Monday Oct. 22nd- Wednesday Oct. 24th – East London

Monday morning, after preparing our text and photos for a blog posting, we drove to the car rental agency at the EL airport and reported our incident at the traffic stop the day before. They phoned PE where we had picked the car up, and were told they had the new license and would fax a copy (which is now on the car) and overnight the original. From the airport we made our way back to town to head to the internet café but it soon became apparent that all the traffic lights were out and there was great confusion. It turned out that there was a city wide power outage due to a “failed” transformer. The outage lasted from 10.30am until after 3.30 pm – no posting on Monday so we returned home. Barry was already home and Ann came home shortly after due to the power failure. I went with Barry to watch him play doubles squash (similar to racquet ball) at the Beacon Bay Club then after a beer, we returned to dine at home and catch up on our respective happenings.

Tuesday we were able to make a five day posting which made me feel good if not anybody else! Barry and I did some shopping (beer and wine) for our Mazeppa Bay excursion, before we watched the Springbok cricket team lose a second one day international to Pakistan and they are now losing 2 to 1 in a five match series. While we were watching we suddenly had a very unusual occurrence – a hailstorm with hailstones of quite large proportions. It was over very quickly, but not before Alison had snapped a couple of pictures as proof of this phenomenon. In the evening, we went out to dinner to a local fish restaurant and Alison and I had a local SA fish that we used to enjoy, Kingklip – it was delicious. We returned home for coffee and after dinner drinks and watched a musical DVD, Celtic Women, recorded live at Slane Castle, Ireland – quite brilliant.

This morning, Wednesday, I arose to greetings, cards and phone calls for my 66th birthday. We’ll be celebrating this evening with a braai at Shaun & Nikki’s home (the newly weds). Tomorrow morning we leave for Mazeppa Bay on the remote Wild Coast until Oct. 29th, so there will be no posting for a while. When we next post, I hope we will have some pictures of fish, although dinner for each evening has already been planned and not one of the menus has fish on it, so confidence cannot be running too high!