The Chronicles of Nandrew

ArGeeBee: ready to play

2009-12-29T14:51:00.005+02:00

If you're keen for something different and rather experimental, I've just finished work on my Game.Dev Comp 24 entry, ArGeeBee. It's basically a mashup of platforming, top-down RPG and match-3 puzzle goodness. Or something like that. You basically need to get three very different little characters to work together to finish a variety of head-scratchy puzzles.

Control three separate avatars in a unicorn-puking array of colour contrasts!

Is it brilliant? I dunno. It was very difficult and maybe a bit awkward for me to develop, but it was stacks of fun too. Give it a shot if you have a few minutes to spare, and maybe (juuuuuust maaaaybe!) you'll have some fun while you're at it. You know, if you're a cool person and all.

In the meantime, I'll probably be returning to my other love in life:

Borderlands. Oh hell yeah. That creepy fat Christmas man has been very kind this year.

Foley for people who suck at sound

2009-12-21T23:52:00.008+02:00

Oh look, a blog post! Gosh, it's been a while. Must have something to do with me changing this to an Official Dev Blog (TM) and then not doing any significant game creation for a good two months. Holy crap, I've been a naughty boy.

So anyway, I've been working on a little something called ArGeeBee for Game.Dev's comp 24. It's nothing much, but I'm quite proud of the ad-hoc sound effects that I've made for it. Why? Well, because I'm about as amateur as one gets when it comes to working with audio. I've taken a radio course and done my own fiddling about, sure, but aside from knowing how to hold a microphone and pressing the "record" button, I can't exactly say that I'm an experienced sound engineer.

Fortunately, one doesn't need to be a pro to make a delightful range of sound effects for videogames -- I do it all the time using a technique known as foley.

Foley is better known as the art of grabbing everyday objects and banging them near the microphone. It's used by professionals all over the world in a variety of fields, but few people realise that it's pretty easy to do at an amateur level too. Here's a few examples of how I made some pretty exotic sounds with some very rudimentary techniques and household objects. The results aren't studio quality, but they're a damn fine alternative to relying on your "1001 Free Sound Effects" CD.

Don't forget to grab my game if you wanna hear these noises in action. Because hearing them would be half the point, duh. Oh, and I edited most of my sounds using the basic options in Audacity. You should get it and learn to use it. You can still get quite far without knowing any funny sound jargon.

Now, on to some examples:

1) If you want to sound like something, grab that something

Enough ice to choke a polar bear.

One of the characters in my game has the ability to lay mines that can trap enemies in ice. I think the resulting sound is still my favourite effect in the project because, well, it was so damn simple. I needed a crackling-icy-freezy noise, so I looked inside my fridge, found a bag of ice and played about with it near the microphone. Afterwards, I cropped the recording to the bit that I wanted and with no further editing had a sound effect ready to inject into my game. Totally freaking awesome, right?

2) If you don't have something, grab something else

I don't own a Zippo, but I thought it would make for a sexy picture.

In situations where you need to use a jetpack, but don't happen to have one lying around (where do all those jetpacks go, anyway? They're like lost socks in the wash), there's still hope. Instead of going to the bother of borrowing a friend's jetpack for the weekend, I simply consider what else sounds like a small combustion chamber and throw that in instead. And that's how I turned to the jetpack's humble little brother: the humble lighter. A nice one, mind you -- mini-blowtorch style. In what's probably a very irresponsible move (kids, don't try this at home) I used one to light a coal by my (cheap) PC mic and got a pretty acceptable burst of "jet noise". After a bit of editing to make it sound sci-fi (just flanging the hell out of it, really), it was ready for game use.

Of course, I could also have simulated the noise using something else:

3) Blah blah blah ...

DISCLAIMER: Not my mouth.

Pretty much every other sound effect that you'll hear in ArGeeBee emerged as a product of Tongues 'n Teeth Incorporated: home-brewed and packed with lots of love, squirrels and other fluffy things. Those high-pitched voice clips are obvious enough (DISCLAIMER 2: Not my original voice), but everything else I got across just by making an approximation with my mouth and then fiddling with (literally) random filters until I got a sound I liked.

Given all of the above situations, I now ask myself three questions.

How was my expertise? Laughable.
How satisfactory were the results? Passable.
How fun was it making my own sounds compared to picking through a minefield of free sound libraries? Dear reader, it was enough fun to kill a whale.

On a final note: I'm not a professional foley artist. Heck, I'm not a professional when it comes to any form of audio. As a matter of fact, I probably even got the definition for foley wrong. But, you know, doing stuff this way is still pretty damn fun. If you're hopeless with sound like me, give this easier stuff a whirl to whet your appetite, even if you initially make someone's ears bleed.

Game update, travel update

2009-09-28T17:03:00.004+02:00

Oh man, it's a busy Monday. I've just released a game patch for Onslaught of the Electric Zombies, have tried in vain to pay proper attention to various writing commitments, and am now preparing for an overnight bus trip to the noisy ol' province of Gauteng. While I'm no stranger to such journeys (heck, I got pretty deep about them once), I still can't say that I'm looking forward to it.

I obviously need to train up more and get a taste for travel again. Being lame and nest-ish in Grahamstown has its perks, but I'm steadily losing my vagabond mentality. A pity. Maybe hitting the rAge expo this weekend will do something for me.

Hawright!

For those of you who aren't familiar with rAge: well, it's a bloody big game/tech expo -- at least by South African standards. Fancy overseas buggers may be taking a freaking slice out of the moon to hold their own showfloors, but I don't really care as long as I'm surrounded with bright lights, loud noises and lots of like-minded people. Which kinda describes the average student party except for the fact that people aren't, you know, fall-on-your-face drunk. It's quite novel in that respect.

I'll try write a bit more about rAge if I have the time: it's starting this Friday and lasts for three days, so I'm quite sure that something newsworthy can come out of it. At the very least, I'll have an opportunity to flog my- OH YES, GAME UPDATE BY THE WAY! ONSLAUGHT OF THE ELECTRIC ZOMBIES NOW HAS A GLOBAL LEADERBOARD! Check it out now and upload your scores: if you get to the top of the leaderboard, everybody will think you're totally awesome and stuff.

This guy is riding a freaking dragon, and even he isn't as awesome as you are.

Unfortunately, that's all I can afford to write for now: my remaining time in Grahamstown is ticking down, and I don't really think that I'll be able to get everything done in time if I spend too long on this blog post.

Cheers for now. And try my game if you haven't done so already.

Liberation!

2009-09-24T21:45:00.006+02:00

See this? This is the INTERNET:

Sneaky advertising, free of charge.

The reason why I find this so special is because one of my regular Grahamstown haunts, Cow Moon Theory, has just gotten itself some sexy wireless access, meaning that I don't have to rely on my bloody unreliable cellphone to get basic chores done. Makes a nice change.

Sorry, Mr Cellphone.

No longer do I have to crumple my face when somebody sends me a paltry 5 megabyte file. No longer am I doomed to turning down Gtalk links just because they happen to be made of videofailure. No longer am I forced to wake up horrifically early (read: pre-noon) every single Tuesday just so that I can make sure a tiny article submission gets uploaded to my editors over at NAG Online without the file mysteriously breaking down and flipping me the bird halfway through.

Seriously, that damn process has taken HOURS sometimes.

Of course, there's a flipside: if I screw up from now on, I probably won't be allowed to blame my cellphone connection. A pity, but it's a sacrifice that I'm willing to make in interest of totally sweet Internetlands.

Kinda hoping that this new development sticks. It's pretty novel being allowed to enable browser pictures again ...

Onslaught of the Electric Zombies: RELEASED!

2009-09-21T17:16:00.004+02:00

Hey, remember that post I made a few weeks ago before disappearing? It had something to do with zombies and videogames and crap, and I was muttering a bunch of excited things about finishing it off and updating my blog more often and stuff.

Well, hey, I wasn't lying:

My artist pushes this sort of thing pixel by pixel. He's clinically insane.

So yeah. The game's out of the door, and due to certain marketing obligations, I pretty much HAVE to update this blog regularly again. A good excuse to get into writing again: I've been in a bit of a work rut these past few weeks. Cool game project aside, of course.

For those of you not in the loop: Onslaught of the Electric Zombies is a bit of a cross between Roguelikes and Minesweeper. A typical game session consists of a randomly generated 'dungeon' (16 levels deep) which you have to navigate in the same way that one would typically solve a Minesweeper board. The difference here is that you actually have to fight monsters, manage health, pick up items and level up skills in good ol' RPG fashion.

It's really fun. You should try it.

Head on over to this page for the game download. I hope y'all find it fun: I also hope that you decide to go off and show it to all your friends (though not me, because I kinda already know about it and stuff).

Post some high scores if you want: I'm keen to hear what people think of this little bugger!

Also: this is my 100th blog post! This calls for a celebration.

TOGA PARTY!

I'm off to find a pizza and eat it. Laters, fellow people!

WIP: Onslaught of the Electric Zombies

2009-08-26T23:42:00.002+02:00

Hey all, I'd like to introduce you to something I've been working on recently:

Hey thar!

So after a couple years of designing (hopefully) fun little games and occasionally embarking on more ambitious projects (Variance is still in a sort of long-term development thingie, for those who are wondering), I've decided to finally settle down and actually make something properly. Not something to just show my friends, not a proof of concept, not a 48-hour prototyping proggie: I mean a complete and marketable game from beginning to end, giving myself a dev time of roughly two months.

Meet Onslaught of the Electric Zombies, a work in progress.

Flashier than most of my projects, thanks to actually having an artist on board.

This game means a few things for me. First of all, it's going to serve as proof that I can make a complete and polished product to show to the masses. Goodness knows that I've heard derisive comments about gaming journalists before (usually from those who don't really understand what good journalism actually entails) so I'm kinda keen to show people that I'm more than happy to walk the walk.

Secondly, I've recently been snagged by the gnarly roots of the "serious" game development mindset. While it's certainly useful from a professional standpoint, I really don't want to lose touch with the simple hobbyist joy of creating something fun for people to play. It's for this reason that the project is small and will most likely be distributed as freeware.

Because, well, screw it -- I've never really wanted game development to be a job. I've always just wanted to make fun shit for people to play. And this shit is going to be fun. Or maybe just shitty. I don't know which one yet.

Of course, that's where you step in, oh Hero of the Internets. If you like the idea of combining Minesweeper with RPG dungeon-crawly elements and have decided to ignore the recently called-for moratorium on all zombie-themed games for the next two years (seriously, it's about as cliché as you can get), then do me a huge favour: download this itty-bitty bugger, give it some play time and leave me your comments. It's still a work in progress and rather malleable at this point, so feedback is going to be pretty damn useful and I may just reward you all with icecream.

Maybe.

Give it a shot and let me know what you think. I'm already trying to harvest some developer input from the NAG Online/Game.Dev forum and will probably be slapping this in a few other places afterwards. I just think that, being my personal blog, this would be a great place to put up a game that all of my buddies can have a gander at.

Peace out, and don't let the electric zombies eat your brains. Or batteries. What the hell does a creature like that usually go for anyway?

Blog reboot

2009-08-18T23:40:00.005+02:00

Avid readers may have noticed my lack of activity recently. The reason for this is simple:

I've stopped travelling.

"No, Nandrew! What have you done?" cry the fans.

Yeah, I know. This trip was originally going to be a year long, but various circumstances have urged me to settle down, grow some moss and be more constructive in other avenues. In particular, I need to focus more on my career in journalism and game development (also known as "that crap I write" and "that random shit I code").

This new development DOESN'T mean two things:

(1) This doesn't mean that I want to stop travelling entirely. Oh ho, no. I may be settling in good ol', hippie-infested Grahamstown now, but I still have a trip or two planned this year. And I plan on making them interesting. Even if I have to take a picture of myself running naked through the highveld.

(2) This doesn't mean that the blog is going to die. It's just going to undergo a bit of a refocus, and I'll probably be talking about geeky things in as accessible and appealing a way as I can muster. This will be interspersed with my regular musings about nubile young Germans and the noble Giant Chicken.

So yeah. If you want to stick around, be my guest. In fact, I encourage you to, because most of you are my friends and stuff and I don't get to see you often enough. This blog is still going to be about my life. It's just that work is an important part of said life -- it's tied in with my hopes, dreams and aspirations, after all.

Hold on, maybe not.

I suggest you check on this blog over the next few weeks. I'm going to try get the ball rolling again and resume my noble quest of sending all of my little ramblings to you: the dearly beloved and delightfully insane audience.

Peace out, and let's see where this bugger goes.

Metallica!

2009-07-24T15:23:00.003+02:00

So, my cellphone hates me.

Actual photo of my cellphone. With an angry face drawn on it.

I must admit that I've not been terribly vigilant with my Internet activity over the past week, but even when I have logged on (using the cell as a modem, of course), this device has been fighting me every step of the way. No identifiable reason, really: often, it just refuses to co-operate with my computer until I perform a reboot. Sometimes it freezes my system entirely. Invariably, it will try some sort of cleverdickery just to piss me off. And it will do so at a time when I have a gazillionty-one Firefox tabs open that need my attention. And at least three of those tabs will have nothing to do with that ever-present drain of time and productivity, TVTropes.

Its not been all bad, of course. For a start, I got myself Guitar Hero: Metallica.

Actual photo of me looking rather pleased with myself.

This game is, to say the least, pretty damn cool. Not only has it given me access to my ultra sing-song powers (with the help of an Xbox headset), but as far as Guitar Hero games go, this one is actually pretty gosh-darn good. The reviews have been pretty good and judging from the highly-polished gameplay (and my own inherent Metallica bias, of course), I say that this game gets a solid nine out of ten. Could have done with more TVTropes references.

Enhancing the game experience itself is a little something that I like to call the most badass setup ever. Of course, this is a horrific exaggeration, but after spending most of my game time on a standard-definition, CRT television, it's pretty cool to upgrade to HD and throw a hi-fi into the mix.

Actual photo of my current setup. With a smiley face drawn on it.

So basically, I've just spent my week playing hard, working (reasonably) hard and neglecting any duties which require me to show face on the Internet for more than, say, twenty minutes at a time, or however long it takes for my cellphone to realise that I'm being productive and cut my escapades short.

Damn annoying cellphone. I'll figure it out one day.

Arts Fest over!

2009-07-15T10:54:00.008+02:00

So now I'm sitting in that precarious position that most of us encounter at some point in our lives: that moment just after an awesome arts festival finishes and just before that promised shipping of Guitar Hero: Metallica arrives. It is with a heavy heart that I am thus forced to sit down and do something useful for a change.

The festival was grand. No, really, it was. For a start, I managed to snag myself an epic creamy-white jacket thing at the Village Green market.

I do modelling part-time.

I've also been watching a bunch of performances, and am very happy to say that each one has been very impressive in its own right. This is not to say that I'll be starry-eyed and suggest that everything at the fest was awesome forever: it's just that if there were crap elements, they were doing their gosh-darn best to hide themselves from me.

Flee from my divine countenance, crappy performances!

So, what can I take away from this? My top three performances of the fest:

- "Laugh" with David Newton. This was a straightforward stand-up comedy routine. Nothing terribly artsy or thought-provoking, you may say. Well, screw you. The guy's damn funny anyway.

- Alchemy of the Heart. I believe I mentioned it over here already. It was the first performance I watched, but it still sticks with me anyway. Or maybe because.

- Monkey Nuts. Matthew Ribnick is a legendary actor, and Geraldine Naidoo is presumably a legendary producer. Like their other hits, Chilli Boy and Hoot, Monkey Nuts has Ribnick standing on stage with a collection of hats, acting out a full-blown story cast allllllllll by his lonesome. And boy, can that guy act! The sheer number of body builds, cultures, personality types and accents that he can emulate and switch between on the fly is a great demonstration of what "good acting" actually means. That, and I've always loved the bittersweet comedies that this duo choose to perform: there's nothing quite like feeling "mirthful empathy" when you're watching a performance.

Picture of me enjoying Ribnick's performance. In my white jacket.

As a bonus shout-out, I have to point to the one act that really made the festival what it was. And that was the festival audience. Unfortunately, I don't mean this in a warm and fuzzy way. Even in this hub of culture, enlightment and high-quality performing arts, the audiences at some of the performances I've been to still behaved like a bunch of cave-dwelling troglodytes. Cthulhu help me, if I find one more inconsiderate little shit who wanders into a performance twenty minutes late, yapping away with their friends and blocking my view of a show that I paid upward of sixty rand to watch (and then adding insult to injury by laughing at all the wrong parts for the rest of the act), I'm going to take a mental note of where they sit, force-feed myself a ton of concrete and do a bellyflop dive right on their heads.

Theatre etiquette, folks. Use it.

This is my disapproval face.

Final note: the picture used in this blog was, in fact, that of a professional Dolce & Gabbana model. Confused readers should note that in reality my jacket is a lot cooler.

Arts fest status report 1

2009-07-08T12:39:00.003+02:00

So here I am, about halfway through the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, and it is absolutely lovely. So nice, in fact, that I am almost loathe to take the time out to blog about it instead of, like, actually DOING more stuff.

I've been reasonably cultural and reasonably outdoors-ish, though I must admit that it's really nice to hang out at one of my favourite chill spots instead and see the flood of interesting people arrive. There's a high population of travellers and performers in Grahamstown at the moment: and lo, a few of them are even interesting to talk to! It's like being at a backpacker lodge all over again. Hell, I actually met one of the guys who was running the Amapondo hostel back in Port St Johns.

So yeah, cool and colourful people.

A friend's kitten. This blog is now about kittens.

With regards to the performances so far: I've seen a few, and I've not been disappointed. In fact, if anybody is knocking around in Grahamstown right now and hasn't yet seen Alchemy of the Heart, try get seating for one of the shows. I enjoyed it quite a bit: maybe because it was the first show I saw. Either that, or I just have a thing for freaky masks.

So, with all the awesome stuff going on (and there is a LOT of awesome stuff), what should I choose to write about? Well, considering that my camera isn't allowed into most of the performance venues, I suppose it's safe to have a gander at town itself, as well as the Village Green market that occupies centre stage every year (haha, geddit?).

Unconfirmed Egg Hat Guy sighting.

I'm not sure why I like the Village Green market. Maybe it's just the thought of being able to go outdoors and have access to food and glittery stuff. Perhaps it's just amusing to catch people that I usually see elsewhere, such as the famous Egg Hat Guy and El Rondo the stick juggler.

