If At First You Don't Succeed...

So who remembers Little Miss Farty's birthday present to her fiancé, which went a bit toilet?

Weeeellllll, after a couple of false starts, he finally got off the ground.








He might technically be back on terra firma, but I don't think he's come down yet.

Naughty Kitteh

Inspired by an actual letter email sent to a blogger who wishes to remain anonymous, see here.

Diamond Drive Part 5

Port Elizabeth

Dolphins

P.E. has its own captive dolphins, which I'll admit I'm not entirely happy about. more here
It may take days watching and waiting for the wild dolphins to appear further along the coast, but seeing these free creatures surfing the big waves together is an experience I'll never forget. Sorry, no picture of that, I was using binoculars. For hours.

Chickens on the braai.

What you do is you open a can of beer, stick it where the sun don't shine and place on the braai. The beer boils up through the chicken and argle slurp slobber I feel hungry just thinking about it.

Funny-looking horse

Sometimes the most telling items are what you see when you're not able to take pictures. Ten minutes after we spotted this "zebra" in one of the numerous safari parks near P.E., while changing the batteries in the camera, we passed a very large, empty tin labelled "white paint". Sceptical? Moi?

Crisis?

Bit of a bumpy ride. This was back in Oudtshoorn. Sorry. So was the next one.

Walking On Eggshells

According to our guide, ostrich eggs are easily strong enough to support the weight of an adult human. Ecce! However, just a week earlier another lady had tried the same stunt. One of the eggs had, er, gone off. And when she stepped on it, it broke. Stinkorama!

East London

The only thing I remember with any clarity about East London is the very friendly Afrikaans couple we stayed with. McDonald's had just opened for the first time, so they drove down to collect an order, brought it back and served it on the best china plates. Mmmm, that good, local, home-made cooking that we travelled half-way around the world to experience! Yum!
ANYways, I pointed out that one of the benefits of fast food was that you could eat it straight from the packaging and not have to worry about the washing up.
"Oh, we don't worry about it anyway, the maid does the washing up."
*sigh*

Both P.E. and East London have world-class cricket pitches. I like cricket, but not enough to take photos of people standing about in a field. Imagine our surprise when we were perched in a bar somewhere, watching the Cricket World Cup being played out on the telly, and the commentator said, apropos of nothing, "If you get some spare time in between watching the cricket here in P.E., you should get down to the Wild Coast. There are some great waves to surf at Kei-Mouth and Morgan Bay."

Which is precisely where we were sitting at the time.

Morgan Bay

Baldy Bird

Baldy, the cockatoo, owns the hotel and lets the humans feed her peanuts and beer.

Baldy Man

Dunno who that fat bastard is. I think he's standing in the sea because the beach is too crowded.

Morgs beach

I think nothing of taking long walks along the mile-long beach at six o'clock in the morning, before the sun gets too hot. Mrs Farty doesn't think much of it either.

Crashing Waves

Some people are mental enough to climb these rocks. Fer Cryssakes, why??? There's an easy path up the back way, all the way to the top.

Krantzes

In the evenings, if the weather is good who am I kidding, the weather is always good, the owner of the hotel will rev up the 4×4 and take a dozen or so guests up the dirt track to the top of the Krantzes for "sundowners". This is a complicated ritual taking place at sundown - who would have guessed it? - which involves drinking, admiring the beautiful sunset and, er, more drinking. Oh, and drinking. And if you're lucky, you might see a whale and her calf. *sigh*

Yellow Bird

Coming from the Big City, we were used to the idea that birds are shy and will tend to avoid humans. Hence the binoculars. But in the wilderness, birds hardly ever see humans and will come right up close to see what you're up to. Ah, well, you live and learn. Being a keen ornithologist, I was able to identify this yellow bird as belonging to the species birdus yellowus.

Lucid Pools

The water here is incredibly clear, which makes it a doddle to dawdle down the beach at low tide and hunt for oysters.

All Ur Bait R Belong 2 Us

Whatever that means.

Treasure

Yeah, so we bought a diamond, and a ring. But there's more than one kind of treasure. Mine is the memory of walking hand-in-hand with Mrs Farty through the ankle-deep, warm waters of Morgan Bay lagoon, then stopping to watch the tiny little fishes swimming around our feet.

Diamond Drive Part 2

So. We've bought found a diamond and had it cut, polished and graded. Now we need to have it set in a ring, so we head in the general direction of Cape Town.

