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Monday/ Central Beach 🏖️

There was no rain today here in Plettenberg Bay, but it was still cloudy and mild, with a high of only 23 °C (74 °F).
I went for a walk on Central Beach late this afternoon.

This picture is from early Sunday evening, of the iconic Beacon Isle hotel, with Central Beach in the foreground.
The site of the hotel has a distinctive history: it was a whaling station at the turn of the twentieth century, and became the location of a small hotel in 1940. In 1972, this hotel was demolished and replaced with the six-story Beacon Isle Hotel.
Watch out for great white sharks! 🦈
Looking at that bar chart below the shark’s tail fin, it appears that is is LESS LIKELY in January for sharks to appear in these waters.
Plettenberg Bay has experienced increased white shark activity in recent years and tragically suffered two fatal shark bite incidents within three months of each other in 2022.
Here comes a fishing safari boat, hot and heavy, so that it beach and then be winched further up onto the sand.
There is a rocky outcrop on the far end of Central Beach (away from the Beacon Isle Hotel).
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Sunday/ to Plettenberg Bay 🐚

It’s a 6-hour drive to Plettenberg Bay. We opted for the N1 national route through the Huguenot Tunnel to Swellendam, from where we took the N2 to Plettenberg Bay.

I could only take pictures of the first half of the drive, while I was the  passenger and not the driver.  🤗

It’s a 6 hour drive from Cape Town to Plettenberg Bay.
Here is the entrance to the Huguenot Tunnel.
It is a toll road tunnel that runs through the Du Toitskloof Mountains, connecting Cape Town to the northern regions of the country.
The tunnel is 3.9 km (2.4 mi) long and it opened in March 1988.
The tunnel offers a route that is safer, faster (between 15 and 26 mins) and shorter (by 11 km/ 6.8 mi) than the old Du Toitskloof Pass over the mountain.
At the other side of the tunnel, there are beautiful scenes of the Du Toitskloof Mountains.
Soft cloud puffs and the jagged outcrops of the Du Toitskloof Mountains.
This is a railway station building in the town of Robertson.
The town of Ashton lies at the foot of the Langeberg mountain range.
This arch bridge is new (it opened in August 2021) and lies over the Cogmans Gorge River (Afr. Kogmanskloofrivier) in Ashton.
Here is Swellendam, the third oldest town in South Africa after Cape Town and Stellenbosch.
I found this hibiscus flower in Riversdale, as we made a stop to have some lunch.
This is the N2 national highway in the Riversdale area— even though it offers only one lane in each direction here.
We did not run into too much traffic going east, but we ran into lines of cars going in the opposite direction, heading back to Cape Town. The kids in school still have a week or two of summer recess, but maybe mom or dad will have to go back to work on Monday.
Lots of rolling hills and farmland in the Riversdale area.
We made it! We lost the blue skies and the sun along the way, but that’s OK. It’s just a rainy day in Plettenberg Bay and we will soon have the sun back.
This is the view from our Airbnb, of the Keurbooms Estuary and the beaches around Plettenberg Bay.
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Saturday/ checking out 🏨

It’s time to leave the Cape Town area, and the Airbnb that I have been staying in. My friend and I are driving up the coast to Plettenberg Bay in the morning.

I have been staying in an apartment in one of these buildings by the Tyger Waterfront in Bellville. The complex is built around an old quarry that has been transformed into a 4-hectare man-made lake with a promenade around it.
A Cape wagtail (Afr. Kaapse kwikstertjie, Motacilla capensis) sits on a handrail.
And this fella is a rock hyrax (Afr. Kaapse dassie, Procavia capensis). They are small, plump and tail-less guinea-pig-like animals, about as large as a big rabbit.
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Friday/ Father Time ⏳

Happy Friday, the first of 2025.
Here is one more cartoon from South African newspaper Die Burger (“The Citizen”) by cartoonist Dr Jack.

Father Time 2024 to Baby 2025: “Behave yourself”
Pop-up Party Hippopotamus: “A beautiful year to all of you”
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Thursday/ fishes from Mozambique 🐠

I am buying stamps from South Africa and southern Africa now that I am here, and saving a little money in the process. (Stamps from this part of the world are sent to the USA by express airmail or by international courier— which can be $40 or more for one shipment. Surface mail takes several months).

I love this 1951 definitive issue from Mozambique, part of a set of 24 stamps.
At the time, Mozambique was still a Portuguese colony, and the currency was the escudo.

The fishies are going to swim in freshwater when I get them home, so that I can separate them from the paper that they are pasted on.

 

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Wednesday/ Happy New Year ☺️

It’s 2025!
Happy New Year!
The cartoon is from the South African newspaper Die Burger (“The Citizen”) and by cartoonist Dr Jack.