The market itself extends (somewhat less officially) to Grahamstown's streets -- a nirvana of beanies, cheap sunglasses and plastic toys are on sale for anybody who gets up in the morning and thinks, "Well, gee whiz, I REALLY need some beanies, cheap sunglasses and plastic thingums today!"

Like this guy, har har. Also, in-joke warning.

I suppose it's also important to note that during festival, you get apprehended by all sorts of random people who are NOT beggars. For example, troops of orange-clad, head-shaven individuals chanting the Hare Krishna mantra and playing drums at you. Then there's those esoteric sellers of smelly burny stuff (incense, I think it's called) who shove their hands into your face to prove that their product smells of lilies and lavender instead of, say, Strange Person's Hand.

It bears the question: if I'm interrupted and harassed by really interesting people, does that actually still count? It's like the culture in this town is so overwhelming that it actually presses itself upon your senses. Which is, oddly enough, actually kinda cool.

And how do I maximise my daily doing-ness? Why, with the help of Monster energy drinks, of course!

WARNING: PRODUCT PLACEMENT!

Seriously, look out for these orange-on-black cans. They are, without a doubt, the most delicious energy drinks I have ever come across. In fact, it's quite likely that they could invoke a relapse of the Great Caffeine Overdose of Autumn 2009. And taste awesome while they're doing it.

Anyway, I'm off to say and do more pretentious stuff. Catch y'all again after I next tear myself away from all the cool stuff to try and actually write about it.

It's Gtown!

2009-07-01T13:23:00.005+02:00

Gentlemen ...

Helloooooooooo Grahamstown! Wet, cold and miserable by the way.

So, the last time you heard from me, I was in Port St Johns. A little bit has happened since then, and it's a rather long story that's filled with all sorts of juicy details such as me falling sick again, shuttle services being a little unreliable, temporary alliances forming, banks being robbed, helicopters being blown up and a lot of cuddly and adorable kittens being rescued from the smoldering wreckage of inconveniently-situated orphanages.

Suffice it to say, I wound up back in Grahamstown. Somehow. Which is pretty cool, it makes a nice change.

Oh. Wait. Poker again.

I'm also still adjusting to the lack of ADSL Internet. Very poorly. Port St Johns was great, but it didn't have much in the way of plug access. The only way for me to hook up my laptop was to sit down at the bar and ask the good old 'keep for a power point. This arrangement allowed me to do the bare bones stuff like checking my e-mail, updating the Dev.Mag news stuff and looking at LOLcats. Still, it made me a little uneasy, not least because I was permanently paranoid about some drunkard spilling beer onto my baby.

The laptop, I mean, not an actual baby.

Cor blimey, it's pretty.

Still, I shall have fond memories of Port St Johns. The hikes were glorious, the people were awesome and now I shall be tormenting friends for months to come by constantly referring to the awesomeness of dear ol' PSJ in whatever conversation happens to crop up at the time. Man, that place is just too cool.

Anyway, so now I'm in Grahamstown. And guess what? It's just one day before the National Arts Festival is due to start. Well, actually it starts TODAY, given the time I was finally able to post this. Still, the anticipation throughout town is palpable. More stuff on stuff when I start doing stuff.

Port St Johns ... and love

2009-06-26T18:14:00.005+02:00

Status report: Port St Johns is still awesome. And the love of which I speak is, of course, the love which I hold for this dear, dear paradise of the Wild Coast. If the oft-hyped Coffee Bay is at least half as cool as this place, then it's ... well, really really cool. And stuff.

Even the cows are cool. Caught this bugger on the way to town.

Yesterday, I decided to take the liberty to walk to the CBD of Port St Johns. And by CBD, I mean the one patch of road which has more than two buildings strung together. People may joke around when it comes to Grahamstown's own diminutive size, but it has NOTHING on this baby.

Standing on one side of town. Looking at the other side. No kidding.

Walking to the main settlement takes about 45 minutes (starting from the Amapondo lodge), and the road winds through hills of township housing and lush terrain. It's a really nice walk, but a little bit of a bitch when you're carrying loads of shopping.

But the killer view makes it all worth it. I do believe I've mentioned the view. Have I? This is the sort of stuff I see from my outdoor shower:

Lovely view for scrubbing yourself to.

And yeah, I said outdoor shower. Thoroughly charming, though unfortunately it seems that the insidious Shower of Doom from Drakensberg has snuck up on me once more. So now, I've got a bit of a cold water problem. Not cool when you're outside in winter. Secondly, the shower curtain is less than brilliant: Port St Johns is insanely windy, and you basically have to pin it down with rocks to have any hopes of preserving your modesty.

Still, it's an experience.

Kitties!

Did I mention that there's nothing more adorable than two cats simultaneously trying to lick each other's faces? Man, Port St Johns is awesome.

I'd chat more, but the more time I spend diarising this place, the less time I'm actually spending enjoying it. Forgive me, dear reader, as I rush off for another day!

LAST-MINUTE UPDATE: HOLY CRAP! AN ENTIRE PLATOON OF YOUNG SCOTTISH WOMEN HAVE JUST ARRIVED! THANK YOU PORT ST JOHNS! BYE BYES!

Jewel of the Wild Coast

2009-06-25T15:49:00.004+02:00

Truth be told, I've never been complete enamoured by the Transkei and Wild Coast. "Ohhh, but it's so gloriously African!" many cry. It sure is African, which is great if you're into this sort of stuff:

Lush!

For jaded individuals like me, however, it's basically scrub and dirt. Regardless, I was quite overwhelmed with recommendations for spots like Coffee Bay and Port St Johns, and since I was in the neighbourhood, I decided to see what all the hooplah was about.

Oh. My. Word.

I didn't realise that the Transkei had discovered "green".

Port St Johns is like an island of paradise inside one of South Africa's poorest and most rural provinces. It's a tiny coastal town in pretty much the middle of nowhere, and from the hammocks and bedrooms of the Amapondo lodge, travellers are offered one of the most amazing vistas in South Africa, easily rivalling anything that I've seen on the Garden Route.

The people here are almost as awesome as the view, and about half an hour after I touched down at my new home base I made myself comfortable with the locals in a Wednesday night tradition: a full-blown poker evening at the bar.

Moody lighting, yeah?

I still vouch for poker as a remarkable social tool. After all, it gives you an excuse to sit around a small table with about a dozen strangers and instantly be part of something cool for a few hours. I don't tend to do terribly well at the game itself: even though I spend most of my time playing with hardcore -- and sometimes world-class -- players, it seems that absolutely none of their skill ever rubs off on me. But it's still a nice game, anyway.

The poker session, of course, was only the kick-off to an absolutely fantastic evening. Shortly after getting knocked out of the game, I consoled myself with an awesome curried beef dish (no noodles!) and sat down to chat with some of the other backpackers. Amongst the ranks of rovers and vagabonds, I came across something that I thought I'd never see: not one, but TWO fellow South African travellers! That's right, folks, it turns out that I'm not the only domestic tourist in existence after all.

If these guys are anything to go by, then I can safely say that South African travellers are amongst the most interesting and awesome people in existence. If you ever come across one, be nice -- the divine powers will smile upon you for your courtesy, and reward you with some of the most interesting conversation and stories that you're ever likely to stumble across. Throw in a roaring campfire and some drum-playing, and you've got yourself a pretty epic lineup for the evening.

The bedrooms are soooo coooool!

I can't possibly describe all the totally neat stuff that I've encountered in just my first night at Port St Johns, so I'm going to spend the next few days gushing about it instead. A really, really fantastic place.

The dorm room that you see above is just an example of a really ornate and extremely Africanised abode. Murals and reed curtains clog up the joint like hairs and peas in a blocked drain, except that this particular blocked drain is something that everybody feels really, really awesome about. The beds are welcome and comfortable: though I may be biased, since I only staggered back to my room at about 2am. A far cry from my resolution to be asleep by ten.

8/10. It gets some bonus points for lookin so gosh-darn cool.

I'm going to try take some more pictures for further blog posts that will actually do this place some justice. I keep feeling like I'm falling short in that department.

Port Shepstone ... sorta

2009-06-24T18:27:00.003+02:00

Funny story: I thought I was in Port Shepstone for the past two days. Turns out I wasn't. But I was damn close enough for it to count, so let's pretend that I was. I stayed at a cool little place called The Spot: pretty small, not terribly remarkable, but oh BOY does it have a nice location.

Two steps out the door, and BAM!

I had an awesome stroll or two on this beach to break up the monotony of sitting in front of my computer (the 3G connectivity is awesome in this place, so that couldn't go to waste). Not quite remarkable enough to take pictures of, but since I'm still suffering from "inland fever", I decided that getting sand and water between my toes would be a refreshing change.

I'm already feeling good about being on the road again. Sure, my first day at the Port was horribly overcast, noodles still taste like freaking noodles and I kept having to walk past a picture of what looked like a baby chowing a human heart, but I really feel happy doing this sort of stuff. There's a certain unease that builds up when I allow myself to get too comfortable in a place like Durban.

RRRRARGH! Human heart. Seriously.

I didn't do much aside from the standard relax/work thing while staying at The Spot -- things are pretty quiet here in the off-season, and my only companion at the lodge was a Scottish bloke by the name of John. The staff were very friendly though, and we had a good time doing arb stuff like playing pool and watching TV. I don't mind terribly much: I felt like I was actually on holiday, as opposed to running about madly in an effort to "do lotsa stuff". I'll have plenty of time for throwing my money away when I'm at Port St Johns.

Beds. Bleh.

To be honest, I wasn't terribly impressed by the dorms. I mean, they seemed alright, they were okay on the comfortability scale but ... they seemed a little scummy too. Holes in the mattress and stuff. I mean, come now, I'm a connoisseur! I demand class! Bad dog. Bad, bad dog. 4.9/10 for you.

The water cooler god judges your poor bedding.

The above picture doesn't really have anything to do with anything: I just spotted it in the local Spar and thought that it was freaking awesome. And useful, too: you're actually allowed to bring your own bottles and refill for a rather low price. Since I use bottled water as a memetic reinforcer for drinking healthily (and because tapwater in the more remote parts of the country can be somewhat dodgy), I decided to fill up one or two bottles of my own. Great success.

Warner Beach

2009-06-23T13:45:00.007+02:00

This is Warner Beach:

Sandy!

Quite possibly the shortest stay out of any that I've had this year, too -- a grand total of about 12 hours, most of those spent sleeping. I managed to get around an itsy-bitsy, teeny-tiny little bit, which includded a quick stroll on the beach itself. Not too bad. I mean, it had sandy stuff and watery stuff, so that covers all the bases for a start. Then there's the fact that it's a KZN beach. This means that if you wake up at 7:00 on a winter morning, make a beeline for the shore and dip your toes into the sea, it's pretty much guaranteed to be warmer than any of the water on the west coast.

Warner Beach is also what I'd describe as a very ... salty place. Sea breeze aside, there's something about Warner Beach that's very "yo-ho-ho". Maybe it's the extreme prevalence of sea-side taverns and live music bars. Perhaps it's the presence of loads of dodgy buildings, like the worn-out house which had "BEWARE" scribbled all over it (literally) or the structure called "The Ice Cream Shack" that lit up at night with Christmas tree lights (people love night-time ice cream!). Maybe it's just the fact that I saw loads of people with eye-patches and shoulder-perched parrots hobbling along on their peg-legs while snarling curses at passers-by.

My perception of this little settlement just south of Durban comes from a rather limited set of experiences, but all in all I think that the place holds some character.

The bar at my lodge. Also full of character.

I set up camp at the Blue Sky Mining lodge for a night. And by that, of course, I mean that I decided camping could go to hell for a little while and booked myself into a dorm instead. I have loads of excuses under my belt for not taking the more financially responsible route, but I think that my greatest justification was that my parents gave me a bit of money specifically so that I would not throw myself into a tent, so I decided to honour that wish. That, and arriving in the evening really isn't conducive to tent-setuppery. I was also ridiculously tired for some reason: I hid myself behind a magazine for most of the evening simply because I didn't have the energy to expend on ridiculous notions like socialising and being friendly.

It wasn't long before I collapsed into a deep slumberish thing. I didn't even take the time to photograph my bunk bed beforehand -- suffice it to say, it was a dead average 5/10. Very basic bedding.

Aside from all the regular facilities and a rather funky-looking bar, Blue Sky Mining also came with a bonus extra: a kitty cat on a pool table.

Kitty cat! On a pool table!! Yay!!!

Everything is better with cats, right?

Still alive ... and hurrying out of Durban

2009-06-21T13:05:00.005+02:00

Okay, so. I haven't blogged in absolutely aaaaaages. Obviously I need to rethink something here, or learn to procrastinate less. In fact, I'm going to blame my misery squarely on the fact that I have high-speed Internet once more.

In the previous episode of my strange and twisted adventures, I explained how my horrible procrastination was due to implode the universe. Said procrastination continued for a little bit after my birthday, at which point I decided to settle down and do some working and adventuring.

Then I got horribly sick.

And thus, I was bedridden for days, valiantly fighting my battle against death's dark embrace with all the willpower and teeth-grit determination that I could muster. The battle raged on and threatened to implode the universe, were it not for my heroic constitution kicking in at the last moment and pushing me along that final stretch that allowed me to recover from The Common Cold.

This is a picture of my cat!

Emerging from my sickness, I realised that work had thrown me one or two curveballs. Some events weren't too serious – an abrupt article deadline here and there, some once-off work opportunities emerging – others had me slightly peeved (oh, the life of a journalist!) and still others were fully enthusing, but a hazard on my time nonetheless.

The latter case was Dev.Mag – I wrote a feature article on indie marketing which caught on rather quickly throughout the greater Interwebs, meaning that we've been receiving quite a few extra page hits these past few days. Of course, that really just means two things: (1) we had to start churning out extra content at the last minute to keep our new readers hooked and (2) we suddenly started receiving review packages and offers from hopeful game studios interested in media exposure. Which is great, of course – I love helping indies get exposure, especially when I get free games out of it – but it didn't really settle down with my current procrastination-sickination-just-gave-yourself-more-work-to-do situation. So, for the first time in goodness knows how long, I actually set my Gtalk status to “busy” for a few days.

And then proceeded to waste even more time reading weird Wikipedia stuff. The only place I know where you can move from “Bounty Hunter” to “Heat Death of the Universe” in under an hour.

So, summary of the whole thing: yeah, I've been inexcusably tardy. And my updates have been less than regular recently. And my life has been less than interesting (computer-bound, whooo!). I'm going to try make up for that by backpacking as of ... well, right now. So while you may not have found out much about Durban (summary: sharks, sand and the Burn nightclub) I hope to make up for that by giving you tales of my adventures along the Natal coastline and Transkei.

What I slept in. Aww yeah.

Here's one smidgeon of the family home: my bedroom. Or rather, my brother's bedroom, because he's not around and my own childhood living quarters have been swallowed by my mother's retail stock.

My brother's bed is freaking awesome. Which is in stark contrast to my own home bed, mind you: for a while now, it's been nothing more than a mattress on the floor, and I'm still not sure exactly when my brother decided to lay dibs on the Sleeping Place of Awesomeness, but I only now realise what I've been missing out on. Sure, I don't mind spartan sleeping spots, but this thing is absolutely glorious.

Anyway. 10/10. First stop isn't too far – Warner Beach, sayeth the breeze. Or something like that. Keen to get going again and get away from the damn computer screen a little.

Happy birthday to me, et cetera

2009-06-10T00:28:00.005+02:00

Okay, so this one's going to be a quickie. Today (or yesterday, depending on which side of midnight this gets posted on) is my birthday, which means that I get cake, gifts and a pat on the back for surviving yet another rotation around the sun. Why nobody else views the celebration of this fact as holding an oddly cynical message is rather beyond me.

All I know is that when it's your birthday, you should never, ever be connected to the Internet. And having a Facebook account is WAY out.

Holy crap, it's a flood of cybernetic doom.

Fact: if you're online when your birthday strikes, you'll spend more time fending off well-wishers and concerted “fagstrikes” (don't ask) than actually celebrating said birthday. If you're the celebratory type, that is. And while it's no secret that I have remarkably little patience for ceremony, I will still latch onto any excuse to screw around. So that's what I've basically spent the past 24 hours doing.

Stop screwing around. You screw around too much.

Of course, my lack of blog updates recently is testament to the fact that I've probably been screwing around a lot more than that since I've been in Durban. I saw a friend playing something called Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space the other day and – long story short – I'm now playing it myself. A lot. Work, writing and personal hygiene have been pushed to the side. I can't remember when I last ate, either.

Aside from that ... well, birthday's mainly consisted of banking and admin rubbish. How terrifically inappropriate!

I'm probably going to try do something more exciting tomorrow, after I get together enough willpower to uninstall Weird Worlds. Because, like, seriously, that game. I dunno.

Drakensberg wrap-up

2009-06-05T13:19:00.003+02:00

So! Here I am, sitting in balmy ol' Durban for the first time since I've started this here blog. But wait, what's happened to our intrepid hero since we last heard from him?

The Drakensberg, in summary:

It's frikkin' freezing, Mr Bigglesworth.

Heh, naww, just kidding. The 'berg was great. The sun was shining, the weather was glorious and aside from those typical 5am-wake-up-in-your-tent-because-your-beanie-has-fallen-off-and-your-ears-are-cold moments, I dare say that I generally felt warmer than most of my friends around the country.

That's right, folks: I was in the freakin' mountains and was still shivering far less than you poor sods. In fact, I often took my shirt off to sunbathe while tapping away on my laptop. Hell yeah.

Being on a rather strict budget (Ironically, I later discovered that I'd spent about R100 less than I originally thought), I didn't go on any more of the major tours, but instead spent my days relaxing, being on holiday and creating really freaky games (more on that later). I did, however, decide to talk one or two walks in the land surrounding the lodge.

Hiking instructions: (1) Start walking in any direction. (2) Keep going.

The area that I strolled in is apparently known as the “Little Drakensberg” because of all the itty bitty foothills that dot the area. Something that the brochures don't mention, however, is the ominous presence of dead animals and the poops of something really, really big (and probably vicious) that litter the hiking path. Seriously: moving away from base camp, I progressively caught sight of:

a dead insect

a dead mouse

a dead duck

bones from some larger creature (which, I assume, was dead as well)

All accompanied by ominous poops, indicating that large animals were roaming about. I trekked on, nonetheless: after all, an adventure is always enhanced by that mild sense of danger and that general “what the hell killed all those things” vibe. Good walks, overall.