Cango Caves

They're deep, dark and mysterious. No way in hell is Mrs Farty going in there. Time for me to boldly go where ten thousand tourists no-one has gone before. Pretty. Dark. Especially when the guide turns out all the lights just to show us how DARK it is a kilometre underground. Yep. Really dark. So dark that you have to feel your way around.

"Hey, get your hand off my butt!" Perfick!

Cheetahs & Ostriches

There's a cheetah farm conservation reserve in Oudtshoorn not far from Cango Caves. It's great, you get to stroll around in a raised walkway fenced off above the animals, and if you're very lucky (and over 16), they'll even let you in to pet the cheetahs. Imagine stroking a Harley Davidson that's been upholstered in fur. And in all the years it's been operating, only one stupid bitch has ever had her arm torn off.

"Is it safe?"

"Oh, yes, it's perfectly safe."

"Argh! Argh! Get it off me!"

"Whereas you're not."

Cats.


And burds.


Ostriches

After you've fed the ostriches, count your rings.

More kittehs

After you've fed the cheetahs, count your fingers.

And crocodiles.


After you've fed the crocs, count your friends.

Oops run out of post. Cape Town next, promise!

Diamond Drive Part 1

This was going to be a post about our 20th wedding anniversary trip around South Africa, but given that we almost certainly won't be going back there (Eldest Daughter is now moving to New Zealand), I've decided to expand it a bit and throw in bits from other holidays. If you don't like to see other people's holiday pictures, look away now.

Mrs Farty and I had been married for twenty years and felt that we deserved a wee holiday (no, not from each other). Eldest Daughter and Son-in-Law had been begging us to pay them a visit, so we gave Little Miss Farty some money for crisps, packed our bags and flew off to Darkest sunny South Africa.

We landed, eventually, in a little place known as East London. It sits right on the Wild Coast, about halfway between Port Elizabeth and Durban. That'll be a big help to ya, right? Well, just wait till 2010, when the Football World Cup arrives in SA. Then you'll pick it up quickly enough.

ED and SiL had taken some time off too, so we wasted no time in driving up to SiL's birthplace, Kimberly, right in the heart of the country and hot as hell. The air-cond in the car was, of course, knackered, so we drove fast with the windows down. Kimberly is where the fabulous Great Star of Africa was found, so SiL took us to the very hill where the discovery was made.

Well, that find had sparked a bit of excitement diamond rush. People looked for, and found, more diamonds, so they dug down. And down. And down. Now all that's left is a big hole, imaginatively named The Big Hole. It's still there, but that pretty green liquid covering the bottom is highly acidic, and the very air around it is toxic. Nice.

However, there are plenty of other places in the vicinity where diamond prospecting is still worthwhile, so we bought our Official Prospecting Licences and caught the steam train to King Solomon's Mine. Possibly.

The big rocks from the mine are mechanically broken down into gravel, then it's a matter of crushing the gravel, spreading it out on a handy table and sifting through it by hand until you find yourself a diamond. This may take some time, so bring plenty of sandwiches and soda. (One of these people is an accredited diamond sorter - can you guess which one?)

Once you've discovered your diamond, you have to get it cut, polished and graded. As luck would have it, there's a diamond sorting facility, Harry Oppenheimer House (HOH), right in the middle of Kimberly, so we had a wander round inside.

*ahem*

Oh. Right. They confiscated our cameras, then we were issued with temporary passes, escorted by armed guards, and led through a series of locked doors while we were X-rayed, and thence into the key-operated lifts. All under the ever-watchful gaze of the CCTV security cameras. Think Big Brother for real. Sheesh, you'd think they were worried someone might want to steal their jools or sumfink!

And then we saw them. A long, long line of stools. Perched on each stool, a stern-faced individual wearing a white coat and thin latex gloves. Stacked before each person, a little heap of stones. The leftmost heap was the largest. These ones were jet black industrial diamonds. As we walked along, the heaps grew smaller while the colours lightened through brown and yellow, until the smallest, rightmost heap was composed of pure, clear, glittery gems. Each heap was worth a cool million US dollars. Each sorter had three cameras trained on their every move. I'd hate to have an itchy bum in that room.

SiL's sister works there, so she graded Mrs Farty's diamond personally. As you do.

After seeing the end-to-end process of washing - in boiling nitric acid - drying, sorting, grading and that, we were given a lovely cup of Earl Grey tea and shown some excellent copies of famous diamonds. And a very few real, uncut ones, still embedded in the rock. Then we were X-rayed again, just to be sure, given back our cameras and allowed back outside. I like HOH. Mrs Farty wants to live there.

