Christmas in Tropical Heat

I will soon experience my 9th Christmas in South Africa and will try to give you some ideas about how it is.

My definition of the important attributes for a Swedish Christmas:

• Snow, cold and darkness except for all the candlelights
• The smell och the Christmas tree and the acrid smell of burning "tomtebloss"
• Disney's Christmas program on TV
• The owen-roasted ham and "dopp-i-grytan" with M:s potato sallad
• "Inlagd sill" and "flätbröd"
• Pickled ox tongue

I have here just two of the items: darkness (at least after 8pm) and the pickled tongue. I could of course bake the "flätbröd" if I had the recipe... All the rest is impossible to get here!
The ham is available as Gammon, but then it is smoked, probably as a heritage from the English and Dutch sailing around the Cape, as the smoked ham keeps longer than just the cured ham.
The spruce we used for a Christmas tree is simply nowhere to be found.
My first Christmas here, in 2000, I made a turkey. But not in the oven, but on a charcoal Weber. Quite an adventure, but it was successful.
Another big difference is that Christmas here is just 25 December.

I'm not sure what we will have for Christmas this year... Perhaps just salads and cold meat like smoked ham, salami and pastrami. The heavy swedish Christmas food, like roasted porkbelly and rice porridge is simply not the right food to have when it's 30-35 degrees warm!

We will most certainly have some nice home baked bread. I bake a lot of bread here. If I get the recipe we might have "flätbröd"!

In summary: it is quite difficult to have the traditional Swedish Christmas feeling...
I will post some pictures during or after Christmas.

Fat and funny...

For a long time I have been wondering if the political leaders of this country are leaders because they are fat, or if they are fat because they are leaders. What happened on live TV a few days ago and the newspaper comments below makes the question even more interesting!

Watch the video clip first, then read the newspaper clip!

Geocaching News

During the last two weeks I have been quite busy with geocaching... The last weekend in September we participated in a Geocaching Event: The Gorgeous Gorge. Found 10 caches that day, and met a lot of nice people, and of course a nice braai in the evening!
Last Friday I was out the whole day with Fish Eagle and his wife. Found 11 caches in one day, one of them my 2nd FTF (first to find).



An archeological site



A cheese factory in the middle of nowhere, but they really know how to make nice cheese!


Day before yesterday I was out with Gerrit, my brother-in-law. We went to Barberton where I hid my first cache, and found 6 that day. It involved some off-road driving.




A cold beer is very nice in the hot weather!





The jacaranda trees blossoming in Barberton.

Today I hid my 2nd cache in the Nelspruit Nature Reserve. Out dogs loved the outing!
There will be more!

Kaapsehoop

Yesterday we had a nice walk at Kaapsehoop together with Fish Eagle (Andy and Lindy) and found four Geocaches. In the Geocaching world, Fish Eagle is the "Emperor" of Africa, as he is the Cache Reviewer for Groundspeak for the whole continent of Africa!






The weather was excellent, and we finsihed the day with some nice pancakes at the Pan&Koek.

Back from the KNP

Back home after a 4 day trip in the KNP. The temperature dropped from lower 40's to +17 over-night. And today also some rain which is very welcome.
I saw two species of antilope that I haven't seen before: Nyala and Sable antilope!
Pictures of them are published on www.webshots.com.
http://travel.webshots.com/album/560986454EnJrWA
The new pictures are at the end of that album.

Another hot day...

I'm still in the KNP. Did see a few lions and of course the usual menagerie... Only new animalon my list was a few nyala close to the road. Beautiful antilope! Found a lot of Geocaches today! Great fun!

In the KNP

After two days in extremely hot weather for this time of year(+43 yesterday and a dew degrees less today) I have found 10 Geocaches, and seen a lot of animals. Met some nice people along the route. I'm now in Skukuza Camp. Tomorrow I'll make a tour in the southern part of KNP. No pics processed so far, but they will come up in a few days.

A New Hobby

During the last 4 weeks I have learnt about Geocaching. There was obviously a feature on swedish television about that in Packat&Klart 2 years ago, but I didn't see that program. I got to know it when I bought my hand-held GPSr, a Garmin 60CSx. There are about 650.000 caches hidden around the world, and they are listed on www.geocaching.com . I started in Leksand and found 18 caches, some of them with great help from Plano.
Now in South Africa I have found 6 more caches during the first week! Tomorrow I'm going to the Kruger Park again, and geocaching will add another dimension of the time spent in the park. I will be there for 4 days, hoping to see a lot of nice animals, and possibly discovering a few caches.

Finally Home Again!!!

