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This will be our fourth family Easter spent overseas, our third in a Buddhist country. Our two trips taking the girls to Japan while my brother and his family lived there both coincided with the spring festivities. Last year we were in Geneva, the Europe part of our trip around the world. We even dyed [...]  Arriving at the apartment, we were still soaked and covered in chalk paste. We saw it in the in-flight magazine first. We were landing in Bangkok during the biggest party of the year and had no idea. It offset the knowledge that we were also landing during the hottest time of the year, when the [...] This morning might have been our last snorkeling outing in the Seychelles. We were at Felicity Island today, our last full day on the Catamaran. From here we have three nights on Praslin, and then we fly out to Thailand. Marlie and I followed a sea turtle for a while on our way back to [...] As much as the unexpected has become a way of living, it still catches us by surprise sometimes. We’ve learned that magic arrives when we are not looking and expectations can cloud our vision to it. Fulfilling something we have dreamed of or thought about for some time may be so full of anticipation that [...] On La Digue Island there are no private cars. A few taxis, transports, and oxcarts. Otherwise it is bicycles. Loving it. Just another banana republic? They have our passports. And, our airline tickets out of here. What would have taken a couple of minutes at the airport as we arrived has taken more than a [...]
Our tent in Audi Camp. They have a lock on the bottom to hold the zipper pulls together, but the zippers are installed on velcro strips that do not really stay together. As they say- This is Africa I’m not sure what woke me. Some sound that differed from John’s snoring, or the thumps and [...] Tsitsikamma National Park, South Africa Leaping on the suspension bridge at the mouth of the Storms River, Tsitsikamma, South Africa A section of the Otter Trail over the rocks A view from the Otter Trail near Storms River. The seas were too rough and we were unable to go kayaking into the mouth. Building [...] Bloukrans Bridge, Tsitsikamma, home to the world’s highest commercial bungy jump. Hannah was nervous for days. We had heard about the bungy jump from Bloukrans Bridge and checked the minimum age for jumpers. It was 14. This meant that she had no excuse, other than her own fear, to hold her back from making the [...] Our wandering brings some interesting juxtapositions, showing us the full story by coincidence. Driving out of Baviaanskloof into the Gamtoos Valley of South Africa, we were surrounded by citrus orchards. Looking for a place to spend the night, we happened upon a sweet little guest house overlooking rows of lemon trees. We watched the tractor [...] A vervet monkey in Baviaanskloof watching us. Little did we know he was thinking of sandwiches. A troop of vervet monkeys just came through our camp. About six of them are still crashing about in the thicket lining the side of our space, grey with black faces, small dark hands and feet gripping the acacia [...]
The open entry into the tree house. It’s interesting how perception and expectation create our comfort level and how stories of unfamiliar places become blurred. What is really an isolated incident, the small dot of paint is smeared by the mind’s palm across the whole map. Even knowing this, I fall victim to my own [...] Ostrich Ride South Africa from John Gill on Vimeo. An ostrich pulled wagon at Highgate Ostrich Showfarm “I want to hold a baby cheetah!” Hannah was almost beside herself with excitement when she found information about the Cango Wildlife Ranch in Oudtshoorn. The movie Duma has long been a favorite of both girls, and the idea that we might get to interact with these impressive cats was a big draw. We were [...]
Doing the tourist thing at Cape Agulhas, standing on the southernmost tip of Africa, where oceans meet. We’ve added another night to our stay in Hermanus. We just don’t really want to leave, and our days here were spent with too much driving around and not enough putting ourselves in the picture as we looked [...]
Yikes. OK, we won’t feed them, but we’d like to see a few. This morning we awoke to silence. Our window had stopped rattling and thumping, the intermittent whistle of the wind forcing its way through the narrow slit we offered it that allowed some air flow had drifted off. The air hung silent, [...] |
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