I'm back from South Africa! Have gotton baked in the S. African sun a bit!
Well mostly it's cool or cold in the evenings between 7- 27 degrees celsius, but when the sun's out it can burn you, even though the air itself is cool. The flight was long, 11 hours and at night. Did not sleep a lot, but then I'm used to that. 
I visited Cape Town, and Cape Point where all the shipwrecks happened, Cape of Good Hope (which was initially called a more disastrous name which I can't remember) and the people were so friendly. They loved taking pictures because photography is VERY expensive there. So even if they didn't get a picture, they didn't mind me having a picture taken with them.
We got to see tribal dancing, seals, penguins and whales in Cape Town. Went to the ostrich farm, cheetah ranch and a winery too.
The best stuff to buy there are gemstones (relatively cheap compared to the rest of the places I've been to), rooibos tea, wood crafts, hand-painted ostrich eggshells and native bracelets and necklaces and earrings. Anything else is very expensive. Food is not cheap either. A can of Coke costs about one US dollar. But the fish is very fresh over there and I got one lobster lunch.
Meat is plenty pork, beef or venison. Chicken less, but they still had that at some places. The apples were very crunchy and sweet over there! All the juices they served were made from the real fruit. The guava juice was really nice too, although I couldn't seem to buy a single guava anywhere.Then I visited Johannesburg and Sun City. Btw, Car Expert would have loved to be there! Because cars are VERY affordable! You could always spot one BMW in three cars on the road in Cape Town. Johannesburg is a bit of a poorer area so not as many cars. US1 is 6.15 Rand over there. And a cheap Kia car is only 22 thousand rand! A nice BMW is only 52 thousand Rand!
Besides cars, it was Spring when I went so the streets in Johannesburg and Pretoria (the capital actually!) were filled with the purple-coloured jaceranda (spelling?) flowers in bloom on every tree there. We went to the Voortrekker monument building and we could see puffs of purple everywhere from the cliff.
Sun City was fun. It was fun to see the zebra chairs Miss Universe sat in some years ago. And the Palace Hotel was huge. The wooden table in the lobby alone cost 3.5 million US dollars, although it looked quite simple to my untrained eye. Probably made of oak or something and carved out of one single tree. The legs were carved into elephants. Other than that, Sun City had biking (the motorbikes with 4 huge tires), swimming (they had a wave pool), casinos (I won 50 Rand there
) game arcades and a butterfly sanctuary or something.Oh how can I forget? I went on a Safari! I got to see feeding lions which is quite rare, because our guide who's been there ten times said it's the first time he's seeing a feed! And the sun rose at 5am, so we had to get up at 4.45am to go on the morning safari. We missed the elephants (although it amazes me how the largest animal can be so hard to spot!!) although some of our group in another car saw them, but we also got to see a jackal (quite rare) impalas, rhinos, buffalos, wildebeast, blesbok, baboons, antelopes and giraffes quite close up. So we got to see three out of the big 5 which wasn't bad. The big five are leopards, lions, elephants, rhinos and buffalos.
I got back yesterday at 7.45am, but was too pooped to get online till today. Plus I had all that stuff to unpack and wash and photos to develop.
Ok they turned out alright, although I seem to be a better photographer than my friend
Anywayy... what has been going on in my absence? Am too lazy to trawl through the hundreds of posts that must have been typed during my absence. I won't get to sleep tonight if I do!
How was Nat and Daniel's wedding? Gee, now Choddy has proposed to Sarah and Oddball's marrying Nicki. Who will be next?
Nat and Dan's wedding was ok..it was just that the wedding was missing various people, including the bride who turned up later i think... 