I must say, though, that none of the experiences I had in the 'berg presented quite as frightening a challenge as the camper's shower:

DUN DUN DUUUUN.

I mentioned earlier that there was a rather unfortunate crack in the shower doors. That was back when I was still planning on staying in the dorm. Since camping, I've had to contend with another beast entirely: a shower which not only has a similar ever-exposing crack in the door, but also happens to be possessed by demons.

That's correct. Demons. Demons who hate hot water, and who hate me. Most of us have had to deal with uncooperative and finicky showers from time to time, but this one must take the cake. After switching on the water flow, one gets about 7.5 seconds of hot water before it turns to something quite frigid. There's a sign just outside the shower that says “Hot water doesn't just 'run out', so don't worry!” Rubbish. Hot water runs for precisely 7.5 seconds, then disappears for 30 seconds, then comes back for another 7.5 seconds before tormenting you once again. I've calculated this carefully between alternating sessions of being frozen and scalded because I've had to keep the hot tap fully opened to get any hope of warmth.

This has brought about a bold new technique of 'burst showering': the idea that you quickly soak up some warm water, hop out of the shower THE VERY MOMENT it gets cold again, then apply soap, shampoo or whatever weird stuff you use while counting out half a minute in your head. Then it's time to spring back into the shower, grit your teeth and use those precious 7.5 seconds to rinse everything off before you're cast into an icy purgatory again. By the end of my stay, I was getting pretty good at it.

Right. So. Geeky stuff and Durban tales when I next blog. Cheerio, Drakensberg.

Hike up the Tugela

2009-05-31T19:04:00.004+02:00

Yesterday, I decided that my Drakensberg stay wouldn't be complete without, you know, a little bit of old-fashioned legwork around the mountain ranges, so I signed up for a shuttle to take me to the Royal Natal National Park.

That's not to say that I put my chips in for a guided tour along the mountains. Oh ho, no. See, I'm a bit of a cheapskate. I sleep in tents and eat noodles. And while something like R400 is considered acceptable for a guided day-long hike amongst some of South Africa's most glorious peaks, I can't say that my wallet is entirely thrilled at the prospect of parting with that money for a walk. Unlike 99% of the people who pass through most backpackers, I'm not a foreigner: I earn in rands, I travel in rands, I suffer in rands.

So anyway, summary of the whole thing: guided hike costs 400 bucks and takes people along the mountain range to the top of the Tugela Falls (basically one of the highest waterfalls around). Shuttle to Royal Natal and entrance fee came to R60 and afforded me a gorge hike that took me to the base of the waterfall. Bonus points because the gorge hike was both warmer and easier.

While I enjoyed my stroll, mountaineers were freezing their arses off on this escarpment.

The Drakensberg is awfully scenic, and has a lot of winding trails that take you to all sorts of nice places. I personally went along a trail that closely followed the Tugela river. Being winter, the river was mostly dried up, but it still offered an interesting scene or two for my camera to snap up.

Of course, my pics suck anyway, so it doesn't make a difference.

There was also a bit of wildlife hanging around the path: namely, a bunch of baboons that dotted the trail here and there. Admittedly, they made me a little nervous at times: I hear that they sometimes kidnap and eat human infants, and due to my rather spry frame, I was worried that they'd mistake me for an infant. And I absolutely hate being carried off and eaten.

But seriously? They belt out some of the most frightening sounds at an unbelievable volume – at one point, I nearly fell over when I heard what I thought was an angry simian creature standing right behind me – it turned out that it was a noisy little bugger practically standing on the opposite end of the gorge who was the source of the crazy racket.

If I recall correctly, this was the culprit. He was barely visible.

About two-thirds of the way through the hike, I met up with a group of students from Holland. They were a notable bunch because one of them was called Zoltan, which is possibly the most awesome name in existence. We went along the rest of the trail together, exchanging smalltalk and trying to figure out just how badly lost we were. We even decided to take a brief stroll along the dried-up riverbed after the trail came to an unceremonious halt just short of the falls.

Dried-up waterfall in the background, random Hollandaisy dudes in the front.

Lovely day walk, though I'm glad it finished up before evening struck: I swear, the moment that the sun disappears over the mountains, it's as if somebody flips a switch from “sweltering heat” to “bloody chill”. When you're in the berg, DON'T get caught in the shadows. Pitch Black style, yo.

Lodged in the berg

2009-05-30T19:11:00.003+02:00

It's Drakensberg, baby! Gee whiz, it's been a long time since I've come up here. I mean it's probably been, what, a good ten years? Altogether way too long, considering that this place is tucked away right inside my home province. Yeah, sure, KZN has beaches and Zululand and stuff, but I think that its most distinctive feature is having the best gosh-darn set of mountains in the country. Not that I don't appreciate and respect Table Mountain, but man, “the berg” really puts stuff into perspective.

I'm currently holed up in a backpacking establishment known as Amphitheatre Backpackers, named after the area of the Drakensberg where it's based. Not a bad place: prices are reasonable, cool features abound and I'm able to hide in a corner whenever I want in order to do geeky, computer-related stuff. The jocky vibe of the place makes me a little ill at ease, I will admit, but I'm putting this down to being out of practice when it comes to backpacking.

The main bar, where people drink beer and watch rugby. It's true.

In some ways, this place is a rather mixed bag: some of the facilities are amazing, while others (such as the kitchen and water) are a little on the iffy side. Which is okay, I guess: it's just that alongside the super-duper awesome indoor jacuzzi (which I'm still too shy to clamber into: my pseudo-tan has thus far refused to return and, as I've said, the vibe is a bit too jock-ish for me) I have to deal with stuff like shower doors which don't entirely closed over, leaving me in perpetual fear that the Dutch girls I was staying with were going to see my willy.

Not much room for modesty. And that shower door crack feels pretty big when you're on the inside.

At least I have a comfortable place for the night:

My bed ...

... NOT.

Yeah, so, I almost decided to lie down in the dorms. Then I remembered that I had some freakin' expensive camping equipment that needed to pay itself off with use, so at about 5pm on the day of my arrival I told the backpacking crew that I'd changed my mind and decided to set up a tent instead. Camping is usually a lot cheaper – in my five-day sojourn here, I'll be saving nearly R200 just for sleeping in a tent instead of a bed every night, and the figure would have been a lot higher if dorms were more expensive or campsites were cheaper (this is often the case).

“BUT NANDREW, AREN'T YOU GOING TO FREEZE YOUR ARSE OFF?”

The answer is no. It's not quite dead-winter yet, and the weather here has been jolly nice so far. I can now state proudly that my cousin was wrong: she hit a 7 on the Mother Scale before I left due to all the fuss she made about how cold (and dead) I would be with my current equipment in the Drakensberg. But, as always, I'm a survivor and stuff. Life's pretty good right now.

Ciao again, Pretoria

2009-05-29T15:55:00.002+02:00

Between the Bat Cave and my family's hideout, I think that Pretoria has been my longest stay in one location this entire year. Although I tend to dwell in favourite spots for at least a week or two at a time (read: Cape Town and Grahamstown), it seems that I've inadvertently nearly clocked the full month of May in Gauteng. Blast it all!

The past two weeks have seen me entertained by several clutches of the greater Joubert clan: many thanks to the family, and it was good to see y'all again. I look back fondly on all the great memories I've formed with this particular visit.

Wimpy lunch with the cousins.

Mimmo's dinner – ahhh, the atmosphere!

Sunday lunch at my aunt's place.

I love food.

But now I'm just allowing my mind to wander too far into the realm of nostalgia and self-indulgence. Instead, here's a picture of my aunt's dog.

My aunt's dog hates me.

Hatred. Seriously.

I've not been this creeped out by an animal since seeing that super-creepy dog in Plet. Canine eyes have a way of burrowing into your soul, seriously. And when a dog has it in for you (not the world, not people in general, not even anybody else in the room. Just you), there's little you can do about it.

My aunt's dog hates me, won't go near me and won't let me touch it. It growls at me on a near-constant basis -- kinda like a revving Lancer. If that fateful Sunday gathering was in a movie, the audience would immediately be able to identify me as "the bad guy" cos the animals hate me. Gee whiz.

And, yeah, that's it for now. Just a quickie: I've been procrastinating a whole bunch this week and now need to get myself sorted for a Baz Bus shuttle tomorrow (didn't think I'd use these guys again, but go figure: turns out that they really are cheaper on multi-stops than a public bus would be, and they go door to door anyway).

Depending on how things turn out, I'll either be in the Drakensberg or Joburg tomorrow night. It's all very complicated and last-minute, so don't ask.

Catch y'all in 24 hours.

A LONG-WINDED POSTSCRIPT FOR BONUS READING:

This blog post was supposed to go up yesterday. I swear it. But then, halfway through my evening, my Internet died and refused to start up again. I thought that this was typical cellphone failure until I got an SMS five minutes afterwards that cheerfully told me I was screwed for net cap. But that's just the beginning of this grand tale of woe and deceit.

Let me give you a quick run-down of cellphone pre-paid Internet. When you get a non-contract phone with, say, Vodacom, you usually have the opportunity to use it as a make-do modem to access the Internet on your computer. The typical pre-paid tariff is about R2 a megabyte. This is effing steep, and is not to be used unless, say, there's a crazy guy with an axe behind you demanding that you log onto the Internet by any means necessary (in which case you open up your closest instant messenger app and give your online buddies a “help me please” code signal).

Fortunately, one has the opportunity to purchase Internet data bundles, and the more data you purchase at once, the cheaper it is per megabyte. I typically pay about 30c per meg, which still isn't great compared to a regular land line, but suits me well enough as long as I exercise some restraint. When you run out of data on your bundle, you go back to R2 per meg and that eats into your regular cellphone airtime.

Right, so, with that explanation down: I top up my cellphone airtime using Internet banking. I top up my Internet bundles using spare airtime. This is a very elegant solution which can sometimes go horribly, horribly wrong. When I'm surfing the net with my cellphone, SMS messages often don't come through until I log off. This is dangerous when, say, your “low bandwidth” warnings for Internet data bundles are sent – lo and behold – via SMS. When my Internet cut out at about 11pm last night, I immediately received four SMS messages from Vodacom.

The first one registered as being sent at about 7pm, warning me that I had less than 4 megabytes left on my bundle. The second one was sent half an hour later, telling me that my data bundle had been exhausted, and that I WAS NOW BEING CHARGED R2 PER MEGABYTE. The third was sent later, warning me that I was using up all of my cellphone's airtime on the Internet. The fourth and final message: “YOU F**KING IDIOT! YOUR MONEY IS ALL GONE!” Not in those words exactly, but that's kinda how I felt at the time.

So in summary, I simultaneously lost all Internet and cellphone access at a really inconvenient time last night because the only system of warning that I could receive was, ironically enough, disabled by the very use of the device which warranted the warning in the first place. To top it off, I recharged my cell's airtime with about R70 yesterday afternoon, and it all got chowed by the Internet in one evening. Suffice it to say, Vodacom and I are no longer on speaking terms.

End rant.

Hatfield: day and night

2009-05-26T23:20:00.004+02:00

So, I finally decided to get off my ass and do some walking around for a change. Footlike movement comes rather naturally to me (spend a few years in Grahamstown while lugging your laptop everywhere, and you'll see what I mean) but in Gauteng, that habit all but dries up in favour of getting to far-off locations with a private vehicle of some kind.

Deciding that my personal improvement and whatnot relies exclusively on my ability to wander around aimlessly for at least an hour every day, I've recently been slipping into my anti-mugger kit (also known as “dressing up like a freakin' hobo”) and took to the streets in search of adventure and geographical enlightenment.

My grandparents stay rather close to a lot of important places in Pretoria. After a few trips around the local neighbourhood, I've realised that I'm within perfectly acceptable walking distance of the University of Pretoria, the Loftus Versfeld stadium, a local KFC and Hatfield Square.

Hatfield is possibly THE hangout for Pretoria's student population (aside from the University itself, that is) and is, in general, a place for a great day (or night) out.

Hatfield in the sun: nice restaurants, open plazas and interesting walks.

Hatfield in the dark: jostling jocks, sticky floors and blurry pictures.

Although most of my recent expeditions to Hatfield have been during the sunlit hours, I also went there for a post-rugby party on Saturday night against my own better judgement. Not that I have an undying hatred of the jock crowd or anything (hey, they're people too. Sometimes), but they tend to get on my nerves when I'm surrounded by too many of them at once. And there's just way too many people in this world who enjoy getting drunk because it's an excuse to act like an ass.

Hatfield is nicely cosmopolitan though, which I quite like in a student hangout. There's stuff like dance clubs, Irish pubs, sports bars and all that other mainstream tomfoolery, but there's also a few slightly more alternative spots like Tings an' Times, Cool Runnings and a nice, down-to-earth bar called Aandklas where I received no less than three separate compliments for my glorious fedora hat.

And then there's stuff like this:

Not a student club.

Hatfield is bursting at the seams with fancy stuff like embassies and diplomatic establishments hailing from all sorts of countries. It seems rather strange that they'd throw in such official buildings amongst the student / backpacker riot that makes up the Hatfield area, but there you go. I've literally got Iran setting up camp just a little down the street from where I'm staying, so I guess it's kinda normal around here.

The embassies themselves are also quite unexpectedly plain-looking: you'd think that stuff from Thailand, UAE and Singapore would at least have some pretty cultural architecture, but no ... most of them just look like big houses. Or flats, even.

Canada totally has the best crib. Other countries are totally jealous about it.

Quite a few people ask me why I insist on walking about everywhere even when I have access to transport, but the fact is that I'm somewhat “car-blind”: since I'm not a driver, I get absolutely no sense of direction or geography when I'm using motorised transport.

Humble use of my feet generally gives me a much more solid sense of a location than vehicles ever could – often bringing about rather critical revelations such as the fact that Hatfield has always been just a little north of my grandfolk's place instead of some indeterminate location “somewhere in Pretoria”.

A funny habit, you say? Well, screw you.

Variance prototype is out!

2009-05-24T21:54:00.004+02:00

Right, so: long story short, I don't write about enough geeky stuff on this blog. So it's time to jack that up a little and post some regular updates on my game development efforts.

As I mentioned earlier, a recent mini-death in my blog updates was attributed to two weeks of caffeine and heavy game development. That game is currently called Variance. And it currently has a prototype version available for download.

Bright colours. Very bright colours.

Variance is a puzzle-platformer ... WITH A TWIST (a tip for marketers out there: never ever ever use the phrase “with a twist” when promoting your stuff. Clichés are a pet hate of mine). If you've ever played the likes of Shift and Sokoban, then you can imagine what it would be like if they ever got together and had horrible mutant offspring. Localised gravity fields have your avatar moving up, down, left, right and wonkways in an effort to navigate obstacles, solve grid-based puzzles, dodge enemies and get to each level's exit for glory and presumably some sort of reward.

Huuurgh, more colour. And puzzles.

As mentioned already, the game is in the prototype phase. What I'd like to call the “last” prototype, yes, but still a proto. This means two things: firstly, I've been focusing on getting gameplay down to pat, but acknowledge the need for better graphics. They're like doggy doo, I know – get over it. Secondly: there currently exists a bigger, better game behind closed doors in a whole different engine and stuff (I'll be keeping my lips sealed on the details, at least for now), and this particular bugger is just a version that I hacked out for public consumption to get important stuff from people ... like FEEDBACK.

That means that I'd like everyone to pick up a copy, dust it off, play a little and give me some useful advice about making it better. There's some handy feedback guidelines over here if you choose to accept this quest, o reader.

But yeah. Have fun. More blog updates soon, I've got a bunch of photos in my camera which need to hit this page before they explode.

The University of Pretorialand

2009-05-21T15:35:00.006+02:00

I have a few cousins who live in Pretoria. Funnily enough, this means that at least one of them studies at the University of Pretoria. And as it just so happens, I took a stroll there yesterday while one of these student cousins went to hand in some stuff.

Pretoria's campus is rather different to others which I've encountered. For a start, it's a lot more functional and a lot less pretty. Here's the administrative building:

Unintentional lens flare of awesomeness included.

In other ways, though, the University is just like any other campus: loads of students doing important student things like bunking, slacking off and socialising on the lawns. I kept thinking that I saw some of my Grahamstown buddies amidst the crowds: oh, how the campus aura loves playing tricks on feeble minds!

In the middle of everything, there was some sort of event going on which brought back memories of the trolley race day that I saw at UCT. Minus the trolleys, that is.

I have no idea what's going on here.

After getting hand-ins sorted out, I went with my cousin to the nearby tuckshop. Now, we have a day kaif back at Rhodes which serves various munchables for passing students, and I've borne witness to the miniature food court at Cape Town, but for some reason the sheer jam-packed nature of this particular tuckshop environ absolutely stunned me. If the shopkeepers ever wanted a bit of fun, they could just tip over one or two shelves of sweeties and swim about in the stuff like a particularly nutritious ball pit.

WHY DIDN'T I TAKE A PICTURE? I WAS SURE I'D TAKEN A PICTURE!

The walk to campus and back was pretty refreshing, despite winter's encroachment, and I brought along my devil sticks for some knocking about while I waited for the cousin's paperwork to be done. There's something to be said for Gauteng winters: they're bloody freezing indoors, but if you're fortunate enough to get a sunny day, a spot of standing around in the open can really warm you up. Time to work on my long-lost semi-tan, methinks.

The joys of being fed

2009-05-20T19:01:00.005+02:00

Dear reader, I last left you a day or so back with the knowledge that I was now sitting pretty with my grandparents, recovering from what can only be described as mild caffeine poisoning and a clinical lack of sun and time away from the computer.

Starting from Monday, I decided to switch things around a bit. I've resumed an age-old habit of drinking only water (despite my grandparents' best efforts to laden me with coffee and cola), spend about an hour outside training with my devil sticks every day and, most importantly, am seeking to restore my damaged blog in the midst of all this chaotic self-improvement. Gee whiz, I feel like I'll be able to maintain these resolutions for at least an entire week! Did I hear somebody say “new personal record”?

That aside, one of my resolutions is to eat a lot better. After you spend a couple of weeks living on noodles and peanuts (read: typical student diet), you tend to get a better idea of when your body is lamenting a lack of nutrition. Fortunately, said nutrition is abundant – apparently, my grandmother is unsatisfied with the fact that I weigh less than a baby elephant, and constantly endeavours to remedy this startling condition with a whole menagerie of well-made meals. This is the stuff that I call “real” food – by comparison, most of my eating habits consist of stuff that looks, smells and tastes like food, but actually isn't.

