Vacation in the Magaliesberg (by Midas), and a new light bulb for the kitchen (by Jonah)

Hello everyone. Things had been getting pretty boring around the house lately, so last week we packed up for a few days and took Mom and Dad on vacation to the Magaliesberg.

The Magaliesberg mountains are very old, says Dad, so they're not very high and make for good hiking. Dad also told me that they don't have any monkeys living in them, so I was pretty excited because I don't like monkeys.

It took us about an hour and a half to drive to the farm cottage we rented. Dad has been driving slow these days because the police sent him some things in the mail and Mom got mad at him and said he had to be more careful.

Here we are at Saamrus Guest Farm. Our cottage is in the background and it was called Hoep Hoep. I don't know what that means but it's funny that it rhymes with poop.

Mellie and I were pretty chuffed to check the place out. The porch was pretty cool - you can see how excited Mellie is about it. On the right you can see our spacious bathroom.

This is the living room - Mom and Dad wouldn't let me sit on the couches so I can't tell you if they were comfortable but they don't look like they were.

And here's the kitchen. Dad kept hitting his head on the thing with the candles in it.

And here's our bedroom which you can see has a pretty sweet window for barking at stuff. 

And finally, this is the bathroom that Mom and Dad used. It was awesome because the tub was full of interesting spiders, there was no hot water, and you could see people on the road from the window!

There are a lot of other cool-looking cottages on the farm but Dad said our car couldn't drive to them so we had to stay at the bottom of the hill near the neighbors.

Okay, let's talk about what we did for fun. Mostly, we went for some walks. Here we are at the start of one.

Mom said we were doing very good, so she let us wander off our leashes.

And that's how we found this dry riverbed. I didn't like this place because there were lots of ticks.

Another fun thing to do was to stare at stuff from the porch and sometimes bark at it.

Mom and Dad liked to do this too.

Birds are fun to bark at, like this Black-Shouldered Kite and this African Grey Hornbill.

There was also a nice pool at Saamrus, but Mom wouldn't go in because it was full of cool dead crickets and shongololos and also me and Mellie couldn't go in because the sign said so. We still like Kimi's pool the best.

Mom and Dad also spent a lot of time making food but they didn't let us try any so I can't tell you if it was good.

Even though we got a lot of ticks, Saamrus was a pretty cool place to hang out for a while, but we missed our friends in Johannesburg, so we had to come home. We'll let Dad tell you about what happened when we got back.

One of the glaring flaws in our kitchen was the lack of any light over the main cooking area. Fixing that situation requires turning off the main breaker (since the entire house is run on two circuits), something I hadn't wanted to do at night. Since we got home from vacation in the early afternoon it seemed like a perfect opportunity to remedy this situation. You can see in the background how excited Midas is about being home.

Unfortunately, the only way to access the house's wiring is via a single man-hole above the shower in the bathroom.

Lacking a ladder with 10 foot ceilings means we had to "make a plan" as the locals say - Safety First!

And away we go!

I'm not going to lie, it's pretty creepy up there. But I'll spare you the details. After about an hour of wiring, only one crack on the head from the rafters, and nearly going through the suspended ceiling, I was ready to install our new fixture.

This also required some ladder improvisation skills. 

Nothing is so tiring as working over your head. What's worse is the massive wedgie that I can't attend to because I'm balanced on a stool over a wire baking rack and holding 220v in my left hand.

Ta-dah! We can now tell if food is burning, if water is boiling, just what it is we're actually eating for dinner, and how close the knife has been getting to our fingers. Additionally, I now know that this fume hood terminates blindly next to bone-dry wooden rafters in the attic, so we'll keep our flambeeing to a minimum.

Shack life

In late November, Tyler was passing through Johannesburg and stayed for a week to do some specimen work at the National Museum in Bloemfontein. Together with my graduate students Kimi and Blair, we drove down to Bloem together and elected to stay just out of town at the Emoya Private Game Reserve.

Since we were all working off limited grant budgets (and because of sheer curiosity), we rented ourselves one of the affordable shacks in Emoya's "simulated shanty town". Emoya has been on the receiving end of some terrible press about these shacks (see http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/06/travel/shanty-town/), but I'll hold my comments until the end. 

Full disclosure: many of the best pictures in this post were again taken by my graduate student Kimi Chapelle.

Three cups of coffee, Choiniere driving, and no breakfast make for a bit of roadside chumming just off the N1!

Here's our shack at Emoya.

Of course.

Unlike real shanty towns, this one's got wi-fi.

The collections at the National Museum are not for the weak - here's Blair pulling another dino' in a box off a dusty shelf.

This huge meat-eating dinosaur footprint in the collections at the museum is one of the hundreds found in the Clarens Formation (more on that in the next post). Kimi's hand for scale.

Back at our shack, we enjoyed the benefits of being on a private game reserve, such as giraffes at sunset and friendly knee-lickings from the resident warthogs.

Of course, there was big game at the museum, too! This fellow, Melanorosaurus, is an early sauropod dinosaur. 

Melanorosaurus has one of the better skulls from an early sauropod dinosaur, which means its perfect for resting your hipster sunglasses on...

...or studying intensely.

This pot-bellied pig might want to lay off the pies. We never even saw its feet. Tyler did notice, however, that it had been snacking on the discarded bones from someone's roasted ham! Cannibal!