Next stop: Cape Town, via Cango Caves.

Out With The Old

Meg over at meish.org has a wee thing she runs every year called The Mayfly Project. Go on, give it a try.

Eight Things About Me

Tagged a while ago for this, possibly by Jahooni, and only just got a round tuit. Eight, eh?

1. I once wrote a letter to Isaac Asimov.
   The BBC had been screening a Merkan tv series called Holmes and Yo-Yo, about a human police detective and his robot side-kick. This idea was obviously stolen from Asimov's novel The Caves Of Steel and other stories featuring the robot detective R. Daneel Olivaw. So I wrote and asked Asimov if he was collecting royalties on the series. He wrote back denying that H & Y was anything to do with him. If you've ever seen it, you'll know why.



2. I gave my girlfriend a butterfly for Xmas.
   Embra generally gets even colder in December than in "Summer". So imagine my surprise when I woke up on Xmas Eve 1972 (possibly) and found a newly-hatched butterfly fluttering around in the relative warmth of the kitchen. I fed it some sugar water and gave it to my then girlfriend as a surprise Xmas present. She didn't dump me on the spot, so I guess she was fairly impressed.



3. I'm a bad male model.
   Actually, that should read bad rôle model. One of the local kids, G, had overheard his parents gossiping about me, so he repeated it to his mates. Who completely misinterpreted what they'd heard, like Chinese Wispas. The first I knew about it was when they asked me if I was a male model, so I strutted my stuff up and down an imaginary catwalk, to general hilarity. Then they all turned and pointed at G, shouting Numpty!
   (I have no idea why G's parents thought I was a bad rôle model, I've never been banned for drink-driving.)



4. I once stopped drinking tea for four years.
   When I was twelve, I went on a school cruise to Scandinavia. The ship struck Leith docks on the way out - our cabin received a rather large dent in the wall, i.e. hull. I was seasick for the first two days. For hot beverages we had a choice of tea or coffee, with nowhere else to go. The tea tasted like, well, it's hard to describe, but let's just say that it was so bloody awful that for the next four years I would only drink coffee. I had a great time.



5. I'm heavily into recycling.
   To prove it, here's a recycled joke:
   
   Two blondes, let's call them Sam and Amanda, are in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Sam says, "Let's play Hide & Seek!" and promptly buries her head in the sand. Amanda takes three days to find her twin.



6. The first time I read The Lord Of The Rings, it took me three days to finish it.
   Hey, who needs sleep when you're fourteen?



7. I'm the world's worst darts player.
   During one game, I managed to throw a dart through a window. Well, it would have gone through if the window had been open at the time. As it was, only the point came out the other side. Ooer.



8. I love the song Over The Rainbow.
   Especially the Tori Amos version, but also Eva Cassidy. And when they played this one at the end of 50 First Dates, I just had to track it down. It's by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole. Beautiful.
   
   

Tagging, lets' see, Cat, Mr. X and Brom.

Is It A Monster?

Son-In-Law takes his sport seriously. I'm not talking about that crap on telly, I mean the Real Thing: Participation; Life Or Death; Them Or Me. [That's Enough Capitalisation. Ed.]

He has it all planned out like a full-scale military operation. Firstly he'll check out the tide tables, to find the most suitable time to ship out; then the weather forecasts, to see if his quarry will likely be easy or hard to spot. He'll even make sure every member of the party has an up-to-date hunting licence. On the night before the big event, he'll pack up the essentials into the 4x4 ready for an early start.

Come the big day, he'll be up before dawn, getting the rest of the family prepared, for this is more than a one-man operation. They all pile aboard and hurtle off along the long, dusty highway, passing jacaranda trees bursting with purple [Get on with it. Ed].

He grabs a string bag in one hand, a trusty screwdriver in the other and stomps off down the beach, arriving at the rocky outcrop just as the tide reaches its lowest ebb. Or is it flow? [No. Ebb.]

This far out, the critters have had time to mature and grow into monsters three, sometimes four inches across. Expertly, he reaches far down to the underside of a rock, feels around until his fingers find his prey, then he ducks under the water with the screwdriver, struggles valiantly with one of these leviathans for two, three, maybe five seconds and finally surfaces with, well, what looks like a bit of rock, defiantly thrust aloft. Into the bag it goes and he's off looking for the next one already.
He'll only stop when either the rising tide makes it too hard to stay upright, or he's reached his quota. Well, I say his quota, but that's where the rest of the family come in. 24 oysters per person per day. They just have to physically present, with licences. Sometimes we get to join in. Sometimes we just buy the licences and watch.

