The morning after the night before

I’ve never seen so much sky before. We left the coast today and headed inland inching our way towards Malawi. Abby and I had our first taste of life behind the wheel. Was pretty good to drive the old Landrover Defender. We covered about 600km today - only another couple of thousand to go. We stopped for the night in Bloemfontein.

Anyway, enough driving and dodgy provisional towns, there was the whole unfortunate incident of New Year’s Eve. Well things turned out OK in the end. Abby and I ended up in the abandoned wastes of Grahamstown. “Grahamstown is the capital of the settler country and borders and it still feels like a strange English transplant. The large student population breathes life into this otherwise conservative, Victorian era town” (Lonely Planet Guide to Southern Africa). Now if you disregard the student life bit then you’re nearly there. Seems that some people have hung on to the Victorian era values too. Try “The black townships? Well, they’re no worse than Ireland in 1840…” Hmmmm. After a couple of drinks later we stumbled back to the farmhouse for dinner and to mingle with the other guests.

Dinner was cool, a laid back affair where everyone helped themselves and plenty of wine to go round. Then materialising like some apparition the hymn sheets and music arrived. Now I can’t really describe what happened next but luckily for everyone we took a few pictures and … with James Bondesque stealth I managed to record some of the proceedings onto my camera with the handy in-built microphone.

We did ring the NewYear in as promised and it was certainly a memorable way to start 2005.