Holy crap, there's more than one course?

The above is a small dessert sample of a big, fancy meal that I ate with my grandparents last night. A few aunts, uncles and cousins came over to join in the gastronomic festivities and brought over a colossal pot of – wait for it – BILTONG SOUP.

I eat biltong. I eat soup. But together? Wow.

Maybe I'm a bit of a soup noob (related: noob soup is totally a real term), but I'm sure I've never heard of the concept of putting biltong in a bowl of gloppy stuff. It's one of the few meals in existence that I would describe as being deliciously confusing. Kinda like a dish that you'd attack with raised eyebrows. And this is coming from somebody who gladly launches himself at IceBix (patent still pending).

Up against this bowl of distilled interestingness was also the biggest loaf of bread in existence.

Told you so.

So yeah, summary of my evening? Soup, bread, pie, feta, baked apples, meringues, strawberries, cream, ice-cream and possibly the entire continent of South America. I win.

Time with the grandfolk

2009-05-18T12:39:00.006+02:00

I'm finally out of the Batcave. For the past two weeks, I've been sorely lacking sunshine, sorely overdosing on caffeine and remained sorely immobile considering my resolution to travel more this year. That, and my blog has been sorely missed. All the results of a labour of love, but now I need to remedy my behaviour somewhat.

My itchy feet haven't carried me too far yet: I finally decided to pack up and go visit the greater clan in Pretoria after a fortnight of maintaining radio silence. So, well, I'm currently staying with my grandparents. I visited their abode earlier this year, but I didn't get to write much about it because I hadn't started my blog yet.

They own a half-breed cat: half Siamese, half jet engine. Noisy bugger.

I haven't done much here so far, since I'm currently suffering from waves of caffeine withdrawal (not the “lol, I've been drinking a lot of coffee” kind – I think I've clinically overdosed on energy drinks) and it seems that I had another session last night: I arrived at my grandparents' place at about 5pm, passed out at 8pm, woke up with a nosebleed and lightheadedness at 1am, got over it and fell asleep again at 1:10am, then got jerked back into consciousness by the dulcet tones of my cousin ordering me to wake the hell up at around 9am. So yeah, it appears that my body is still operating at a level considerably below its peak. I'm denying myself coffee and drinking Milo to fool my system until this passes.

I have fond childhood memories of visiting this house: it's rather old and holds a certain charm and sense of aesthetics that newer buildings fail to incorporate.

Aesthetic point number 1: there's visible wood within the house.

Not only is the house itself pretty, but I really like the garden too. It's one of those small, pristine affairs that you see in those fancy victorian fiction movies, with vine-laden walls, natural shelves encrusted with various forms of pottery, a cobbled path surrounded by a rich variety of plants and, of course, a swinging garden bench.

Aesthetic point number 2: there's green stuff when you walk out the back door.

Now, since I haven't had the opportunity to do much just yet, I'll comment on what I HAVE had the chance to do, extensively. And that is lie in bed:

Ugh, PINK?

My grandmother has a tendency to fuss and pamper (I think it's a trait that instinctively gets triggered in any woman who finds out that they have a second generation of mortal progeny), so I have a very comfy bed. Pink, but comfy. We're talking about fluffy pillows, extra blankets and a perfectly situated wall plug for my laptop. Even if it is pink (the bedding, not my laptop).

So, with a combination of a steady foundation (floral), a glorious mattress (pink), some extra-warm coverishness (more pink), I believe that it's only fair to rate this bed as a solid 9/10 (pink).

I'll write more stuff after I do more stuff. Promise.

Lurking at Luma

2009-05-12T03:06:00.002+02:00

Dear reader, lo and behold! I have once again surfaced from my never-ending pile of work to present you with another instalment of what some call the Chronicles, others the Rodblog and the remainder A Bloody Waste Of Time If You Ask Me (or at least, that would be the case if I hadn't already shot them all).

I'm still adventuring in a very geek-heavy environment and loving it to bits, despite the fact that I'm regularly settling for about four hours of sleep a night and fuelling my days with enough Mountain Dew to drown a fish (and you know that's intense because it's a fish). It's a labour of love, though: through a mixture of writing and game development, I'm simultaneously honouring both of my major career choices in one fell swoop of work and sleep-deprivation. I'm also going on some rather interesting field trips as a result.

Last Friday, I paid a visit to Luma, a design company in Johannesburg which just happens to make games as well. Their game development studio – known as Luma Arcade – has already been making waves in the local dev community with a few nice racing titles and mobile games. Now, however, they're kicking it up a notch and starting on development for the iPhone. Unfortunately, there's not terribly much that I can say about it because they're locked up in a non-disclosure agreement thing (they call it an NDA in fancy-speak) and they'll cut off my sensitive bits if I violate that, but it should suffice to say: “Yay!”

Fortunately, the Big Boy burger kid wasn't part of the NDA. So here he is. Yay!

Without divulging too much, I'm really excited about what Luma's getting up to now. Their first few games were okay: they covered new ground and paved the way well for the South African dev community, but they weren't breaking any barriers with regards to game creation as a whole. Now that I'm seeing some awesome concepts and a real one-up on their previous projects, I'm kinda keen to pump images, interviews and reviews of these guys into every possible media outlet at my disposal. Because I'm a Level 90 Journalist, at least on the odd occasions when I somehow manage to do things right.

The head honcho at Luma decided to make his face a part of the NDA at the last minute. He said it was because he looked silly. Tsk tsk.

Anyway, that's all I'm going to say. Mostly going to save the juicy details for people who will, you know, actually pay me to scribble them out. And I'm waiting on permission for some things anyway. In the meantime, I'll leave you with a little something I whipped up this morning. I call it Icebix:

Oh no, he's not ...

Oh he just DID!

The surprising conclusion: Weetbix in icecream tastes DELICIOUS! Patent pending.

Food woes and cool news

2009-05-06T00:59:00.008+02:00

This blog post is about food. In all ways. Food is pretty awesome. Not only does its consumption allow human beings to continue surviving, but it also has the occasional decency to taste good while it's doing the job.

Of course, instead of taking the time and effort to eat properly, I usually just drown my pangs in a mixture of caffeine, carbohydrates and MSG. Occasionally, I'm bold enough to try something different – like cooking and stuff – but this is a purely artificial resolve that I try to conjure up because my doctors keep saying stuff like how I should be clinically dead right now.

For one, I'm sure that I've by now overdosed on caffeine at least six times.

Two litre Mountain Dew bottles have become the bane of my existence.

Not too many people are aware of this, but I have a thing for Mountain Dew that's basically borderline worship. I mean, the stuff is great and all, but it's still quite rare in most of the shops that I go to and even then it tends to be in cans (which aren't even nearly worth the money compared to the price of bottles).

When I arrived in Pretoria and learned that one of the gentlemen I was staying with regularly supped on the well-caffeinated fruits of BOTTLED Mountain Dew, it was basically over for me. I purchased a few gallons for myself, squirrelled them away in the fridge and began drinking. About five days later, I realised that I'd stopped sleeping. Or, at least, I was no longer prone to the bouts of narcolepsy that I've been oh-so-unfairly labelled by my friends as being subject to.

That, and peanuts.

This is a kilogram of peanuts. Also known as my survival rations.

Of course, that's not all I've been eating. Just last night, we decided to make a pasta dish. Today, I made the mistake of eating the leftovers.

Be warned, dear reader. Never finish leftovers in the Bat Cave. You'll be fined, guilt-tripped and cast into hell. Moreover, offering your comrades a kilogram of peanuts as compensation will not work. They'll simply pass commentary on how they have no food to eat that night, raising concerns in your tormented mind of waking up the next morning to the sight of a pair of emaciated corpses (still posed in front of their computers of course). And then, five minutes later, they'll douse the unnecessary fires of guilt by whipping up a fish and chip dinner for themselves. Asses.

This seafood is made of pure failessence.

Unfortunately, I'll have to leave my blog post at that, as I've surely just placed myself in great peril. My current companions both keep tabs on my writing, and one of them is a freaking ninja.

...

Oh, and before I forget: I got an article featured on Gamasutra, the face of the world's largest game development journalism conglomerate thing. I've apparently earned the label of “Expert”. The professional in me is unmoved. The aspiring juvenile in me is busy going “EEEEEEEeeeeeeeeee!”

Discussing the Gamasutra exposure with Dev.Mag's editor. Professional composure in action.

Totally sweet. But seriously? It's not just a personal pride thing: I'm actually genuinely stoked that Dev.Mag (the SA publication that I'm writing most of my game development stuff for) is making moves to establish a global audience, and I shall continue to update on Gamasutra with Dev.Mag reprints that I feel are pertinent. Hopefully this effort will serve as encouraging news for disillusioned SA devs and get them out of their shells a bit more.

Game geekery with Dev.Mag

2009-05-05T00:52:00.005+02:00

Okay, okay, I know: my blogging rate has rather unambiguously been suffering as of late. I can predict three reasons for this. Logical assessment of situation number one: anticipated decay and loss of steam. This is the result of a scientific formula that dictates how, if you're not paid to do a given task, you tend to do it a little less often as time passes by. Mainly because you can't be arsed to put in the same effort. I kinda accepted this eventuality when I started out.

Logical assessment of situation number two: hanging about in places like Grahamstown and Pretoria have the unfortunate side effect of causing me to slack off and not do much blogworthy stuff. Sitting in a comfort zone is a far cry from, say, doing newsworthy stuff like throwing myself off bridges.

Logical assessment of situation number three: perhaps most importantly, I've been devoting one helluva lot of time over these past few weeks to Dev.Mag , an online e-zine that's all about cool stuff like game development and ... well, just game development. But that's more than cool enough on its own.

It's also very, very orange. And has lots of gears. And a giant robot.

I've been with Dev.Mag since its inception three years ago, assuming various roles within its grand superstructure of awesomeness that included a fairly lengthy stint as editor and grand high poobah. For most of its existence, the mag has been a humble monthly PDF with a reasonably small circulation, but a few weeks ago it was jacked up to become a full-blown dev Website with daily news updates and free icecream.

Right now, we're doing our damndest to punt ourselves to the international community. I won't bore you with the marketing spiel, goals and rationale – suffice it to say, I'm writing a lot of stuff for them right now, so whenever I have spare time to sit down and scribble out a few words, I'm unfortunately forced to choose the mag over my blog. So really, I'm still updating the Internet with Nandrew-ish goodness: it's just that I'm mostly doing it elsewhere. With a different pic of myself.

What a devilishly handsome bugger!

If you're interested in game development (or even if you aren't), stop on by at http://www.devmag.org.za/ and have a look-see at all the cool stuff. If you have any friends interested in game development, swing them the link. If you have any friends with loads of money who are sitting around wondering, “Where can I squander my vast wealth now?” ... well, point them in our direction too. We may be able to help them with that problem too.

Luggage woes, adamantium claws and a return to the Bat Cave

2009-05-02T14:42:00.003+02:00

I bet that most of us have had fun and games with public transport in the past. I'm not sure how things are for international readers, but the services in South Africa are a far cry from the if-it's-five-seconds-late-it's-unforgivable mentality of the Japanese subway system. I've heard quite a few horror stories from friends who have been horrendously delayed, robbed of their luggage or even hijacked by laser-wielding dinosaurs who want to catch the next bus ride to the lost city of Atlantis.

Personally, I've not suffered too heavily in this regard (except when it comes to the dinosaurs. Stupid bloody dinosaurs), but that changed a couple of days ago when I hitched a quick ride from Grahamstown to Pretoria via our delightful domestic bus system. A quick overview of what happened: both my luggage and I hopped onto a bus in Grahamstown. But while I was safely deposited in Pretoria about fourteen hours later, my luggage was whisked away by an extremely localised space-time rip that tore it out of the nice and safe underbelly of my transport and deposited it somewhere in Midrand. And although everybody seemed to know that it was in Midrand (and, indeed, could confirm its presence with one of a multitude of buses that hopped between Midrand and Pretoria every day), nobody seemed able to retrieve the luggage and put it into my grubby little paws until a good 24 hours later, following several broken promises from the transport crew and a few chewed-off ears at 6:30am.

A picture of my missing ba- OH WAIT, I LEFT MY CAMERA IN MY LUGGAGE.

Fortunately, my renewed presence at the Bat Cave has more than compensated for this momentary setback. The Bat Cave, as you may recall, is something of a gaming Valhalla – a gathering spot for geeks to achieve something of a critical mass and explode in a shower of awesomeness.

Plastic controllers and bright colours = instant rock band success.

There were three reasons that I arrived on this particular: one, it was a long weekend. This begs people of my ilk to get together for major videogaming sessions (which, ironically, never seemed to consist of the stuff I actually wanted to play. Screw you guys, I'd do anything to play Lode Runner on the Xbox).

The second reason was the cinema debut of X-men Origins: Wolverine. This needs little explanation: the guy is a freakin' cultural icon.

A freakin' cultural icon.

Lastly, I had a score to settle with the local division of Yanky's – more specifically, I needed to finally confront one of their Monster Burgers for myself. My encounter was framed by a challenge that I levelled at a fellow geek: we had to race to see who could eat a whole burger first. Preferably without dying from gastrointestinal complications in the process.

It's bigger than my laptop. Oh dear.

I lost. Horribly. And now I have a bit of a tummyache. I'm still trying to figure out how that much physical burger can fit into such a scrawny frame as my opponent's, but admittedly the overpowering sensation of mass indigestion is blurring my cognitive processes for the time being.

This blog post is dedicated to Simon “you-never-mention-me-in-your-blogs” Croudace.

Havana Nights in Grahamstown

2009-04-26T21:38:00.009+02:00

Right, so: it would appear to the layman that I've once again become too well-settled in Grahamstown. This is not true. I have stayed here for two reasons: one, I wanted to sort out my passport and stuff because I've been considering doing some out-of-country travel (nothing too exotic or expensive: I'd basically be going through Africa, if anything). Of course, this particular job was never actually carried out due to a mixture of election hype and my own gross tendency to procrastinate. Go me.

The other reason was that at some point in the past, I promised a friend that I would attend her 21st birthday party. I can't remember when. I may have been raucously drunk after downing half a beer or something (DISCLAIMER: no, not really). It was some time after designing the party invite.

Damn, I'm good.

While my design skills are rather paltry (read: crap) compared to my godlike writing abilities (DISCLAIMER 2: I really am that good) I still like to keep in practice doing odd jobs for people. I received a year of super-duper official training, after all, so I may as well put it to some good use. Here's a higher-res version because I like to show off.

Anyway, enough self-indulgence. I went to this gathering yesterday evening. It was themed “Havana Nights”. Which was really cool. I mean, I had no idea how to really dress, but I decided to use it as a grand opportunity to dress up in my “you look like you came out of a Quentin Tarantino film” outfit, complete with my beloved fedora hat (which, by the way, I'd accidentally left in Grahamstown before backpacking along the Garden Route . I missed it oh so very much).

Actually, this pic was taken the day after. In the same clothes. And very unwashed. Don't ask.

The 21st was very nice, actually. It wasn't one of those typical parties where the aim is to get drunk and dance (those do not gel with me AT ALL) – it was one of those “sophisticated” gatherings with slides, cocktails and speeches. And stuff. I had a great time and all the stops were pulled out to make everybody feel fancy and cool for an evening.

Also: food. And yes, that's a guy in a dress.

I excused myself at about 11pm, shortly after all the main stuff happened. As I said, I don't mix well with all-out partying and even though the main evening was all fancy and stuff, people inevitably got their jollies on afterwards. I decided to have a more laid-back session afterwards and crashed somewhere else for the night. Which, by the way, urges me to post a bed that I have yet to mention:

An actual bed. In Grahamstown. The novelty!

This comes from a spare room in one of my friend's flats. I negotiated it after buying him dinner (his daily withdrawal limit had been exceeded, the silly bugger) and I can fully testify that it was absolutely glorious. I mean, yes, it's a bed, so it's automatically a notch up from couches. But there was such a lovely plethora of blanketry and pillowness that pretty much guaranteed that I could tailor my sleeping experience to just the way I wanted it. Or, very nearly. There was a certain something missing, but I can't exactly figure out what. Oh well. 9/10.

Election day

2009-04-22T18:50:00.004+02:00

Wooo! April 22nd! It's our glorious nation's time to exercise its constitutional right and decide who gets to play with our lives for another five years. That's right, ladies and gentlemen: it's the 2009 South African national elections.

... and I failed to take part.

Now look. Don't get me wrong. I wanted to vote today. I really, really did. But unfortunately, I have this weird neutrality streak and by the time I decided to catch a political wake-up call and register as a voter, it was a case of too-little-too-late-you-silly-little-bugger.

And yes, I know the spiel. I officially have to keep my yap shut about the state of the country for the next five years, will be solely responsible for the downfall of said country should it ever come to pass and have signed an abstract contract that will allow baboons to come and eat my children (though I have the last laugh on that particular point. Poor starving baboons).

I am, for all intents and purposes, a noob. I sincerely confess this.

Most tragically, I have now missed out on free coffee from Wimpy – an offer that was extended to everybody who actually had the initiative and political foresight to cast their vote.

WHAT HAVE I DONE???

All that aside, it was really inspiring to see people turning out in their droves to make their voices heard. There's apparently 161 voting stations in Grahamstown alone – not bad for a town that my cruel, cruel friends from Gauteng declare as being an imaginary place that exists only in my head.

Of course, while people turning out in their droves is good and all, it makes for a helluva long wait when you're in the queue. The booth on the Rhodes University campus was particularly bad.

“...wait, you mean this isn't the queue for free coffee?”

People kept their spirits up, though. There was a lot of lively chatter in the queues (which could easily incarcerate voters for a good few hours) and some of the students even brought along their instruments to play a few songs. Journalists were also swarming the place like politically-motivated flies to election-poop (in other news, my ability to construct similes has gone down the drain like something that goes down a drain really, really fast).

Of course, I don't want this blog to become politically aligned or anything, so I'm going to withhold commenting on the situation much further. If you want to know about South African politics, read up elsewhere – and I wholeheartedly recommend that you do.

Remember, people, there's only one way for democracy to work properly and that's to be informed about your vote. Six billion ballots mean absolutely nothing if you're casting them like a doofus, so don't piss away your vote unless you know what you're putting your weight behind. I honestly don't care what party you voted for today, as long as your voice was based on an educated opinion that will, you know, benefit humanity and stuff rather than going with your gut because some jackal-faced MP came over to your house yesterday and promised you free icecream.