Then it's off with the day's catch a l'hotel, where chef washes and opens the oysters and serves them up with lemons and piri-piri sauce. Anything to disguise the taste of snot, really.
So there we are, eating the little fuckers with various shades of enthusiasm, when Mrs Farty exclaims, "This one's not been cleaned properly, there's a bit of grit or something in it!"
But lo and behold! On closer inspection, the "or something" turns out to be a real, honest-to-goodness pearl. Ain't it a beauty?

Er, you might want to click to enlarge. Several times.

International Talk Like A Pirate Day

It be only six months until International Talk Like A Pirate Day, so I be thinkin' I'd better be startin' to getting ready^*. So here be somethin' to educate yez, with the three four five R's.

It all be startin' with the Flying Spaghetti Monstaaarr!


His chosen people be pirates. Arrr!

Mrs Farty and I always be takin' it in turns to walk the plank. Ah-harr!

Then there be the lovely wench Tasha Yarrrrr...


And A Vast Behind were just a bonus. Aaaarrrrrgggghhh!

Now keel-haul the mainsail, belay the demon rum and buckle that swash^**!

^*If the Christians can start preparing for X-mas in August, for FSM's sake, why shouldn't we start early too?

^**Erm, anyone know where I can get a decent swash?

Treasure Trove

This is a true story. Long ago and far away in a distant galaxy (ok, maybe not that distant), a trading ship was carrying its precious cargo of Chinese pottery and carnelian beads and that from the Orient to the ports of Europe. Whilst attempting to negotiate the Wild Coast of South Africa, it was caught up in a terrible storm and dashed against the cruel, jagged rocks. Only a few hardy souls - and their slaves - managed to escape and make their way to shore. After many exciting adventures involving treacherous natives, wild animals and the odd tropical disease, an even fewer number survived the journey overland to East London.

But that's not important right now. When we visited our family out that way a couple of years back, my son-in-law took us for a wee drive down 100 kilometers of dirt track to a secluded beach, then we clambered across the rocks, forded a river mouth at low tide and came at last to a group of women - some were natives dressed in bright colours, some tourists in khaki - picking their way amongst the flotsam and jetsam strewn along the shoreline. It transpired that after 400 years, the tides had finally released some of the sunken treasure from its watery resting place.

Even as I watched, one of the locals let out a whoop of delight and held aloft a biscuit-sized sliver of white with blue markings on it, before thrusting it into a fold in her headgear. With a little persuasion, she plucked it out and proffered for my inspection a beautifully-painted shard of Chinese pottery. "I'm having me some of that," I thought to myself and immediately started scanning the sand and gravel shushing around my bare feet, hunting for goodies while son-in-law went off with a screwdriver to secure some slightly-more-available oysters.

The sun beat down on our heads, a gentle wind blew across us and all the time the waves crashed, crashed, crashed onto the shore, dredging up forgotten hoards of, well, not very much to be honest. A German frau found a couple more bits of pottery, two or three women found some translucent beads, still clearly pre-drilled for threading onto necklaces, but with the tiny holes now clogged with sand. And Muggins? After three hours I had sore feet from the sharp stones, my shorts were soaked through and I had bugger-all to show for my troubles. I was still having a whale of a time but it was growing late and I had to get back before the river became impassable.

Now a dilemma. Should I brazenly continue with the public-consumption version I trotted out when I got back to the family, or should I come clean and tell the truth? Ah, what the heck. You're only figments of my imagination anyway...

One of the German frauleins took pity on me and just as a wave drained away, dropped one of her beads right in front of me. "Look!" she yelled, "There's one now! Grab it before it gets washed away again!"

Quick as a flash, I reached down and snatched it up. "Are you sure about this?"

"No problem, I'm here all week and I've got half-a-dozen already."

"You're very kind. Thank you."

And with that, I stuck the bead in my mouth for safe-keeping, picked up my shoes and with a wave of gratitude to my erstwhile companions, made my way back across the river and returned to civilisation.

When I told my son-in-law the official version, he congratulated me. "My sister's been coming back to that beach every summer for the past seventeen years. She says when she gets enough beads, she'll drill them out and make them into a necklace."

"What a lovely idea. How many has she collected?"

"Four."