“Good news, swarrie*! Even though your barbecuing leaves a lot to be desired, we have decided to stay until after New Years”
“You may have to run out to the store today, since the brannas** is AGAIN running a little low. “
#$!&🤬
Side Comment by the little hippopotamus: “House guests are like fish— after three days they start to stink”

*old brother-in-law; **brandy/ supply of brandy

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Monday/ stopping and shopping, here and there 🐆

Here are a few pictures from today.

It’s great to see my home town as part of a store name— so far away from home. There are 54 Starbuckses in South Africa (but the first one opened only in 2016).
The Seattle Coffee Co. franchise has been around a lot longer. The first store opened its doors in Cavendish Square, Cape Town in November 1997.
I stopped at a branch of the beleaguered South African Post Office. It was supposed to have completely run out of money and options to stay open by the end of October 2024, and go into bankruptcy, but now it is unclear what the new ‘Day Zero’ is.
Do you have any postage stamps to sell to me? I inquired. I came away with this sheet of woodpeckers (issued 2020), one of the last sets of stamps issued by the South African Post Office. No new issues appeared after 2020. 😱
Hey! We still have Toys “R” Us in South Africa. (On June 29, 2018, Toys “R” Us permanently closed all of its remaining U.S. locations, after 70 years of operations).
And here is what I acquired to add to my collection of African animals: king cheetah (distinctive coat pattern due to a recessive gene; there may only be 10 or so in the wild, with some 50 or so more in captivity); black wildebeest, springbok antelope, and African penguin (these are the ones found in the Boulders Penguin Colony in Simons Town, South Africa).
My quest for a six-pack of Beck’s Blue (Beck’s non-alcoholic beer) continues. This store did not have any.
Beer and hard liquor are only sold in dedicated liquor stores in South Africa. Wine may be sold at grocery stores as well as at liquor stores. 
The “YOU HAVE REACHED THE SOUTH POLE” is just a little joke, indicating that the walk-in refrigerated room with chilled beers is right there below the sign.
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Sunday/ in the dry dock 🚢

I stopped briefly at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront today, to use one of the parking garages there.

This is the Robinson Dry Dock in the so-called Alfred Basin in the Waterfront, and it is the oldest operating dry dock of its kind in the world. It dates back to 1882. The foundation stone for the dock was laid by Prince Alfred, second son of Queen Victoria.  Named after Governor Sir Hercules Robinson, it was used to repair over 300 ships during World War II.

The Robinson Dry Dock is currently occupied by research vessel DR. FRIDTJOF NANSEN, sailing under the flag of Norway.
Ships are typically dry-docked every five years for a special survey, but may also be dry-docked for inspections, maintenance, and repairs, in between.
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Saturday/ at the mall 🏪

There is a little Christmas market in the Tyger Valley Shopping Centre, still open for a final few days.
It’s good that it is indoors: day-time highs here were 35°C and 34°C (95°F and 93°F) on Wednesday and Thursday, and 30°C (86°F today).

The Christmas market on the lower level of the food court in the Tyger Valley Shopping Centre. The jumbotron screen (top left corner) showed what was happening in the first of two cricket tests between South Africa 🇿🇦 and Pakistan 🇵🇰.
And what happened today in the first of two cricket tests between South Africa and Pakistan that is underway in Centurion in Gauteng Province?
From espncricinfo.com:
“The first Test match at Centurion is tantalisingly poised after Pakistan took three wickets in nine overs to leave South Africa wobbling at 27 for 3, still 121 runs away from the 147-run target that seals a win, as well as a place in the 2023-25 World Test Championship [WTC] final.
After South Africa had bowled Pakistan out for 237, they needed a fairly comfortable 148 to secure victory, but an unerring spell of accurate medium-fast bowling from Mohammad Abbas and Khurram Shahzad was well rewarded. Aside from Aiden Markram, the South Africa batters were somewhat timid in their approach to the last few overs of the day, while Abbas and Shahzad targeted the pads. Abbas brought one to jag back in sharply into Tony de Zorzi for the first breakthrough.”
Update Sun 12/29 [From espncricinfo.com] “South Africa have qualified for the World Test Championship (WTC) final after beating Pakistan by two wickets in a high-drama encounter at SuperSport Park. Set a modest but challenging target of 148 to win, they were 99 for 8 just before lunch and it was left to Kagiso Rabada and Marco Jansen to score the remaining 51 runs in a tense ninth-wicket stand against a Pakistan attack with their tails up.”
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Friday/ Pringle Bay beach 🏖️

Happy Friday, the last one for 2024!

