South Africa 2009: Part 1

After 33 hours of butt-numbing travel, we have finally arrived in South Africa. We arrived in Cape Town a 5pm local time and then had the 3 hour drive north to our lodging for the night. Already a little delirious from our hours in the plane, the switch to left hand drive was pretty interesting. The freeways were fine, because the is a big divider in the middle of the road - but the one lane highways in the countryside were pretty interesting. The oncoming headlight coming at us on the right side prompted panic a number of times!

We are staying on a small cottage on a farm north of Clan William in the Cedarburg Range. The accommodations are spartan, to say the least. I looks like electricity was added as an afterthought in the 1980's and you can't run two electrical appliances at the same time without tripping the main breaker! Yikes.


The next morning we met up with our climbing comrades Justin, Becky, Kevin, Peter, and Mike Wickwire who are staying on the same farm. Our first day climbing was a good introduction to the area - we went to The Plateau and tagged along with Peter. Still a little delirious from out travels and jet lag it was nice to have someone else leading the charge.

In the afternoon we headed in to town to get supplies at the Superspar, the local supermarket, and a few household items at the Pep. One thing I noticed when walking around, is that almost every sign or label is in English but most people I ran into don't speak but a few words of English. There are 11 official languages in South Africa and while English might be the de facto language, it is not their mother tongue.

For our second day of climbing, we headed out to the Amphitheater area because a few were psyched to try this test piece. Only a few of us tried it and my goes were pretty pathetic. Here was the formula: old dude + v11 + no warmup = priceless.


We headed to nearby Roadside area for the second part of the day and on the hike over had quite a scare. Once we arrived one of the guys who was hiking at the front said, "I wonder where Cameron is." Panicked adults went running in all possible directions and Lyn tracked our son down as he was hiking back to the first area. (He had thought we were hiking the car and when no one arrived decided to hike back to the first area.)

A cooking adventure followed (remember: only one appliance at a time) and a game of bannangrams afterward... It's starting to feel like vacation!

-Raza