Sherpa at Cape Receife near Port Elizabeth, South Africa

[j-ms]

This is not a "was it you" post because we stopped and had a long chat.

Ed van Rensburg is busy cycling from Cape Town to Durban along the south and east coasts of South Africa and we bumped into each other while we were out riding this morning.

Great to see another Thorn in South Africa.  The only other one we have seen apart from our own was a Nomad more than 5 years ago.

Neither his bike nor ours are really visible in the photo - sorry :-(.

[John Saxby]

cycling from Cape Town to Durban along the south and east coasts of South Africa

Good ride, that! 

Thanks, Jean-Marc.

[Andre Jute]

Well met on a favourite road.

Vasco da Gama's Cross in the Sour Grasslands near Mossel Bay about halfway between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth on a misty morning. Far left of the 30-second sketch which was all I had time for before my crew got bolshie, just below the middle, that's me struggling uphill with a load of gear, wishing there was a path so we could use one of the pair of bikes on the back of the camera truck to haul the gear.

andre_jute__vasco_da_gama_s_cross_looking_into_the_sour_grasslands__mossel_bay__2018__gansai_tambi_on_cotton_paper__800pxw

Vasco da Gama was the navigator who in 1497-99 discovered the route around the Cape of Good Hope to the valuable spices of India. His cross, which he put up to commemorate surviving the dangerous passage around the Cape, where the cold Agulhas Stream meets the hot Indian Ocean, with violent results, was once said to be made of gold but by the time I got there it was bare wood with nail marks where once it might have been covered some kind of metal cladding. The local sandstone rocks holding it up looked more like gold as the sun rose.

[John Saxby]

Splendid colours, Andre!

Not far from there on Valentine's Day 2004, Marcia and I were visiting the Cape peninsula. I had bought my sweetie a small box of high-end chocolates for the occasion, and...in the only real experience of non-governmental lawlessness I encountered in the 15 or so years across four decades spent in Southern & Central Africa, we were mugged by a big male baboon, who jumped down from the roof of a nearby Landrover, grabbed our chocolates and fled, hugging them to his chest!