot Monday. By mid-morning, the heat of the sun had burned off the mist, and a brilliantly blue sky was bringing out the ochre-yellow hues in the walls of the Castle of Good Hope. By midday, everyone was looking for shady spots to shelter from the harsh sun, and glancing hopefully towards the western skyline, where just the hint of a cold front was starting to appear.
On a blisteringly hot Saturday, 19 October 2013, Vygieskraal Stadium in Johnson Road, Rylands, Athlone, was the venue for an exciting annual interschools event: the Western Cape Schools Drill and Marching Festival. I had been to the 2011 festival in Vygieskraal and the 2012 festival in Florida Park (see photos and reports on those links) and was rather looking forward to this year’s event, as it is always a colourful spectacle – and a great photographic opportunity. 🙂
It was a very wet weekend in Cape Town, with torrential downpours blocking stormwater drains, flooding streets and causing dams to form at the side of the road. Gale force winds tore the limbs off trees and carelessly scattered them everywhere.
This afternoon, it suddenly felt as though the temperature had plummeted another couple of degrees. And then the hail began to fall.
Flat Kathy has asked for permission to write a guest post on my blog, because she has some very exciting news: Do you feel like receiving one of these Very Special Flat Kathy Postcards?
It is not easy to walk around with Flat Kathy.
For all strangers, or rather, people whom Flat Kathy hasn’t yet demanded I introduce her to, she is simply a sheet of sunshine yellow paper on a stick. With a couple of buttons and some woolly hair sewn on. She is, I freely admit it, “a bit odd”.
It was only a couple of days ago, that I told you about our visitor from overseas – Flat Kathy. She arrived here from Nova Scotia, Canada, last Friday.
She immediately asked me to help her create a blog for her: http://flatkathy.wordpress.com/. And much to my amazement, she has been a prolific writer, having just published her 21st post. At first, she was keeping me very busy with all her dictation, but now I just switch on the laptop for her, and let her tappity-tappity away as much as she likes.
Last Friday, a long-expected and much-delayed visitor arrived from overseas. It took her about three weeks, to travel across the wide Atlantic Ocean from the snowbound frozen forests of Nova Scotia to the baking summer heat of South Africa.
So, dear friends and blog followers, may I introduce you to Flat Kathy.
With Richard’s sister T, an avid hiker, visiting us last week, we thought we would treat her to a lovely hike in the Jonkershoek Nature Reserve outside Stellenbosch. We ourselves hadn’t done any hiking in a long time, and honestly felt a bit daunted by the prospect of a too-long trudge through the mountains and the veld. We decided to explore the Swartboskloof-Sosyskloof trail at Jonkershoek…
Last year, I wrote and submitted a number of articles to the Pinelands Muse community magazine and the Reserve Force Volunteer magazine, as well as the Equestrian Express and the Sawubona in-flight magazine of South African Airways, our national carrier. In order to update my CV at the start of January, I compiled a list, which I thought I’d share with you, in case you are curious.
I paid another visit to the Castle today to see what was happening in the run-up to the Tattoo. The mood was one of excitement and anticipation. It is a challenging task to coordinate the rehearsals of all the participating acts in the show, and to make sure that everyone knows exactly what is expected of them.
I popped down to the Castle of Good Hope in central Cape Town yesterday to take some photos of the preparations happening behind the scenes of the Cape Town Military Tattoo 2012.
As you can see, things are starting to get quite busy, in anticipation of the start of the CT Mil Tattoo, which starts next week Wednesday, 31 October and runs until Saturday, 3 November 2012.
On Saturday morning, 20 October 2012, I made my way to the Florida Park Sports Ground in Stroebel Road, Ravensmead. I had been asked by WO2 André van Schalkwyk of the SA Army Band Cape Town to take some photographs of their performance at the Western Cape Schools Drill and Marching Festival 2012. I had attended and written about last year’s festival in Vygieskraal Stadium, Athlone, and was looking forward to what promised to be a very exciting event.
Every year in early spring, Mother Nature lays on a colourful spectacle for South Africans who live along the West Coast from Cape Town northwards into the Namaqualand and beyond into the Northern Cape: it is Wild Flower Season! When we drove through those very areas, en route to and from Windhoek in Namibia, at…
Grains of Sand 
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