If you were a twit and gave a positive vote to people who could screw you over because you didn't bother to check up on them objectively, then you're no better than the idiots like me who failed to vote at all. If anything, it'll just cause more harm.

And there ends (hopefully) the only post on this blog that will ever touch on the subject of politics. Here, wash the bad taste out of your mouth with some kitties:

Tacklehug!

This blog post is dedicated to one J. Cook, who 80% of you have probably never heard of.

Graduation

2009-04-19T13:40:00.003+02:00

And so, the dust has finally settled from all the madness of robing, capping, scrolling and whatever other random nouns are associated with the act of graduation.

Yes, dear reader, I've finally graduated. Despite the fact that I've been messing around for a good few months already with work, travel, writing and pretty much all of the real-world stuff that I was going to do anyway, it is only now that Rhodes University has decided to stand up and say, “Right, we're letting you go now ... you mischievous little bugger.”

I do like Rhodes, and I do respect the education that it has given me, but I have little to no tolerance for tradition and ceremony. The justifications are usually weak, and these sort of things always find some way of inconveniencing and/or irritating the heck out of me. In this case, I really didn't want to jump through all sorts of fancily-decorated hoops to get a silly piece of parchment.

Heck, the last 48 hours have been absolutely saturated with unnecessary picture-taking. Yes, it's cool to pose in the graduation gown for the first five or so times. After that, it begins to feel like I've walked right into a certain South Park episode involving cameras, hype and really beleaguered celebrities.

I take a picture of people taking pictures of me. The world implodes.

Of course, I went along with the whole show because loads of people were being all super-proud of me and stuff, so I kinda owed it to them to get my head patted by a bunch of academic geriatrics (in related news, I've discovered for the first time ever that Rhodes University actually has a chancellor. Waitwhat?). That, and there were some pretty damn awesome tea parties to go to – I can happily report that these were very well-stocked. I only ate twice during my graduation weekend, and both occasions were munchie-calls at nearby garden buffets.

Pic related.

The graduation ceremony itself was horribly long – about two and a half hours of talking and name-calling ensued after everyone was seated, and this was just for BA graduates. I actually feel sorry for the VC, Registrar and all the other figureheads who need to be in attendance for every single one of these ceremonies.

No, seriously. I proudly maintain that I've not known the sensation of boredom for a good few years already. I always find some way to entertain or busy myself, even if it's just wandering off into daydream-land when I'm stuck on a long bus trip. But the grad ceremony somehow broke through that barrier. A combination of bright lights, ungainly ceremonial garb and a crowd of my peers successfully worked its dark magic on me. And although I would certainly testify that honorary doctorate recipient Dennis Brutus has led a very interesting life – and has possibly the most badass surname in existence – I still think that his speech would have been far more welcome at a time when I wasn't trapped inside an auditorium for several hours surrounded by a gajillion people wearing bat-suits.

Da-duh-da-duh-da-duh-da-duh-BATMAAAAAAN!

Did I feel a certain sense of reverence for this occasion? Regrettably, no. And I say 'regrettably' with sincerity because I'm sure that this graduation really was important to a lot of people. It's just that I can't bring myself to regard a piece of paper or a funny hat as a vindicator of my work and my achievements. In my head, the important stuff happened a long time ago and I've already moved on to do great things. You know, like writing this blog. And bungy jumping.

At least one thing is certain: deep in my heart, I know that the selection of food at the garden party was – and shall forever remain – absolutely awesome.

BUNGY! (For really reals)

2009-04-17T11:56:00.005+02:00

I finally did it. For those of you who have been keeping careful track of my adventures, you may remember my trip to Storms River and the Bloukrans Bridge for a shot at the world's highest bungy jump.

You may also remember me weakly excusing myself from doing the actual jump due to certain financial technicalities. I left Bloukrans with the paltry achievement of a quick zipline, and vowed to return one day to complete the job. My promise to myself was fulfilled rather unexpectedly yesterday.

For the past two days, I've been on the road between Cape Town (where I attended the totally rad Coke Zero Fest) and Grahamstown (where I'll be attending my totally boring graduation ceremony). I've been travelling via minibus with my brother and a couple of friends, and I was quite pleasantly surprised yesterday morning when I heard that we'd be making a quick stop at Bloukrans to throw ourselves off a bridge.

Ahhh, my old nemesis.

People say that your second bungy jump is always the most scary, because you know what to expect. After doing my first one and having the opportunity to reflect on all the indescribable sensations I felt in just a few short seconds, I can see why that would be the case. If you haven't done a bungy jump before, there's almost no way to truly explain how it feels.

Yeah, it's scary. You can try psych yourself up for it and do your best to clear your head beforehand. But in that moment when you first look over the edge (the bungy cord holding your legs in place like a python with a foot fetish), all courage inevitably melts away, and for a few precious seconds the only words going through your head are “holy crap”.

Good so far ...

... OH ****.

Fortunately, the gentlemen at Face Adrenaline are rather experienced when it comes to last-minute-willies syndrome, and they only give you about five seconds to ponder your potential demise through fally-squishy. No, really. They start the countdown as soon as you get to the edge, interfering your “holy crap” train of thought with a brief “waitwat” before you get 'helped' over the side.

Thank goodness I remembered to give the horns. They makes me look just a tiny bit badass instead of plain terrified.

Something that I have discovered from doing stuff like this: everybody has a unique “OH CRAP I'M GOING TO DIIIIIEEE!” noise. For some, it may be a high-pitched squeal. For others (like totally badass action heroes and stuff) it's a deep, throaty “AAAAAAAAAAAH!”

For me, it's invariably a rather intriguing “YAAAAAAAA!” sound which tends to mix the two extremes. I've screamed in the same way while cruising on rollercoasters and riding on giant chickens .

“YAAAAAAAA!” Seriously, though: note how I've retained the badass horns.

Here's the funny thing, though. After about the first two seconds of freefall, my screams cut out and gave way to a sort of quiet shock. Other jumpers that day reported the same thing: the breathtaking beauty of freefall mingled with the threat of an imminent demise pretty much just took away one's voice. Sound gives way to sensation: in a few short seconds, enough adrenaline to intoxicate a baby elephant gets pumped into your system. It electrifies your body, speeds up your heart rate and boils your blood in a way that cannot otherwise be experienced. That, combined with the invariable sensation of organ displacement when accelerating downward, brings a unique physical and mental state which causes you for the briefest moment to feel pretty damn alive. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the “thrill” behind death-defying joyrides such as this.

Once your freefall is over (and you've rebound, fallen again and then bounced about a little bit), you're left hanging upside down in the gorge for about half a minute while somebody is lowered with a harness and complicated hook things used to hoist you up again. Aside from the understandable rush of blood to the head and the unfortunate risk of dizziness if your bungy cord happens to be spinning around too fast, I think that the strongest impact on me during that upside-down hiatus was the complete and utter feeling of isolation.

The gorge was completely silent. We're talking about a silence that you don't encounter when you're in civilisation. Heck, it's the sort of silence that you often can't even find in nature (damn noisy animals and all). Literally the only noise to be heard was the occasional creak of the cord, and eventually the sound of blood pumping into my head. Even my breathing seemed muted.

I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, with no way up or down, removed not only from society but from the very earth itself. It was amongst the most amazing thirty seconds of my life.

Durr hurr.

I was eventually brought back up. In the picture above, my left hand is actually clutching a ceramic necklace-ornament-thing that I'd procured in Oudtshoorn. I'd forgotten to take it off before the jump, and about halfway down my second bounce I realised that it was hanging down in front of me and grabbed on to it (my dear little brother, watching my jump via CCTV, thought that I was trying to suppress a hurl).

It was a cast of the African symbol for “nyame”, or “immortality”. I decided that it was worthwhile holding onto it as a life insurance policy.

... of course, in looking for a suitable link for this symbol on the Web, I've just learned that the actual meaning of the symbol is “sack of cola nuts”. Go figure.

Azi owes me fifteen bucks. Also: Coke Zero Fest.

2009-04-15T21:48:00.005+02:00

So. Today, I finally had a chance to pick up my digital pen and scribble up a fresh new report of my adventures. And boy, do I have stuff to write about! I've been hyping up Coke Zero Fest on this blog for more than a month (and planning my attendance since the beginning of this year), and on Monday, 13 April I finally had the chance to attend it.

I'll start off by saying this: no matter what else I blabber on about, it's of utmost importance for everybody to remember that a certain friend of mine owes me R15. I bought her a beer at Coke Zero Fest and she never paid me back for it.

13/04/2009. Never forget.

Now, on to the rest of the stuff. Overall, Coke Zero Fest was absolutely freakin' awesome. I enjoyed the bands, I got to hang out with a nice range of friends and I walked away from the experience with about a gajillion free T-shirts earned from playing in a Guitar Hero competition.

Snow Patrol got a bigger crowd, but I bet they can't 5-star Sweet Home Alabama on Expert.

The bands were awesome. Zebra and Giraffe were the highlight of the locals with an absolutely stunning performance, and the other South African acts weren't far behind. Panic! at the Disco was fun, and Snow Patrol really gave it their all. Even Oasis managed to give an acceptable performance, suggesting that they probably took a hint from their Joburg reception.

There were also attractive women in Coke outfits handing out free drinks, pins, bangles and other assorted paraphernalia. This was a big plus.

Unfortunately, I felt that the organisation was a teensy bit on the “Extremely Crap” side of the crappiness scale:

(1) Two international bands pulled out. Probably nothing that the festival organisers could have done, and I wasn't actually interested in them anyway (who the hell is Red Jumpsuit Apparatus?), but it's the principle of the matter.

(2) No passouts were allowed. At first I thought this was just a warning to not drink too much alcohol. Oh-ho no! As soon as I entered the festival grounds, security tore up my ticket and ushered me further in, with no hint of giving me something as simple as a wristband to keep track of my entry. This meant that I had to stay inside the festival grounds or lose my place in the concert of a lifetime. And I NEEDED to go out. I ended up having to call a connection on the inside to get this crap sorted out. Thank goodness for networking.

(3) They have something against cameras. Recorders I can understand. Videocams I can totally see as not being cool. But picture snappers? The last time I checked, most musicians didn't have to worry about the rampant piracy of photographs Unless I'm totally missing out on something.

(4) They have something against devil sticks. Apparently, they're potentially as dangerous as most firearms. I tried to explain to security that I'm not a complete moron, but it didn't seem to work. Eventually sorted this out with a little help from an insider again.

Despite these setbacks, the venue was definitely prime rib:

(Insert cheesy nature comment here)

I spent time in a glorious place, got to hang out with my dear brother at a rock concert (Hi wittle brudda!) and sang along to “Champagne Supernova” within a crowd of drunk people. It doesn't get much better than this.

A hike up freaking Table Mountain!

2009-04-09T17:30:00.003+02:00

Yesterday, I took a hike up freaking Table Mountain! For a geek of my calibre, this is no mean feat. Before now, the only sort of intense vertical walkabout that I've ever been engaged in has been a vigorous ascent of Devil's Peak to reach its old military block house. And said peak is quite thoroughly and quite mercilessly put to shame by Table Mountain with regards to both pain and gain.

“Skeleton Gorge”? Who in their right mind wants to walk up a trail with a name like that?

I shouldered this monumental task with two of my friends – brave and noble men who were willing to face rocky perils and unspeakable horrors in a quest for Bragging Rights and Really Good Views. Our expedition started in the Kirstenbosch Gardens, situated at the base of the mountain.

Our nemesis looms in the distance. Also, two noble friends.

The climb quickly became steeper. We were soon in a rather thick forest, hopping up stairways and the occasional inconvenient boulder. Good enough so far: no direct sunlight and a well-worn path to keep us on the straight and narrow.

“We're going on an adventure, Charlie!”

Then, all of a sudden:

“You're screwed now.”

After a few hours of hiking, we actually wound up getting lost on Table Mountain. It's hard to believe, I know. It looks so endearingly flat when viewed from the bottom, after all. But, dear reader, this is merely a trap set up by the spirits of the mountain to lure helpless tourists and hiking noobs to their doom. That, and I totally suspect that it was a bad idea for the tour guides to scrawl direction arrows on rocks that any mischievous little urchin could easily pick up and move.

We eventually got back to the beaten path, though. And our detour was admittedly kinda adventurous.

This is my wallpaper now. I just look so badass.

Of course, no matter how worth it the climb may have been we were pretty much dead by the time we finally hit the summit. We came grossly underprepared, and were extremely dehydrated and possibly suffering from a little too much sun exposure after four hours of supercharged stairstepping. We technically satisfied the safety requirements for a hike between the three of us, but Table Mountain doesn't seem to accept group deals. A protip, kids: when they say “bring two litres of water”, they mean PER PERSON.

We ended up taking the cable ride back down. It was amusing enough, but we weren't really paying for a ride or a view at that point. We just wanted to spare our bodies from further pain and humiliation.

A good day in all. Now I can veg out with a clear conscience for at least the next three weeks.

Wrapping up Oudtshoorn (Read: long overdue blog post)

2009-04-08T20:25:00.004+02:00

So, after getting around and doing a whole bunch of stuff at the arts festival in Oudtshoorn, I've finally caught up to my own shenanigans and can take a bit of a blogging breather. My lack of a suitable Internet signal in Oudtshoorn was rather aggravating and caused me and my laptop to have a bit of a row, but things are all good now and I'm happily blogging away from my fortress in Cape Town.

By spending a whopping four nights in town, Oudsthoorn has officially been my longest stop in the Garden Route backpacking trip, even topping my three-night stay in Knysna.

And for two out of four, I snuggled up inside this tent:

The one at the back. I call it “the blue dwarf”.

Note to self: tents suck. At least I invested in a jolly nice sleeping bag, but it's still not all that preferable to, say, a jolly nice couch . You're basically sleeping on the ground. Sure, there's a few layers of plastic and warm microfiber fancymabobs that allow you to pretend that you're not sleeping on the ground. But no, really: you just are.

My fortress of solitude. And discomfort.

I don't mind the size of the tent (I don't really intend to share it with anyone in the near future), but I really do wish that there was an affordable way to guarantee comfort that's a few levels above “horrifically abrasive rock”. For now, I'm improvising with stuffing dirty clothes under the mattress. But this does, of course, mean that I end up sleeping on dirty clothes. Hmm.

Camping gets a firm 4/10 for me. It admittedly affords me far more privacy than I've actually had in the last three months. It's also cheaper than most other solutions: I got the tent and bag for just over R350, so a week of camping instead of dorm beds means that it actually ends up paying for itself. And it's an absolute lifesaver when there's nowhere else to sleep anyway.

But for the love of giant chickens , I do not want to sleep like this if there's any other realistic options at hand. Ever. That is my final word on the matter.

And so, to wrap up my blatherings about Oudtshoorn, I'd like to show you one of the prettiest sights in the area: the Outeniqua Pass between Oudtshoorn and George.

Now imagine seeing this with your eyes instead of through a crappy camera lens.

It's a fantastic view that's offered to anybody travelling between the two locations – there's even a few lookout locations along the pass where people can pull up their vehicles and admire the view a little.

And with that, I say bye-bye to Oudtshoorn. I'm glad that I had the opportunity to visit.

Kunstefees highlights

2009-04-08T19:49:00.004+02:00

Writing this blog post is almost embarrassing. One: I only spent about one and a half days at the KKNK in Oudtshoorn. I probably have one of the least thorough assessments of this event in the history of ever ever. Two: there is way too much stuff going on. It's impossible to dictate all the cool things I did and saw in a mere 36 hours. So I offer you a few humble highlights so that I can at least rest easy in the knowledge that I made some sort of half-arsed effort at documenting my experiences.

First on my List of Cool Things™ is the music group Zamar , who deliver a sound which I shall simply describe as “gypsy music stuff”. I'm a bit of a musical heathen, so don't ask me for any proper definitions.

Tell me that this doesn't look gypsy. I dare you.

I first heard these guys while I was sitting in an Oudtshoorn cafe (sipping mineral water and pretending to be posh, of course). Their sound immediately grabbed me and I was moved to sit down and chat with them after their performance.

Zamar consists of a bunch of Stellenbosch students who decided to get together and make something a little different from the run-of-the-mill Afrikaans pop music and doof-doof-doof club sounds that have pretty much saturated the local market. They've been touring the country for some time now, building up a fan base and even winning awards for their performances at events like the KKNK. Not only are they different, but their lack of emphasis means that they're effectively language-neutral, so pretty much everybody can enjoy the music.

Also, they have a rad Website. Much respect to a group who knows the IT haxx.

Now, music aside: one of the main drawcards for the arts festival (in my opinion) was the open market filled with some of the most absolutely cool stuff in existence. And by that, I mean loads of awesome food. And super-cooled relaxation tents with built-in water sprays.

It was pretty funny when they switched the valves to the “knockout gas” setting.

But seriously, you find some recipes in all this madness which are probably unique to the festival: stuff like mint-flavoured nougat, mint-flavoured pizza cones and mint-flavoured baby elephants. You know, the good stuff. I broke my noodle diet once again to sample some of these wares. It was glorious. Budget-killing, but glorious.

As it so happened, I was carrying my devil sticks around with me at the time (let's all say it together now: not a tool of Satan) and a little birdie told me that there was actually a stick juggler wandering around the KKNK market. I enthusiastically hunted said juggler down in the hopes that I could bump into El Rondo again.

I ended up running into another juggler instead. His name was Nico, he had a shop in Knysna and he recognised my sticks as El Rondo's work, so we sat down to chat for a little while. Our conversation brought to my attention the harsh reality of festival markets everywhere: if you're even a paltry two stalls down from the high-traffic paths, you're going to get screwed over for customers. A pity: I tried out some of the sticks myself, and they were pretty well-made.

Enough sticks to choke a giraffe. The moral: buy sticks, save giraffes.

In closing: I totally got to ride in a Toyota along an off-road hazard course.

AWESOME.

Enough said. Post over.

My gunsteling Kunste ... er ... ding

2009-04-07T18:02:00.005+02:00

Ons kan nou 'n lekker ... aw, heck, my Afrikaans is waaaay too crummy for all of this.

So I've just touched down in Cape Town after visiting Oudtshoorn for a few days. My expedition has been filled with art, giant chickens and Afrikaans. Loads of it.

Pic related. Sorta.