These photos are from yesterday, from a little trip I made with my family to Pringle Bay.
Pringle Bay is a small, coastal village in the Overberg region of the Western Cape, in South Africa. It is situated at the foot of Hangklip, on the opposite side of False Bay from Cape Point. The town and surrounds are part of the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO Heritage Site. [Wikipedia]

The main beach at Pringle Bay has rocks and tide pools, and then a sandy stretch for heliophiles and bathers. The rocky outcrop in the distance on the left is Hangklip (Afr. “hanging rock”), 420 m tall (1,377 ft), marking the entrace to False Bay as one approaches Cape Town along the coast from the east.
Here is the main beach at Pringle Bay. We’re on the Indian Ocean side of Cape Town (only just), and here the beaches have warmer waters than on the Atlantic side: the effects of the warm Agulhas Current that comes down along Mozambique from Africa’s eastern coast.
Time for my nephew to deploy his drone (I don’t know the model name, but it’s a technological marvel; cost: about $800). It has very sophisticated navigation abilities and a super-high resolution 360° swiveling camera.
Off it goes, up, up to 1,000 m (3,280 ft)— at which point it is invisible to the naked eye.
We only saw something black with fins, maybe, from the beach out in the distance. The drone footage shows that the fins belong to the sea lions.
(Seals or sea lions? These are sea lions:  brown, bark loudly, “walk” on land using their large flippers and have visible ear flaps. Seals have small flippers, wriggle on their bellies on land, and lack visible ear flaps. – Source: noaa.gov).
The drone’s camera has a very high resolution and superzoom capabilities.
A viewpoint on the way back to Cape Town, showing the coastline and the fynbos* of the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve.
*Fynbos: fine-leaved shrubland or heathland vegetation found in the Western and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa.
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Tuesday morning/ arrival into Cape Town ✈️

Here is our flight path south on Monday night and into Tuesday morning. We were directly over Tunis (capital of Tunisia) after crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Later on we were at 39,000 ft (the plane’s cruising altitude) over Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Windhoek (Namibia).

We landed at Cape Town International at 7.30 am local time (it’s an Airbus A350-900) and were bused into the terminal.

The shark tank dive billboard 😱 is from the pedestrian underpass to the rental car companies at the airport.

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Monday night/ to Munich, and south ✈️

A few weeks ago Lufthansa cancelled the direct Frankfurt to Cape Town flight I had reserved. They rebooked all of us on a short hop to Munich, to catch the Munich to Cape Town flight from there.

Pictures:
I ran into several more billboard pictures of “Venus” in Terminal A. Would you like to see all of them? (Of course you do. The “merivaglia” in the slogan “Open to merivaglia” is an Italian word that means “a wonder” or “beauty”).
That’s a Boeing 787-9 at the gate at Terminal A that took us to Munich. It’s a 45-minute flight due east.

 

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Sunday/ in Frankfurt 🏙️

Here are a few pictures from today, as well as a few clippings from the Sunday newspapers.

This closed-for-traffic street across from the Hauptbahnhof station (main train station) is lined with restaurants from the Middle East and the Far East. Döner kebab is very popular in Frankfurt: a dish of Turkish origin made of meat cooked on a vertical rotisserie.
Inside the Hauptbahnhof. This train from regional operator Hessische Landesbahn GmbH (HLB) is a Bombardier Talent 2 model ET150 (a German manufacturer as far as I can tell, not the Bombardier that makes business jet airplanes). It is about to depart for Giessen, a 42-min trip to the north of Frankfurt.
Hello. A fluffy pup inside the food court at the Hauptbahnhof station.
My lunch from seafood franchise Noordsee. It’s Norwegian salmon. Very nice. An elderly woman took the seat across from mine.
“Ich spreche nur ein wenig Deutsch” (I speak only a little German), I said. It was a little noisy to carry on a conversation, anyway. As I got up, she pointed to my phone and said “Dein Handy” (your cell phone). Cute word— and appropriate— that handy thing called a “Handy” in German.
Paulaner from Munich also makes non-alcoholic beer now.  (Weissbier is a wheat beer: a top-fermented beer which is brewed with a large proportion of wheat relative to the amount of malted barley (from Wikepedia). I will have some more when I stop over in Munich on the way back from South Africa.
Back at the Flughafen train station, and across the street some nice dinosaurs on the sidewalk walls promote the Senckenberg Nature Museum in Frankfurt.
“A MOOSE COW HAS ESCAPED FROM SCHONFIELDE WILD PARK”
“WELL, ONE CAN SPOT THEM EASILY, BIG AS THEY ARE .. “
” .. BUT THEY CAN STILL BE ASTONISHINGLY DIFFICULT TO FIND”
[Cartoon by Naomi Feam for newspaper Tagesspiegel]
A loose translation of a few paragraphs in this piece titled “When trees and nerves are burning out/ How to survive Christmas nonetheless” reads like this:
Christmas can be a pretty stressful time. We have baked cookies, made the Christmas wreath, drunk mulled wine at overcrowded Christmas markets— and what now? Now the time has come. The extended family is about to arrive. Or: you find yourself in a crowded train traveling across the country and have to split your time between Christmas Eve and Christmas Holiday because your parents are separated. Grandma Inge wants to see you again, and Uncle Bert and his new girlfriend have invited you to dinner. Once you have managed all of that, New Years Eve follows. You should be totally festive here, as well— but now with sparklers and a glass of champagne in hand. And heaven forbid it’s not a great party! In short, December is a seemingly endless series of social, personal and societal expectations and gatherings that could send you straight into end-of-the-year burnout. How the hell is one supposed to survive all of that?
This cartoon refers to the chaos in the German coalition government. (Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote, deepening the political turbulence in Germany).
“Are these all returns? Rejected by the electorate? And what is inside yours?”
“Candidates for chancellor”.
[Cartoon by Stuttmann for Tagesspiegel newspaper]
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Saturday/ the Christmas market 🎄

