Kenton-on-the-sea, posh life

 While driving around South Africa's coast, we ended up in Kenton-on-the-sea.  It is a small beach community of larger homes, that are all obviously new.   It would have been beautiful to see when things were still undeveloped.   There are three places to access the beach in Kenton, and since it is small my mom and I stopped at each one.  The last place we went to was the Oyster Box, which from my memory of its internet site thought it was a restaurant, but it was not.  It is actually a guest house you can rent.  My crazy mom and I went right up to the door and knocked anyway.  The man let us in and toured the place, but he was a guest so it became a little awkward when he introduced us to his wife.  Upon seeing this place it was clear to me and my mom we had to come back.

They don't know who Sir Mix-A-Lot is.

An inescapable fact of life in South Africa is that they used to do Apartheid here.  It's inescapable in that pretty much everywhere you look, there are traces, vestiges, that it left.  Some of these are straightforward, and are to be expected.  Others are much more subtle...

Hello from a long time!

Long time no see!  My co-author has been doing all the postings recently (like for at least the past month, probably embarassingly longer than that).  There are several reasons for this.  One is that at the mid-semester point, we switch modules in all the undergrad courses - which means my (mercifully light) teaching schedule got turned upside down 5 weeks ago.  Another is that I got tired of bragging about how pretty it is here.  We have a ton more pictures from Hogsback that are gorgeous, but what's the point?  ...and so they haven't made it off the camera yet.  But they will.  Someday.  I'll also eventually finish the last post I started writing, sooner or later.

Big and close up Africa

Traveling back from Stellenbosch, we stopped at the Tsitsikamma Big Tree.  It is huge and ~ 1,004 years old.  Walking through the woods with ferns, humidity, and a canopy topped dense forest, we were definitely in a different part of SA.  Along the road we would always see brown signs for rest stops.  The sign tells you where is the next big tree with little picnic table.  But this is not that kind of tree, it was amazingly the bigger and there were a few trees near that were growing similar in size.  There was a long and windy slightly wet walkway to the tree, but we were so excited we practically ran there.  Lucky for us we didn't find any baboons along the way.  Will assures me he can take one or five baboons if he needs to, doubtful if you ask me.
 [Edit: I maintain that I could defeat at least one, handily. –WB]