Oudtshoorn plays host to an annual arts festival known as the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees. As you may have guessed, it's very, very Afrikaans. And I'm very, very English. In fact, I'm the sort of guy who could walk the streets of London and get accosted by random locals who only want to tell me just how damn English I am. Yeah, it's that bad.

Some may be tempted to suggest that I'm exaggerating. Verily, I deny this with damning evidence: my interaction with just about every local in Oudtshoorn since I got there last Thursday is testament to the fact that I cannot utter a word to – nay, cannot even stand within six feet of – an Afrikaans-speaking individual without them immediately switching to English on my behalf.

Even Egg Hat Guy was on to me.

I tested this over and over while wandering around the festival's main market. Shopkeepers, stall owners and passers by all chatted in a flurry of Afrikaans until approximately 0.034 seconds after I'd entered the immediate vicinity, at which point a little switch would flip in their head and instruct them to address me in English. It didn't matter whether or not I even said anything. They just started talking in English. Was a gigantic “I'm useless with the Afrikaans language” sign taped to my back the whole day? I dunno. I was hanging about with actual British people most of the time (comes with the backpacking territory), and even THEY got greeted in Afrikaans. There is no justice.

Another inappropriate picture placement. Enjoy.

Language barriers aside: the KKNK is absolutely bloody terrific. Oudtshoorn is like the Afrikaans mirror city of Grahamstown: it's small and pretty much situated in the middle of nowhere, but it can throw a damn epic festival. On every street corner you'll find stuff for sale, music halls, art exhibitions and strange people wearing gigantic egg hats (see above). The festival organisers even set up a freaking funfair complete with rides and candyfloss. All of this combines to make Oudtshoorn seemingly spring to life overnight.

Before and after. Those rent-a-crowd guys are pretty damn efficient.

I'll scribble out another post soon to point out just a few personal highlights from the day or so I've been at this fest – to incorporate all of my experiences in this humble blog would be a bit of a mission, I'm afraid.

Giant chickens and giant holes in the ground

2009-04-07T17:28:00.003+02:00

Oudtshoorn is famous for its giant chickens. Heck, the settlement's treatment of these birds borders on worship. Their names, images and products are featured on signposts, inside cornershops and are scattered around an endless number of tourist traps within the area

OH NO HELP PLEASE THEY'RE EVERYWHERE BLAAARGH.

These large and gracious birds are a major source of meat in the area. Biltong, sausages and even steaks are sold in the giant chicken variety. I actually gave in one evening and indulged in a nice ostrich steak supper – my second departure from instant noodles in these past two weeks.

Shortly after I took this picture, my wallet leaped up and stabbed me in the neck.

I also went to a local giant chicken farm where I went on a guided tour to explore the world of giant chickens. It was great: not only did I learn much about these massive birds, but I even got to ride one of them. Of course, I couldn't quite manage a piccie from the beast's back because I was a little too busy holding on for dear life at the time. So here's a picture of giant chicken eggs instead:

Easily the biggest chicken eggs I've ever seen.

Aside from giant chickens, Oudtshoorn is also quite well known for the Cango Caves. Ever since playing Spelunky a week or so back, I've been rather geekily inspired to do some cave exploration and had a pretty cool hour and a half on the Cango “Adventure Tour”.

There's some rather tight places. Great for posing, though.

These caves were formed about sixty billion million quadzillion years ago, and a bunch of chemical reactions mixed up with water droplets and a whole bunch of science stuff that I don't understand leads to some amazing sights and very pretty rock formations. Here's my favourite piccie from the experience (and possibly the only one which any reasonable human being could make out):

Bonus points for not being covered in graffiti.

So yeah, cool stuff. I'll be blogging a little about Oudtshoorn's arts festival after this, then I'll hop on a bus to Cape Town to meet up with some friends. Coke Zero Fest awaits.

Curse you, vile Internet

2009-04-04T18:01:00.004+02:00

If 3G exists around here, it's sure as hell doing a good job of avoiding my phone at the moment.

Blogging has become rather heinously difficult at the moment. Timeouts, disconnections and killer crocodiles are making my online life a bit of an IT purgatory.

So I'm just going to write up some stuff in the background and post it all up when I hit Cape Town. You can relax for now ... though if I don't put something up by Monday, it probably means that I've been eaten by an ostrich or something. Nice knowing you.

Oudtshoorn (Part one of eleventy-six)

2009-04-03T09:12:00.007+02:00

So, a day or so back I hopped onto the Baz Bus, radically changed my plans and took a shuttle to Oudtshoorn for a few days instead of going with my original George – Mossel Bay – Swellendam idea. Then I arrived in Oudtshoorn, realised that I'd stumbled in just before the annual Kunstefees (good luck, international readers) and decided to stay for a few days longer.

I'm currently residing at Backpacker's Paradise. It is damn awesome. Before now, my favourite residence was pretty much the Dijembe lodge in Storms River, but this place blows it right out of the water. With dynamite.

Well, dynamite and African charm.

Backpacker's Paradise really lives up to its namesake. This place is apparently ranked as one of the top ten in the country, but it's still a respectable R90 a night and offers pretty much everything you'd expect for twice the price. It has the typical game room, bar and lounge area, but also sports an itty-bitty swimming pool (though it may just be a really large jacuzzi), a nice garden and even its very own curio shop (I absolutely despise African curio shops, but it's a nice touch anyway).

Backpackers get discounts on just about every tourist attraction in Oudtshoorn. Doubly awesome because this Klein Karoo settlement has been by far the cheapest way for me to see sights and go on adventures. Instead of paying hundreds for a single shoddy expedition, I'm able to do a lot of genuinely interesting stuff for around R50 a pop. And if you successfully prove that a crocodile at the Wildlife park has chewed off one of your limbs, you could probably negotiate a complete refund too.

So, with all this awesomeness there absolutely must be a steep downturn when it comes to facilities, right? Wrong. Even the dorms have en-suite bathrooms and quite possibly the largest beds out of any backpacker establishment that I've stumbled upon so far.

No commentary here: just soak in the magnificent view.

These beds are pretty damn fantastic. They get 9.5 out of ten. Minus half a point because one of the blankets isn't quite to my liking – screw you, blanket.

Unfortunately, the massive popularity of this place combined with the looming Kunstefees spells doom for my hopes of staying in the dorm beyond a few precious hours this morning. I was only able to book a two-night stay (they're otherwise fully booked until April 11th) but using my resourcefulness, roguish charms and map-reading ability, I was able to secure myself a tent and sleeping bag from a nearby shop for a grand total of only R350. Now I'll be camping at the lodge for a few extra days at a considerably reduced rate – go me!

I sure hope that the tent gets a bit bigger once I've pitched it.

I'm looking towards my camping plan tonight with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Mostly apprehension. In fact, I don't know how excitement even crawled in there. I seem to vaguely recall a total and all-consuming hatred for camping. But at least it'll be cheaper.

Living in Wilderness

2009-04-01T09:28:00.004+02:00

Hokay, so today's blog post isn't much. This is due in part to the fact that I was feeling less than spectacular yesterday after combining a really late night, certain culinary indulgences and an early rise in the morning to finish off some work (including an article for my column on NAG online – oh look, purely accidental advertising, y'all!) that I'd originally meant to get out of the way before deciding that the time would be spent better choking on oysters.

Also, it's April Fool's Day. I cannot express just how much I hate the Internet, television and in fact just about any form of media over these next few hours.

I'm currently staying in Wilderness. Not the wilderness: just “Wilderness”. It's a little slice of coastal heaven situated between George and Knysna, and depending on your fancy, you can either stay by the beach or wander into the forest for two equally touristy experiences.

Given the way I was feeling yesterday, I honestly couldn't give a damn and headed for the Beach House lodge. It's not a bad place: the location is great, for a start.

“Fifty metres from the beach,” they said. “Straight down, of course.”

Unfortunately, this place serves as an example of the value of asking about prices before making sleeping plans. This was another of those R120 monsters which came equipped with several extras that I didn't particularly want or need (though the on-call masseuse would have been pretty kickass if I'd had the money for it). Granted, the beds were absolutely fantastic.

Humble at first glance, eh? Ahhh, the cunning ways of furniture!

These have to be by far the most comfortable sleeping devices I've encountered on my Garden Route trip. You get lots of snuggly clean blankets, the pillows are just plain awesome for some reason (I suspect they've been dipped in meth) and I slept very soundly. Granted, me feeling absolutely crap was probably a contributing factor to the enthusiasm with which I received the bunks, but the only drawback that I could really fathom was that they weren't, you know, king-sized. Of course, there IS the annoying little fact that they're equipped with some sort of experimental sonar facility: every time somebody walked near the bed, it would somehow resonate through the floor, go up the legs of the bed and transfer itself to the rumble pad that had been stealthily hidden in my mattress. So I guess that's 8.5 out of 10.

As a final note, the bathrooms are totally super-duper:

MIRRORS!

I probably spent more time in here trying (in vain) to snap cool photos than anywhere else. I'm a pretty weird tourist sometimes.

Also, http://nag.tidemedia.co.za/.

It's Rasta-oyster time!

2009-03-31T15:48:00.004+02:00

Yesterday, I visited one of Knysna's townships in a quest to find a local Rastafari settlement that was supposedly hiding amongst all of those tin roofs and worn paths. Accompanying me were a couple of foreigners I'd met earlier that day, and we were all armed with an enthusiasm for tourism that would make even the most camera-keen, flower-clothed, barefoot island traveller cringe with embarrassment.

Townships and people from outside South Africa are like oppositely-charged poles in a gigantic supermagnet array. They possess a certain attraction to several colloquial delights that I, as a local, simply cannot understand. I was keen for the Rasta vibe, to be certain, but the sight of a township itself is not something that I find terribly exotic.

Cow.

Mind you, not enough people – both locally and abroad – really know what a township is actually like. Visiting a location like this is very different to watching a documentary or news report. Highlights and once-off photographs do well to emphasis particular emotions and deliver an audience something that they expect or even want, but most reports rarely give the full picture unless it's full of drama and stereotypical imagery.

Deciding against the R300 tourism levy for a guide around the township, we grabbed a taxi ride from the Knysna taxi ranks for about eight bucks and a few minutes later found ourselves in the middle of Judah Square, the Rastafari neighbourhood within the Knysna township.

The community in the township is full of exceptionally friendly people, and we were invited to sit down with a few gentlemen outside their house, share some tea and chat for a while. Contrary to popular opinion, Rastafari isn't all about weed and Bob Marley music, and I was exposed to a fascinating belief system and way of thinking through my conversations with these folks. I was escorted to their worship site, where I was able to snap a few pics and pose with the man who'd volunteered as our guide.

My “tourist mode” is spine-shatteringly cringeworthy.

Also, they all have really cool hair.

Awwww yeah.

After visiting the township, I decided to break my noodles-'n'-peanuts regime for a night and joined some friends at a local oyster bar to try some of Knysna's famous oysters. This was a rather bold venture for me: not only have I never eaten an oyster before, but I also happen to have a deep and sincere hatred of almost all seafood.

Om nom ... nom?

Because it was ceremony (and because everybody else was being fancy) I also decided to accompany my oyster consumption with a glass of semi-sweet white wine. Never again. Not only do I find most – if not all – forms of alcohol absolutely and unforgivably vile, but my body also has the chemical tolerance of a particularly poorly fieldmouse.

The combination of oysters and wine left me feeling a bit less than perfect, but I treated myself to a hearty Spur dinner afterwards to get the taste of sea and fancy booze out of my mouth. A pretty good day overall.

Across the lagoon: some Knysna pics

2009-03-30T11:49:00.008+02:00

Yesterday afternoon, I went on an expedition around Knysna's famous lagoon-lake thing. It primarily involved going to places where I technically wasn't allowed to travel, but it gave me a bunch of pretty pictures which I have an urge to share. So today's storytime is going to revolve around some pretty illustrations. Gather around, kids!

So yeah, Knysna is around a lagoon. Which means that it has a nice little Waterfront set up for the tourists. It's reasonably busy here, but the town itself is eerily quiet on a Sunday afternoon. Like, Silent Hill quiet.

For some reason, the locals have this thing about a bulldog named Bondi. He served with some ship or another for a few years, and died on a really hot day. Not the most heroic of historical figures, but they made a statue out of him anyway. I was always more of a cat person anyway.

As mentioned already, Knysna surrounds a lagoon that's hidden amongst some mountains near the ocean. Ferries and yacht tours are the main attraction for visitors here, but my aversion to guided tours and “standard” sightseeing (and the lightness of my wallet) urged me to investigate what appeared to be a very long bridge stretching right across the lake.

After walking around the lake a bit, I discovered that the “bridge” was a railroad that hopped over several islands in the middle of the water. The sign clearly indicated that I wasn't allowed to cross ...

... so I did anyway.

It turns out that my actions were vindicated by a multitude of local fishermen scattered across the lake's islands. The old railroad seems to be a popular gathering spot for these aquatic hunters – the presence of these individuals combined with the fact that I saw several cars parked across the railway lines near the waterfront urges me to believe that Knysna's railroad is now defunct.

The wind picked up rather fiercely as soon as I left the shore. Cro-magnon Nandrew wasn't very happy.

I only realised just how big Knysna's lagoon actually was when I tried traversing it. The lake crossing took me a full half hour, but I got some distance shots of the settlement in the process.

Approaching the other end of the lake, I was confronted with something akin to a shoreside desert: an oddly barren area of the bay occupied by sand and clusters of moss-like plant matter. It seemed that the lake had, at its apex, covered this whole area.

Further evidence of the water's rise and fall. A lonely puddle sat in the middle of this barren wasteland, and plays home to a whole menagerie of aquatic bugs. They all scuttled away and hid in the nearby sand when I tried getting closer, but it was pretty impressive to see this nucleus of activity for just a few moments.

Toto, I don't think we're in Knysna anymore. I was sure that I'd seen some sporadic housing from the other side of the bridge, but when I followed a path off the railway I was only confronted with wilderness. I started feeling truly adventurous, and sallied forth.

Oh, wait. Picture taken two minutes later. After discovering this strange land of “Brenton”, however, I realised that it was getting rather late and started backtracking to the railroad.

When I emerged by the lakeside again, I was astounded to see tidal flow in action: fed by the sea, the lake was slowly reclaiming the marsy desert near its shore. I was actually able to observe the water crawling steadily over the wasteland.

The above was just sand and moss a few minutes ago.

Considering my trip a great success, I took this final sunset picture just before my camera finally hacked, wheezed and breathed its last. With a pair of flat batteries and a full memory card, I put it away and headed back to my lodge.

Backpacking in Knysna. Also: food

2009-03-29T13:44:00.003+02:00

Ah, Knysna! That peaceful, lagoon-side gem of the South African Garden Route! A place where even a walk through the dirtiest, most tin-roof-laden township can be slapped with a price tag and become a tourist attraction. This place is the very reason why I decided to go for a backpacking trip between PE and Cape Town, and while it may not be everybody's cup of tea, I'm quite intent on soaking up the shoreline ambience for a few days.

I'm currently staying at Knysna Backpackers, a converted Victorian household which is somewhat small and creaky, but nevertheless a good place to stay at if you're reasonably price-conscious like myself. The only buggery bit comes in when you realise that the dozen nubile young women that arrived with you in the bus are actually heading for the ever-so-trendy Island Vibe backpackers instead, making you wish that you'd forked out ten or twenty extra bucks instead of being condemned to hang out with old people for three days.

A charming Victorian house on the lakeside. I could pretty much sense the old people from here.

Not to say that it's entirely bad hanging out with a more mature and relaxed crowd: it's just that I set out on this trip mentally prepared for interaction with people closer to my age and ready for the wild parties that would inevitably result. Not so. Since my sojourn at Storms River, I've been pretty laid back: just been wandering solo and tapping away on my laptop for a few hours each day. I'll see about hitting the more popular youth hostels on my next few stops, but prediction is rather difficult and ultimately my wallet is going to be the boss.

My portable bank account is rather peeved already, and with good reason.

Anyway, on to the lodge itself. The facilities here are reasonable, though use of water is restricted because there's apparently a dangerous shortage of it around Knysna. I tried in vain to point out the gigantic body of water that the settlement had sprung up right next to, but nobody really paid any attention to me, so I've satisfied myself with going the enviro-friendly route anyway.

I've also – for the very first time ever ever EVER – learned how to use a gas cooker. Although the technology is inferior to that used in a modern stove, I'm nevertheless far more fascinated with how the contraption works, and was delighted to see how I could adjust the release of gas to create fire that seemed to be suspended in the middle of thin air.

Oogah! Magical flame machine!

The beds are also pretty reasonable, though I'm not looking forward to the prospect of spending a night under an occupied top bunk: the beds are horrendously creaky, and I'm not even sure how anybody would climb to the upper mattress without an incredible amount of juddering and step-on-another-person's-facery. So yeah, they're pretty bare bones, but they do the job. 7 out of 10. That'll be minus 4 points if I end up getting my face stepped on before leaving Knysna.

Victorian cottage on the outside, army barracks on the inside.

So yeah, my final note on this post is that I'm getting hungry. I don't mean in the normal “oooh i could hav a spot of dinner rite now hahaha” kind of way, either. I mean that my angry wallet is forbidding me from living on a cent more than R15 a day, and my diet of instant noodles, canned beans and peanuts really isn't working out for my system.

Is that a loaf of bread I see in the background? Sheer bloody luxury!

I don't really eat that much to start with, but this journey has proven to be the first time that my body has stood up, slapped me in the face (let's just forget for a moment that my face is, indeed, just another part of my body) and told me that I need more nutrition. I've been going for about a week on a less than sterling diet, and it's getting to the point where I occasionally think about food more than I think about women. Something has obviously gone horribly wrong here.

Although I've never strictly overeaten before, I've rarely been in a spot where money for meals has been a problem. Even as a student, I've always earned my own money and been able to pick and choose hunger-busters at my leisure. I now look back at all those times when I would willfully spend in excess of R40 for takeaway meals. My tummy laments, but the amount that I've spent on this trip forbids me from indulging that much. A great exercise in being more frugal for a change, but two cups of noodles and the occasional handful of peanuts is not a good daily plan in the long term. I'm trying to diversify a little to see what cheap options I come up with.

When I get to Cape Town, I'm definitely going to be hitting another Panarotti's all-you-can-eat night to console my poor system for the punishment it has recently been going through. And I'll drag my friends kicking and screaming with me, even if I have to pay for half of their food.