Hey, on this winter solstice day I made it to the Christmas market at Römerberg. It was cold and raining, though, and I did not stay very long.
(It did seem that the inclement weather increased the glühwein sales volumes!)

Pictures:
Entrance hall to Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (main train station). There was a strong of police presence at the station. Hauptbahnhof station looked a little more ragged and rundown from the last time I saw it— especially the floors leading to the U4 & U5 subway lines’ platforms.
Poster for Messe Frankfurt (exhibition center) close by Hauptbahnhof station.
It’s two stops on the U5 subway line (turquoise train car) from Hauptbahnhof station to Römer/ Dom station to where the Christmas market is.  The U5 is getting a 2.7 km (1.7 mi) extension that will open in 2027.
Last picture: the S9 regional train (red train car) arriving to take me back from Hauptbahnhof station to Flughafen (airport) station where my hotel is, a 14-minute ride.

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Friday/ to Frankfurt ✈️

We took off from Seattle-Tacoma Airport’s South Terminal almost an hour after the scheduled departure time. (The inbound flight from Frankfurt was late). The flight went without incident, though— always a good thing— and we made up the lost hour on the way.

Still at the cruising altitude of 37,000 ft here, with about 2 hours of the 10h flight remaining. Our route took us over Nunap Isua (Cape Farewell), the southernmost point of Greenland.
Our Airbus A330-300 bird landed on the tarmac. I have just boarded the bus that would take us to the terminal. Frankfurt airport is enormous, and it was more than a 10-minute drive, where we joined a line of buses and waited for another 20 minutes or so before we could go inside the terminal.
A view from the bus. The bus drive makes for a mini drive-by tour of the airport. The striped livery is that of low-cost German airline Condor.
Inside the terminal now, making my way to the passport control and baggage claim. These travelers are headed to their connecting flights.
Recognize the woman on the Italian tourism billboard? She must be Venus from Sandro Botticelli’s famous painting called The Birth of Venus.
Frohe Weihnachten (Merry Christmas). A little while later I would learn of the terrible events in Magdeburg at the Christmas market there. A madman (50-year old Saudi Arabian doctor that had lived in Germany since 2006) drove into the crowd, killing five people and injuring some 200.
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Thursday/ my bags are packed 🧳

My bags are packed for my trip to South Africa, with two-night stayover in Frankfurt, Germany.
That way I can check in on the Christmas market, at the historical Römerberg market square in Frankfort.

Ready to Go! says the friendly shinkansen (Japanese bullet train). My ‘junior’ wallet is a spare wallet, and it is stuffed with US dollars, Euros and South African rands. I should be able to use my credit card or debit card everywhere and I should not need the bills at all.
(I bought this wallet in Hong Kong in August 2011 at the Sogo department store. Just the day before, my leather wallet was stolen out of my backpack ON MY BACK, and while I was on the escalator in an upscale shopping mall. One pickpocket distracted me by ‘bumping’ into me, and at the same time, his accomplice must have zipped open the pocket in the backpack to steal the wallet. I believe they watched me withdraw cash from an ATM just ten minutes before, and saw me put the wallet in my backpack. By the time I could notify American Express, the thieves had already gone on a shopping spree and spent some $7,000 on luxury items. American Express immediately cancelled all the transactions on the card. Several lessons here, of course, and all well-known: keep out an eagle eye when drawing money from an ATM anywhere; don’t let strangers in get too close to you; don’t carry your wallet in an easily accessible place.)
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Wednesday/ another rate cut 📉

Fed Cuts Rates, but Projects Fewer Reductions Next Year
Federal Reserve officials projected just two rate cuts in 2025. Markets shuddered at the assessment, with the dollar soaring and stocks plummeting.
– Headlines from the New York Times

Here’s where the Federal funds target rate is in the United States.
Inflation has eased notably, but remains above the Fed’s 2% target rate (2.7% as of November, up slightly from 2.6% in October).
Unemployment is at 4.1%, relatively low. Mortgage rates are going to stay in the 6 to 7% range through 2025, say most analysts.
[Graphic from CNBC]