Our wonderful friends Sanet (to the right of Tyler) and Jaco (to the left of Kimi) happen to live just down the road from Emoya, and we spent two great evenings drinking wine on their porch and celebrating their upcoming nuptials.

And they even gave us a preview of their first dance for their upcoming wedding.

As our last salute to Bloemfontein, we stopped for breakfast at one of the best restaurants in the Free State, called Iewers Nice. Not only is their menu cheeky, but Iewers Nice serves what may be the most delcious breakfast foodstuff on the face of the planet  - kaaings. 

I had to blatantly steal this picture off the internet because I was in such breakfast bliss that I forgot to photo document the beauty of kaaings. As you can see above, they're just rendered fatty bits of either pig (as above) or lamb belly (as is more traditional). Served with a poached egg, some cornmeal grits called pap, and tomato relish, they're enough reason to visit Bloemfontein on their own.

What can I say about staying in a simulated Shanty Town? Did I learn more about the desperate poverty that many South Africans live in every day? No. Did I enjoy staying in a modestly priced place with a definite theme and easy access to dowtnown, restaurants, bars, and giraffes and rhinos? Immensely. Do I think it's worth getting worked up about what is clearly just a wacky-budget-backpacker's-type hotel that provides a number of decent jobs for poor people in the Bloemfontein area? Certainly not. I will be staying there again.  

Waltzing through the Western Cape

Previous posts have shown you much of the Eastern Cape from Jonah's field trips, so I thought you might like to see another part of the country. 

Let's head west to a quaint little area filled with mountains, lined by the sea, and dotted with wine farms. Oh, Western Cape, you are a joy to behold. 

In January, I attended the AETFAT conference, which was a meeting of the botanical minds of Africa and Europe. The lab arrived in Cape Town on Sunday and immediately headed to the quaint town of Stellenbosch. A trip to Stellenbosch is not complete without a little tour of the wine farms.

We stopped briefly at Uitkyk, where the bartender kindly offered us each one tasting for free. They were closing and hoped to shoo us along quickly.

Next stop: Delheim. This is one of Jonah's and my favorite wineries. The table wine is fantastic and we always have a few bottles on hand. Above is the view as you pull into the lot.

The entrance to deliciousness.

The cellar where we enjoyed tasting different wines. I ended up going home with 2 bottles of their Chenin Blanc, which is not for sale in good ol' Joburg (yet). We then headed back to the University for the opening evening reception.

Fast forward through two days of exhilarating scientific talks and well fed tea breaks...to our Table Mountain Excursion! One of the options for the mid-week excursion was to take a cable car to the top of the mountain and hike around. (photo credit: my phone!)

  

As we climbed up in the cable car, we were a bit worried that the "table cloth" wouldn't lift in time. Thankfully, after a few minutes at the top, the cloth gracefully slid off and we had amazing views.

The Ericas were in bloom! This is one of my favorite groups of plants in SA.

Another favorite group: Orchids! How pretty is this little flower?

The landscape on top of Table Mountain.

Watsonias were everywhere, dotting the mountain top with brilliant fiery orange.

From the Duiker Trail, you had views of Lion's Head (left) and Robbin Island in the distance (right).

A closer view of Lion's Head. 

Of course, this is the trail we took out to the edge for better views. No, Jonah wasn't leading the hike, he was back in Joburg getting ready for his umpteenth rendezvous in the Eastern Cape.

My favorite ocean! 

After coming down off Table Mountain, our tour guide took the bus over to Signal Hill for a short visit.

On Signal Hill, there was a nifty frame set up for the perfect tourist photograph.

From here, you could also see Robbin Island. It reminded me a bit of Alcatraz. Apparently there is a cookbook for sale there that provides details of Madiba's meals while imprisoned.

We weren't finished yet! Afterwards, we headed to Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. This is possibly one of my favorite places in South Africa. Pictured above is a Welwitschia mirabilis, which are now being propagated in the greenhouse at the Garden. Welwitschia's are one of southern Africa's most iconic plants (a gymnosperm, not a flowering plant). Each plant only has two leaves that spiral around and grow approximately 15cm each year. You can tell how old the plants are by the "rings" left on the leaves after each growth period.

Castle Rock overlooks the Tea Room (I did buy the cookbook offered at the Garden).

While on our tour through the garden, we were privileged to see the progress on the Canopy Walk that's under construction in the Arboretum portion of the Garden. The Garden staff fondly refer to it as the Boomslang, which is a highly venomous, arboreal snake in SA. Nothing fond about that.

Stellenbosch University, where our meeting was held, is probably one of the most picturesque campuses I've ever visited. Nina- you should totally do a study abroad here. I'd definitely come visit! :)

It's also a primarily Afrikaans university, so not many of the signs were in English. However, almost everyone spoke English.

The main hall on campus.

On the last day, I skipped the last session to walk around the town. The lack of walls and electric fences was a welcome break from the high security of Joburg. The town had a wonderful New England feel to it, with lots of white, Dutch colonial buildings. Above is the presumed Town Hall (Stellenbosch is worse about signs and information than Joburg) with a lovely tribute to Mandela out front. The day before, flowers and cards were laid out in front and added lovely splashes of color to the lawn.

Here's a not-so-great view of the streets, where we'd walk down to find dinner. 

The moon rising over the mountains and campus was one of the most serene views that week.

On my way back to Joburg, I saw this awesome cake at Mugg & Bean in the Cape Town airport. Challenge accepted.

After a great week in Stellenbosch, it's nice to be back.

Home Sweet Home.