Pretty Plettie – on the Bay

2009-03-28T14:06:00.005+02:00

Ah, Plettenberg Bay. I've heard a fair amount about this small town, and it's truly an oceanside wonder of the Garden Route. The town has the most charming layout: the entire place (or at least the bit that I've seen) looks like a beachside holiday resort. The shops, restaurants and malls are huddled together in open-air complexes alongside a cobbled main road and a set of winding paths that take you right down to the shoreline.

Plettenberg bay is famous for its experiments with frozen carbonite and dolphins.

The bay itself is almost eye-bleedingly pretty, especially if you have a gander at it from Plet's lookout point. I really wish that my entry-level camera (combined with my entry-level photography) could truly express the prettiness of the place.

There's, like, a hotel in the ocean. +5 points.

I was told that I could walk about safely at night, so I did. Of course, I stripped myself of anything remotely valuable first (haha, I'm not THAT gullible, fiendish crime syndicates!), but it was really nice to freely hit the streets and check out the night-time shoreline. The building in the picture above looks absolutely amazing when lit up at dusk: an eerie night beacon standing out against an endless expanse of black ocean. I'd strongly recommend seeing this for yourself if you ever happen to be in the bay area.

My accomodation while in Plet was the Nothando Backpackers. It's R120 a night: unfortunately, none of the other Baz-endorsed hostels in Plet were any cheaper.

The terms “Five Star” and “backpacking” just don't seem to go together in my head.

Something that backpacking lodges need to realise: I. Do. Not. Want. Luxury. Accomodation. Please give me something cheap and crappy. I've been eating noodles and baked beans for the past week because of the nightly levies and it's not about to get any better.

I'm strongly considering investing in a tent at the first possible opportunity. A tent and a sleeping bag. And probably some anti-mozzie stuff, too. They'll all pay for themselves within a week or two, I reckon. Having your own tent is the difference between paying something awful like R120 a night for “luxury dorms” (slightly nicer beds, I guess?) and fifty bucks to camp on the lawn just outside while still getting access to all of the lodge's facilities.

Beds. Who needs 'em?

The above is what I spent my night on. Yeah, it's reasonably comfy and management gives you your own towel to wash up with (it's oh-so-white and puffy!), so it gets an 8 out of ten. Minus ratings for the price I had to pay (probably for all the extras that I never ended up using anyway) and the fact that the wall socket for my laptop was just a tiny bit too far from the bed to be realistically convenient.

In other news, I came across this really creepy dog while wandering about Plet's malls, and it just wouldn't stop staring at me, even amidst a crowd of passers-by.

Yeah, the eyes really are like that.

It must be an omen of some kind. Probably to the effect that I should start avoiding creepy dogs.

Hopping off to Knysna for a few days now. Really looking forward to it.

The Didge and the Village

2009-03-27T15:26:00.005+02:00

I've spent the last two nights in Storms River, staying at a backpacker's lodge known as Dijembe or, in more colloquial terms, “The Didge”. Of the few backpackers I've been to so far, this has to be the best. Not only does it provide good service, but the staff are the sort of down-to-earth people that you can actually hang out with. And the lodge itself has a certain personality about it.

Yes, there's hammocks in the foreground. Yes, I've slept in them. And yes, they're totally awesome.

Dijembe offers shuttle services to various daytime activities, has all the standard backpacking perks and even prepares breakfast and dinner (though at R60 a pop for the dinners, I'd seriously not recommend it unless you have the cash). In the evenings, they set up a roaring fire in the games room, an even bigger bonfire outside and open up the bar area and jacuzzi so that people may eat, drink and make merry for a while. And while I'm really, really not into gimmicky African rubbish all that much (I call it my domestic bias), I must admit that I was damn impressed at the vibe that this place managed to offer. The Didge comes highly recommended on my “places to stay” list.

Oh, and bedding at the Didge is superb. Why? Well, this:

TRIPLE STOREY BUNK BEDS!

This was not photoshopped. There really are three beds on that vertical plane. And for some inexplicable reason, nobody wanted the top one. So I instantly called dibs on it. Plus five points for decent bedding and blanketry. Plus another two points for a soft mattress. PLUS ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY BILLION FOR TRIPLE STOREY AWESOMENESS. 9/10 in all.

Now, on to the village of Storms River itself, which has thus far gone under my blog's radar. To be honest, that's probably for a good reason.

Heed the sign's warning. You're heading for the middle of nowhere.

Storms River is rather small. In fact, you can basically stand on the road at one end and look over to the other side pretty easily. Not to say that it's an awful place: it actually has a certain touristic charm about it, and it was interesting to finally wander about a settlement like this: my journey has thus far been pretty firmly rooted in civilisation.

That's not to say that I wouldn't eventually go insane if I had to live here on a permanent basis. Half of the buildings here seem geared directly towards tourism, and frequent trips to PE are made by locals to secure anything that doesn't fit under the category of “bare bones basics”. Of course, I could easily be exaggerating about all this, so I'll let you judge for yourselves here:

Quite possibly the biggest retailer in the area.

This is Storms River's supermarket. Literally, “supermarket”. This is what it calls itself. The picture pretty much encompasses the whole store aside from the tills and tobacco kiosk. Oh, and the village's only ATM is hidden somewhere in the corner. With a draw limit of R500 per person. Reasonable, I thought. Cute, even. That's until I tried to get some money out of it and realised that it had run out of cash. Completely. I kinda just sat there for a few minutes, staring at the machine. A core paradigm shift occurred that day, and I'll never look at ATMs in the same light again. I feel a little dirty.

I returned this morning and thankfully managed to withdraw enough cash to pay for my two nights at Dijembe. After that, I said my tearful goodbyes (well, not actually tearful. That's not terribly manly) and hopped on the Baz Bus for my next leg of the trip.

I'm currently chilling out in Plettenberg Bay. I'll write about that tomorrow.

Baz Bus and Bungyyyyyy!

2009-03-26T15:37:00.004+02:00

So, I'm officially on the backpacking trail. My primary means of getting around is a neat little system known as the Baz Bus. It's a hop-on hop-off shuttle service (I'm not aware of anything similar that operates on a national level in South Africa) and it basically allows you to buy a single ticket and ride in one direction for as long as you want, getting on and off whenever you want, over however much time you need. I got myself a “PE to Cape Town” ticket and have been doing door-to-door backpacking ever since.

A stunning picture of me. The Baz Bus is in the background.

Right now, I've been spending some time in Storms River near the official, Guinness-approved, Tallest Bungy Jump In The Whole World™. In fact, I was only in the neighbourhood for about twenty minutes before I was whisked off to the Bloukrans Bridge for this life-changing adrenaline experience.

Of course, I didn't ... um ... actually do the bungy.

Fail.

In my defense, I was sincerely prepared to take the plunge (hurhur, pun there) and go for it, but I only carried R200 in cold hard cash and the adventure centre's card machine wasn't working. A single jump costs about R640. A “flying fox” zipline costs about R150. I sure as hell wasn't going to leave without doing at least something, so I paid for the zipline and got to hang about on the bridge for a bit to watch some bungy first-hand. I wasn't allowed to take a camera onto the bridge (in fact, it was kinda impossible: I was terrified that it would fall out of my rather shallow pockets during the zipline) but I can testify that the view was amazing. Almost as amazing as the underwear-clad, co-ed dorming German women that I've just spent the night with.

This view is worth at least five hot women. Or maybe just two.

I'm a little bit disappointed that I didn't get to do the jump: I hear that it's a life-changing experience. But at least my wallet, which was thoroughly prepared to wuss out on my behalf, is feeling a little relieved. Backpacking's expensive, you know.

And yeah, I mentioned cute German backpackers. But I'm not showing the pics because this is a PG-friendly blog. Now go away.*

* Hi mom. If you're reading this, don't get a heart attack. I don't actually have any naughty pictures of these ladies and I've had a lot of good, clean fun with them.**

** Hi everyone else. The only reason why I don't have naughty pictures is because they probably wouldn't let me take them anyway. Also, the next time you're confronted with a bunch of hotties, I want YOU to make the choice between sticking around and running off to fetch your camera. Yeah, that's what I thought.***

*** Ignore that, mom.

Meandering around PE

2009-03-25T17:45:00.003+02:00

I initially booked myself in at the King's Beach lodge for two nights so that I could spend a day in PE before hopping down the Garden Route. Although people generally say that it's an inferior tourist trap to the likes of Knysna and Storms River, I decided that it was worth a look anyway. Besides, I was only about 100 metres away from the beach: it would have been a wasted opportunity otherwise.

Port Elizabeth has some nice things, I'll grant you. I didn't get much of an opportunity to check out the night life, but during the day there are a few interesting tourism spots to head off to. The beaches are fairly standard – the water isn't as frigid as, say, the bloody freezing depths of Camp's Bay, but I'm disappointed by how small and rocky the shoreline is. What came to me as a pleasant surprise was a park that opens up on the beach – it's called “Happy Valley”, and possibly the most notable thing about this place is the inexplicable presence of a whole lot of cartoon character sculptures at various intervals along the path.

Holy crap, it's Asterix!

I had a nice long walk along some of the trails and inexplicably emerged near the Boardwalk Casino. I don't know why, but it was there. So I walked around a little bit. The casino's complex plays host to a whole lot of neat little shops and cafes surrounding a great big body of water. It had all kinds of stuff: a craft market, a nice and classy News Cafe (which for some annoying reason has a minimum age requirement of 23. 22-year-olds everywhere must feel pretty bleak about it) and even a miniature Oriental World (which is really just two restaurants and a Koi pond). It's also apparently the home of Algoa FM. Neato.

Oh dear. Somebody left the bath running again.

On my way back, I ran into a Sprite Zero pool party at the McArthur Pools. Hadn't heard about it – I was pretty much just in the right place at the right time. They had some music, some fancy commentators and a whole bunch of free Sprite, so I ultimately scored.

The spoils of war. Also, juggling sticks.

As a final note, the King's Beach lodge has a kitty. He is made of 90% fluff and cute. I'm gonna call him Mr. Snuffles. He practically launches himself at you for cuddling.

I dispatched the beast with a right hook to the jaw.

Anyway, that's all for PE. I'm currently sitting at Storms River (which is a tourism paradise situated in pretty much the middle of nowhere). More about this place in my next blog post.

Backpacking in Port Elizabeth

2009-03-24T12:48:00.003+02:00

Okay, so now I'm on the road and pretty much backpacking for the first time (okay, not strictly the first time, but this is the first time that it'll actually count). Right now, I'm staying at a place known as the King's Beach backpacker's lodge, situated in Port Elizabeth. Amidst the towering hotels and fancy-schmancy complex buildings it seems not only homely, but remarkably out of place too.

A place to sleep that looks like a house instead of a business. Oh, the novelty!

The King's Beach lodge is a former family home which has now been converted to run as a full-time backpacker's establishment. Staying here is probably best described as pretty much like living in your very own house, except that it's ninety bucks a night and hogging the toast means that somebody will probably end up swearing at you in Spanish. Or French. Or Esperanto.

Beware! There's foreigners hiding behind the couch.

Heck, hearing a plain old South African English accent (or even a hearty dose of Afrikaans) addressing you here is something of a rarity. To my knowledge, I'm the only local aside from the owner who has set foot in this place for a while – the rest of my companions mostly hail from Europe and other far-flung environs. I suppose it's only foreigners who really have the money to maintain a lifestyle like this, but I still find it quite strange how I'm often considered the “odd one out” for engaging in a bit of domestic tourism.

The map is full of pins. Amazingly enough, they remembered to put one of them on South Africa.

Mind you, it's not as if I dislike the foreigners at all. In fact, it's damn interesting staying in this little slice of global heaven. I spent yesterday evening sitting in the living room and chatting with a couple of Swedish exchange students (who gave me some mad liquorice stuff to try), a cricket player from Holland and an eccentric old gent with a powerful Welsh accent who wears a nice hat and goes by the name of Robert.

Robert, like me, appreciates good headwear: this automatically makes him cool. I share a dorm with him and one other fellow who arrived on the same night as I did.

I don't have a fancy national flag by my bed. Everyone else does. I feel a bit naked.

The beds are pretty humble, but they make a refreshing change from couches. For a start, they're bunk beds, which is automatically cool. The furnishings one gets, however, are fairly Spartan: there's a single fluffy blanket to keep you warm and one fairly flat pillow to rest your head on. I didn't mind this all terribly much, but I hope that they provide extras during winter: it looks like it could get a bit cold otherwise.

I give it a 6.5 out of ten. Preferable to many couches, definitely, but I always have to be stricter when I'm scoring beds. And if you stay at a backpacker's, you can't expect royalty unless you're looking to pay for a private room.

Grahamstown wrap-up

2009-03-23T18:37:00.004+02:00

In the dying hours of my sojourn in the little town of G, I paused for a moment to reflect on my time spent there. Unfortunately, I couldn't really think of much because I've just whiled away the past weekend by working – and playing – pretty damn hard. So I'm just going to mention how that all went instead.

First of all – and I cannot do enough to stress the importance of this knowledge – but anybody who visits Grahamstown absolutely has to try out a Ginos pizza. Not only do they put on enough cheese to fuel the plotlines of a dozen Mills and Boon romance novels, but they have something every Sunday known as the family-sized pizza special:

Many brave souls have perished trying to eat a whole one.

For about R100, you can get one of these monsters and a 2 litre drink of your choice. It may sound steep just like that, but a pizza of this size could feasibly – nay, easily – feed a party of four, and the generosity of the establishment becomes evident in the amount of topping material that you get. Ordering a chicken and feta pizza, for example, will cause the pizza box itself to groan under the weight of meat and cheese inflicted upon it. To this day, it still stands as the most glorious pizza I have ever eaten.

The weekend has also been full of a reasonable amount of hanging out at random places and staying up until all hours just to mess around and screw about with our internal clocks. One particular night had me passing out on this delicious little couch:

It's hidden somewhere under all these blankets and pillows.

I had a really, really glorious night on this thing – to be honest, though, that's not very difficult once you've stayed awake long enough. The couch itself is rather spartan and may be less than comfortable in vanilla form, but the amount of cushiony goodness that they managed to cram into my temporary bed more than made up for it.

Ever jumped into one of those awesome little ball pits as a kid? You know, the kind where you swim in a sea of colourful spheres and hide from your parents when it's time to leave?

Neither have I, but I bet I know what it feels like now. 8.5/10.

So anyway, I've finally hauled my butt out of Gtown and am now sitting at the King's Beach backpacker lodge in Port Elizabeth. I'm going to spend a day or two here and see what this Eastern Cape coastal town is really like, then it's on to Storms River. More info with my next blog post.

Admin note thing: Blog subscription

2009-03-20T16:29:00.002+02:00

Hey there, faithful readers.

I initially tacked on Blogger's "follower" app in the hopes that people could receive updates from my blog as they happened. Turns out that it doesn't strictly work like that, so I've added a subscription widget on the right.

Subscribing should allow you to receive updates directly. I think. You know, as they happen. Without you having to check the Website to see if anything has changed.

Umm, let me know how that works out.

A stroll through Gtown

2009-03-20T14:59:00.004+02:00

To prove to people that Grahamstown really does exist (and because I needed to go do some chores for my very own graduation ceremony in April), I had a stroll about town yesterday and took some pictures during the process. The good old town of G is a pretty historic place, and it brings out what's possibly becoming my borderline fetish for fancy architecture (I have a tendency to talk about buildings quite a bit).

Grahamstown's main zone is High Street, a road which leads out of the University and through the centre of town. Halfway down this street is Grahamstown's impressive cathedral (which apparently makes this place an official city) and a bunch of really old buildings from a time before man even had the Internet. Truly the dark ages.

These pictures weren't actually taken in black and white. I changed them to make them look fancy.

One of these ancient buildings happens to be a local outfitter and clothing supplier known as Birch's. Not only is it the primary supplier of academic gowns to in the country, but it also holds a special place in my heart for its selection of really nice hats, which includes my very own beloved fedora. My appreciation of quality headwear is pretty much another borderline fetish.

They're locked in cabinets for a reason. That reason is me.

Birch's has a rather novel pulley system that it uses to get notes and stuff across the store quickly and easily. It's quite odd to see this system of ropes and wires hanging from the ceiling in this day and age, but the system really works. I've personally witnessed a few airborn post-its whizzing about, and I almost wish I worked at Birch's just to be able to mess about with this sweet little system a little.

Zip-lining, anyone?

A little bit along the main street is Grahamstown's primary bus stop and the Frontier Hotel and an interesting statue that I've never actually looked at before (I've only ever walked past it in my quest for KFC, anyway).

Dude. Dude, wake up. That angel behind you has your wallet.

The statue is a war memorial concerning the deaths of soldiers who fought here at Albany. I suppose these sort of sculptures have always been a bit of a delicate matter, since they generally herald war heroes from an age of colonialism and oppression, but I always find historical monuments to be charming interesting. And in case you can't see clearly in my piccie, there's a gentleman in the front of the angel who appears to be asleep.

If any readers know the significance of sleeping figures in war memorials, I'd genuinely be interested in hearing what it is. I'm quite sure that it holds a specific meaning, but I can't call it to mind.

... or maybe he's dead. Gee, I only thought of that right now.

St Patrick's Day at Cafe Blanca

2009-03-18T23:52:00.004+02:00

So, as I approach the end of my three-week sojourn in Grahamstown (yeah, it was only ever meant to be three weeks. I'm eyeing you, Mr Danny “When-are-you-going-to-stop-being-such-a-hippie-at-Cow-Moon?” Day) I look back and realise that perhaps I've been a little too engrossed in work and similar comfort zone activites. I decided to take the opportunity on good old St. Paddy's Day to get out, have some fun and admire all the green booze that was suddenly emerging from nowhere.

My highlight of the evening was spending some time at a cocktail garden known as Cafe Blanca, a place on Grahamstown's High Street where my brother works as a bartender. It's a pretty nice place – the vibe is pretty chilled when compared with other establishments, and the patrons generally aren't all that raucous. Heck, even the bartenders are great: there's a lot of interaction with customers and they bring loads of personality to the place.

Some of the Cafe Blanca bartenders. Now with an extra ninja nosepick.

Overall, Blanca is a great establishment for when you want to sit down with a cocktail, talk to your friends and meet new people. And even if you're not into drinking all that much, they have a pretty respectable food menu – if you ever stop by town, ask for the R25 Gatsby sub. It's awesome.