Long time no blogging...
After some time overseas, I'm finally home again. During my weeks abroad I did enjoy my 10th anniversary as a cruising driver at Classic Car Week in Rättvik. I posted some 2 dozen new pics at Webshots http://rides.webshots.com/album/560898566bZfgxh

This album right now had a 6.500+ views! 2nd most popular of my albums at Webshots.com.
The total number of views is now 60.000+.
Check it out at http://community.webshots.com/user/tommy_javerfalk

At Paris CDG airport there was a suspected bomb threat, and the police and some military guys cleared the place in a few minutes. It was a small black bag that someone had forgotten, containing no bomb, so everything was back to normal after about 15 minutes! But it was a bit scary anyway...

About an hour later when I went through security before boarding to Johannesburg, my carry on luggage raised suspicions... as always! I had to unpack it, taking away all electronic stuff like an external Hard Disk, a GPSr etc. etc. But it came out from the X-ray machine and the security was not happy about it...

So I had to unpack it again... Finally they asked me if I kept a scissors in the bag, and then I remembered that I put a set of surgical instruments (scissors, clamps, surgical knife handles without a blade). But fortunately my stethoscope was also there, so they asked me if I am a medical doctor. They wanted me to show proof of that, which I couldn't find. Thought it was in the big suitcase. But luckily they let my instruments through anyway, which I think was quite exceptional! They probably thought that a person planning to high-jack an airplane wouldn't have a stethoscope!

No pictures this time, but there will be more pictures soon!

Concert in the Botanical Garden of Nelspruit

Today, the last day of the 2008 Innibos Festival in Nelspruit, we enjoyed
a concert in the Botanical Gardens. It must have been at least a couple of
thousands in the audience, most of them with nice food and drink!
Me and Leona were there with out best friends, Annelie and Robert, and
some relatives of theirs.

This actually is in Mid-winter here!!!









Many different performing artists, but my favourites are the Soweto String Quartet





We had a lot of nice food and drink that wse enjoyed during the 2 hr concert...





Adele and the famous opera singer Kevin Leo

Some Prado Adventures

A week ago I was in the Kruger National Park for three days, enjoying the comfort of my new car.
Especially the 2nd day was quite fantastic, seeing all the Big 5 in one single day, and not just one of each: 2 leopards, 30+ lions, 3 rhinos, and lots and lots of elephants and buffalos.






Today me and Leona went to the Barberton Nature Reserve for some off-road exercise.
We actually covered all the tracks in about 4 hours. Great experience!




















To drive off-road in the bushveld gives me a strong feeling of the REAL Africa!

Long time no posts...

Back in South Africa after 6 weeks of work in Sweden. I actually came home 2½ week ago, but has been quite busy. Among other things, I bought a new car a week ago.

It's a lovely car, a Toyota Prado, with a 4L V6 petrol engine, delivering 179kW= 240 hp. 4x4 with a LOT of extras built in.












I read a lot of newspapers, and the clip below is one of the best letters to the editor I've seen in a long time.

Another Snake... This time IN our house!

Tonight we had another snake, this time in Leona's study. We called Hi-Tech, our amazing security company and within a few minutes they came and caught the snake!
This time it was a quite harmless Brown House Snake. But it was nice to have it taken away!

An Amazing Video from the KNP

Only today did I find this marvelous video clip on YouTube. Hopefully I will experience something like that for real...

Back from the Kruger National Park

I'm back from a 6 day trip in the KNP. I went all the way up to Shingwedzi Camp. The total mileage was 1300km, and I took 1300 pictures! The best have been uploaded to http://community.webshots.com/user/tommy_javerfalk
The previous pictures in that album are at the top, so one has to go down a few pages to see the new ones.

More about Black Mambas...

We didn't see "our" Black Mamba again. But it might still be there...
This newspaper article can be an indication of how bad they are.

VerveEarth

I was invited to VerveEarth. Seems to be a very nice idea. So here I am now!

Black Mamba

This afternoon we saw a Black Mamba in a corner outside our house. We called for help, but the snake escaped up the wall and under the tiles of the roof... So, now we have a Black Mamba "under our roof" litterally speaking! The snake expert told us it has probably been there for several months, but they are so shy that we haven't seen it until now.
The snake catching will continue tomorrow morning.

A Nice Birthday!

We spent the weekend in the KNP.
First night at Lower Sabie Rest Camp, the second night at Satara.

We had a very relaxing time, enjoying the beautiful camps, but also the traveling through the park, even though it was VERY hot!

Photographically it was very successful, even though we did not see any "big cats".

This Klipspringer was like a statue!




A Lilac Breasted Roller














Watch my eyelashes!















A Grey Heron at the Sunset Dam close to Lower Sabie













Hippo at the Sunset Dam