Anyway. St Paddy's. On this particularly special night, the students came out with the full fury of green behind them. I'm not sure how many of them actually know about the main idea behind St Patrick's Day, but it's well-understood that it's a good excuse to get drunk and dress up in interesting ways.

Aftermath of the food colouring accident.

Aside from impersonating orcs and spinach vat victims, most of Blanca's patrons availed themselves of the opportunity to indulge in some St Paddy's specials: for example, a green “depth charge” that I've been duly informed has the punch of a shot with the liquid volume of a draught. Or something like that.

A depth charge. Also known as doom in a tumbler.

I didn't actually buy one of these. At least, not for myself. I wussed out with a hot chocolate and gave my drink to someone else after I'd snapped the photo.

Mmm, chocolate.

The Rhodes University rowing club

2009-03-17T13:02:00.003+02:00

Since my first year at Rhodes University, I've been friends with a member of the rowing squad. He doesn't look as badass as one would suspect (he's actually less than seven feet tall), but by golly does he do some crazy stuff. Like all rowers, he had some sort of hectic diet and exercise regime, and there were times when he would get up before sunrise every day for a few weeks to train.

He even gave up drinking during the sport season. Amongst students, this sort of thing is rather unheard of.

Recently, another of my friends decided to take up rowing as well. And willingly, to boot. We're still trying to get him to check in with a psychologist, but in the meantime I've accompanied him on one or two rowing-related expeditions onto campus.

Yesterday evening, we went for some sort of ergo test thingie at the Rhodes University Rowing Club, a small hovel near the swimming pool and squash courts which served as a home to all sorts of burly, hairy-chested, beer-swilling rowing men and women.

WATCH YOUR BACK.

Well, okay, I've met some truly charming rowing ladies out there, but I still think that it made a wonderful picture. And besides, rowers are about the most macho objects in existence, second only to a distilled mixture of pure chest hair and man-sweat. Seriously, I could feel my beard growing the moment I stepped into the clubhouse – I was also overcome with an overpowering urge to constantly high-five people.

This is the chill zone, where you can pose and flex between exercises.

The Rhodes rowing club wasn't always this way. It apparently owes its success – and the dedication of its members – to one gentleman who single-handedly turned the rowing club from its old B-league ways into the pumped-up festival of madness and testosterone that one sees today. Whoever this guy was, he must have been some sort of demi-god: I've never seen any sportsmen exert themselves so hard or commit themselves so fully to a cause in the way that the Rhodes rowers do. I'm not quite sure whether to regard them with awe or concern.

Occasionally they have silly ideas. Like making rowboats out of concrete. Silly silly.

After about twenty minutes at the club, I decided to duck out and head to the local library to get some work done. The rowers are an interesting bunch, but there's only so much uber-manliness that a hardcore geek can take in one sitting.

Chinese drink things are weird-awesome

2009-03-13T15:41:00.004+02:00

So, being entrenched as I am within the alternate crowd, I tend to stumble across some interesting things. For example, huge shipments of Eastern beverages. Eastern beverages which you can eat. Seriously, a bunch of cryptically-labelled cans consisting of part liquid and part glop arrived at the doors of Cow Moon Theory yesterday. I lent a hand in unloading some of the contents, and was introduced to the concept of making drinks that people could pretty much eat.

Trial by suspicious-looking psuedo-liquids.

Cow Moon's owner came across these concoctions while travelling about in Johannesburg's Chinatown and subsequently decided that it would be great to inflict them upon the humble residents of Grahamstown. We sat down with a few of these things after unpacking them and indulged in some experimental refreshment (a damn fine idea too, considering how hot it was).

It's actually amazing how incredibly different these drinks taste to our regular old Western stuff. I mean, it's not as if they took standard Squeez-O-Juice and threw in some generic chunks. They have a rather different flavour which I'm not used to with liquids in general, and the chunks are – for lack of a better word – meaningful. Even pretty, if you decide to opt for the awesome fruit juices.

This is either litchi or fish eggs. We're still trying to decide.

Suffice it to say, these drinks are really cool. You can get yourself some grass jelly or white pearl tea for R8 (made by a company called Chin Chin, which has rather blatantly stolen Coca Cola's text style). The fruit juice is a bit expensive (15 bucks a pop) but considering the brand-new taste experience, the ability to eat while you drink AND the fact that you can walk away with an awesome glass bottle, I think it's worth it. Also, it's fantastic to drink while watching anime.

I feel totally asian right now.

As a random little tidbit to end off this blog, I've recently been looking into travel options for a trip along the Garden Route to Cape Town. Stumbled across a service known as Baz Bus and I must admit that I'm rather intrigued. More on my plans a little later – I plan on sorting out the next leg of my trip within the week.

My culinary wizardry

2009-03-11T17:53:00.005+02:00

I don't cook. It's just not something that I've ever really been into. I can make myself a toasted sandwich, a heat-up microwave meal or a boiled egg, but that's just about the extent of it.

Recently, I have become exposed to the art of making Real Food™, an endeavour which I was first introduced to when I sort-of-successfully helped some buddies make a killer lasagne. This trend continued while I was in Cape Town – I stayed with a couple of student friends who unbelievably managed to cook meals for themselves every single night. I've encountered some crazy things over the course of my blogging career, but this little factoid has probably astounded me the most.

Since arriving in Grahamstown, I've felt inspired to try this “cooking” thing for myself. The results have been ugly, but edible.

My first dish.

I've benefitted greatly from being able to use the fully-equipped kitchen at Cow Moon Theory to craft my crimes against nature. It wasn't too difficult to get permission to use it outside business hours – offering to cook food for people kinda falls into the same category as famous commentary like “Hey, can you look after my Xbox for a few days?” and “My wallet is way too heavy, would you like some of this money?”

In general, I'm striving to tear apart the good name that pasta meals have acquired over the ages – after all, they're cheap and easy to make. I do intend to diversify, however, and have already attempted bolder ventures such as chicken a la king.

The meal ended up turning into its less glorious cousin: chicken, rice and glop. Half eaten, of course.

What I've found is that cooking isn't as hard as the Internet makes it out to be. Seriously, shame on you Internet. You provide me with a lasagne recipe with about five billion ingredients when all it really takes is a wad of mince, a wad of pasta sheets and a packet of just-add-some-damn-water cheese sauce. I added a can of tomato onion mix and that was JUST BECAUSE I WANTED TO BE FANCY.

My tuna macaroni dish. Ingredient count: 4. Splurt of tomato sauce was number 4.

Cooking an adequate meal is surprisingly easy, even if the results aren't exactly pretty, and I think that simpler recipes need to be more broadly advertised so that neophytes like me can see that making food isn't so hard. Yes, my lasagne isn't nearly as good as the stuff that top chefs make, but it's a springboard into the Real Food™ world and hey, it's still pretty edible.

It's great to know that I can start with a bare bones pasta dish like this, for example, and then elaborate in the future with more interesting stuff like garlic, chicken livers and crystal meth. If only more Doritos-eating basement dwellers like me realised that this truly was the case.

OutRhodes party – rock around the clock!

2009-03-09T12:18:00.006+02:00

I had a rather crazy night on Saturday – I was determined to live it up and actually go past midnight without spontaneously flopping onto a couch somewhere in narcoleptic fury. By the power of Facebook and my continued attachment to the student newswire, I was alerted to the existence of gay-bashing at Rhodes. And by “gay-bash” I do, of course, mean a huge party hosted by OutRhodes, a local LGBT support/activism/rights/party-throwing group. Oh, how witty and misleading I can be, dear reader!

I've always considered Grahamstown to be rather intent on their crusade to support all sexual paradigms when compared to other locations in South Africa – the community has a broad and rather passionate group of supporters, and although I consider some of their actions to be rather heavy-handed at times, I can't help but admire their ability to tirelessly crusade for a cause and still throw awesome parties at the same time. Especially when they feature free drinks and pizza.

Oh, and an awesome dress theme.

Yes, that's a Guitar Hero controller. You trying to say something?

The “Rock around the clock” theme of the party allowed me to dress up as pretty much anything, so basically getting some rags of clothing together and giving peace symbols once in a while allowed me to pass as some hipster rip-off. I was originally going for David Bowie as he appears in Labyrinth, but I couldn't quite fit into my pair of Goblin King tights.

Also: hair.

Unfortunately, I feel that the venue didn't quite do justice to the size of the party, and I didn't stay for terribly long. I'd also decided not to bring my camera along (shallow pockets and a raucous dancefloor were asking for trouble in my opinion), and am still trying in vain to source some pictures of the event for your viewing pleasure. I'll try update later when I have something.

After OutRhodes, I spent the evening bouncing around Slipstream Sports Bar, a friend's digs and Cow Moon Theory. Long story short, I got to sleep at about 8am. Funnily enough, my last three hours were thrown into an intense bout of game development. I guess that's what happens when geeks party too hard.

Speaking of which, I have Xbox Live for another month. Yay me!

Well, sorta yay. If I drop off this blog for a few weeks, you'll at least have an explanation for my absence.

Drums, sticks and Mahjong

2009-03-07T18:47:00.003+02:00

In my quest to become ever more hippy/alternative/barefoot, I decided to pitch up at a meeting of the Rhodes University African Drum Society. Well, okay, it's difficult to describe as a meeting per se: it's more like a bunch of people stumbling upon the same place at the same time and, well, staying there for a bit. But it's meet-ish enough anyway.

Oh bother, they forgot the chairs.

I swung by because I was promised a shot with some fire sticks that one of my brother's good friends owns. As some may be aware, I have a thing for devil sticks and know a thing or two about whacking stuff in mid-air. I'm not that good, but learning is fun.

Another session of Chucking Stuff Around™ commences.

The Drum Soc meeting was pretty awesome. It was very laid-back, had a flexible agenda and – most importantly – was populated with chilled-out, friendly individuals. I even got to meet some people that I hadn't seen in a while.

Also, fire sticks. These buggers are super heavy. The stuff that I juggle with weighs about as much as, say, a can of soda. The proper, kill-yo-momma-with-an-axe sticks that the pros set fire to weigh approximately as much as six baby elephants. They're not so much a toy as they are a lethal weapon. Another reason to hate clowns.

Following the Drum Soc meeting, I wandered on over to various establishments for a night out, eventually settling in at Cow Moon Theory where I was introduced to the game of Mahjong.

Yep, those are leather punk gloves. Because Mahjong players are badasses.

I've seen it being played several times before, but this is the first time I've actually been involved in a game myself (beyond the ever-so-lame solitaire version, which is pretty good for killing time and probably your braincells too). The game bears a resemblance to Rummy, except that everything is in confusing Chinese characters and you make funny sound effects whenever you lay down a set.

I burned a good few hours playing Mahjong that evening. It's actually really fun, even if you're only playing with a very basic ruleset (whoever hit Mahjong won, and we left it at that). After my gaming session was over, I headed back home with a friend and we spent the rest of the evening watching movies and talking rubbish. Then I crashed at his place for the night.

Crash place of awesomeness.

This is hands-down the best couch in the universe. I've not slept on it as often as most others, and it's not an easy one to reach (my friend lives at the top of a really steep hill), but it is by far the most comfortable sleep experience I have ever encountered. I honestly find nothing wrong with this thing – it's broad, it's comfortable, the arm rests are literally shaped like cute little pillows and – if you're extra lucky – you'll wake up the next morning to a host of gorgeous women who will be more than happy to serve you coffee and toast.

10/10 for this marvel of the modern age. I literally can't find anything wrong with it, and my naps on it are always a pleasant experience. I would give you the identity of the friend concerned, but there's only a limited amount of couch to go around and I want to maintain a certain amount of exclusivity. Go find your own sleepy place.

The Cow Moon Theory hubbly den

2009-03-05T13:46:00.008+02:00

One of my favourite haunts over the past year has been Cow Moon Theory, a hubbly bar and alternative hangout that's somehow squeezed itself between the local jock dens and fast food joints.

Come here if you want oolong. Grease and alcohol poisoning are a little further up the street.

To this day, I have a good relationship with the owners and often hang out with them to do general hippy stuff like smoking hubbly (or hookah, as it's formally known) and drinking green tea. The vibe here is fantastic – in the afternoon, you can expect a quiet sit-down with a few of the regulars. When evening arrives, more locals start popping in and the place becomes flooded with chatter and all sorts of new faces.

The customers are a weird bunch. Just the way we like it.

Even on the busiest of nights, it's never impossible to lay back and just chill – this is what I've always loved about the establishment. For me, Cow Moon has served as a way to hit the town and socialise without having to get drunk and snog somebody on a dingy dancefloor. It's also quite exciting to see the changes that are made on a monthly basis – it's still a developing business, and the staff continue to surprise me with all the new ideas that they whip out for the customers. Especially when it comes to the food menu.

Om nom nom.

In its short history, Cow Moon has evolved its kitchen on several occasions to try new things and see what sticks with customers. In my time with them, I've sampled homemade pies, Middle-Eastern cuisine, extremely creative sandwiches, Moroccan kebabs and even classic mac-and-cheese meals.

What they now seem to have settled upon is a variety of food wraps. Get a meat or vegetable base, then add four ingredients of your choice. If you can't decide, a few suggestions are made for you.

I ate one of these little buggers last night. It was great. I also decided upon a slightly creative combo – apples, steak and feta sounded too interesting to pass up on. Catching these wraps on special meant that they only cost me R25.

As much as the menu has changed, however, one foodlike thing seems to have stuck over the ages – the legendary Cow Moon Brownies. They stand locked inside an iron fortress on the counter, tempting customers and passers-by with their dark, delicious, sugar-laden promises. Not only are they totally delectable on their lonesome, but the owners have now alighted upon the brilliant idea of “Brownie in a Mug”. By tossing some brownie mix into a coffee cup along with some icecream and possibly some kind of super-secret substance that's more addictive than meth, they've crafted one of the most awesome little desserts in Grahamstown (with perhaps the exception of the Bar One milkshakes at Red Cafe – but I'll write about those later). It's yumsome.

Then, of course, there's the awesome couches.

Colourful. Comfy. Cow-like.

These things are great when you want to sit down, chill out or even take a nap. And I have something of a reputation at the establishment for doing all three. Yes, dear reader, I've personally left a permanent indentation on more than half of the couches in that place – a testament to their comfort and lie-downability.

Being the sort of place it is, Cow Moon has an entire army of cushions at its disposal and a bunch of hubblies around to get you heavy-headed. These combine marvellously on, say, a lazy Tuesday afternoon to get you curling up and passing out for a few minutes while people carry on with whatever they're doing around you. Awesome? Awesome.

Except when somebody decides to be a dick and hits you on the head with a pillow. 8.5/10.

Reader, meet Grahamstown

2009-03-03T15:47:00.007+02:00

In some ways, it's a bit more difficult to write about a place when you've spent a good whack of time there already. Grahamstown is the home of Rhodes University, an institution where I spent a good three years of my life learning stuff and being all student-like. As a result, everything is ... well, rather familiar to me by now. It's difficult to decide what would impress visitors the most, so I decided to just spend an afternoon wandering around campus and artistically appreciating it for a change.

Let's be fair, this place is awesome.

Rhodes really is a glorious-looking place when you get to it. I mean, my own review of UCT's aesthetics last week was pretty generous, but it's been a long time since I've realised just how pristine this small-town varsity really is. I guess spending most of my time stuck inside boring old lecture venues and sanitised computer labs has altered my perspective somewhat.

Aside from my stroll around the university grounds, it's difficult to isolate just one thing that's happened in the past few days that I would cover on this blog – I've been doing an absolute truckload of random stuff with old friends, and my lamentable coverage recently means that I'll kinda just have to roll all the cool stuff into a little ball and satisfy myself with mentioning that on Sunday I had the opportunity to play Guitar Hero and Dead Space inside a lecture auditorium – there was a LAN party at Eden Grove which I took advantage of fully. Big screen, big sound and one helluva good time.

Not actually the venue, but it's good enough.

Also, I've got about half a dozen people offering me their beds every night (not quite in the way you'd think), so my next few weeks are going to be oozing with sleep reviews. Take this one, for example:

A classic.

I spent a great deal of time lying on this little bugger last year because I had a tendency to crash at my one friend's student sanctum altogether far too often (it kinda got to the point where I spent more time hanging out with his digsmates than he did). It's a great sleep spot with possibly the most comfortable couch foam in existence. Fact. It's like they rounded up a bunch of kittens, dressed them in feather boas and then hid them under the sofa cover.

I'd sleep on that.

There's a few drawbacks, of course - mainly the couch's age, which means that it's somewhat ruptured in places. The arms are also extremely flimsy and will absolutely refuse to support you if you decide to lean on them. Then there's the fact that I woke up this morning to the sight of my friend shuffling past in his boxers. Gah.

Overall, this couch gets a good solid eight out of ten. It gets pushed up to a nine if you get rid of my buddy's asscrack.

Cape Town Design Indaba

2009-03-02T12:03:00.005+02:00

Righto: as promised, my little wrap-up spiel about Cape Town is going to be about the Design Indaba Expo that I attended on Friday. This annual event – held at Cape Town's ICC in the city centre – is all about professional designers showcasing wares which include fashion, furniture, décor, jewellery and all the other stuff which makes our lives prettier.

Also, queues.

You know it's bad news when the line disappears over the horizon.

After waiting for about half an hour to purchase my ticket and squeeze through to the main showfloor, I was met with a sight that can only be described as awe-inducing. For the layman, I suppose it's sufficient to illustrate the Indaba as a flea market on steroids. Or maybe crystal meth. Sure, you get the standard assortment of people peddling their wares and showcasing various craftwork, but the products in question are somewhat more jawdropping than the average craft mart doohickey. A visit to pretty much every stall is necessary if you want to do your eyes – and imagination – sufficient justice. I'd show you pictures of the goods, but unfortunately I encountered one little hitch.

Aw, CRAP.

I did manage to get permission from some of the designers on a case-by-case basis and I have some amazing pictures of the stuff that they do, but I don't really have their consent to put them on this blog, so I'll satisfy myself with a few callouts instead.

The Indaba was understandably filled with a lot of African pieces – and we're not just talking about good old SA here, but work from Namibia, Botswana and a whole host of other places. Some good examples are found with the group Aid To Artisans, an international organisation which links local workers to new markets – in a nutshell, allowing crafters of handmade, cultural goods to get some exposure and receive potential new buyers.

Then there's those innovative little pieces which catch one's eye, such as the Songololo Couch (it looks like it sounds) by Haldane Martin, who have also devised a bunch of other modular and genuinely interesting furniture including the coolest coffee table on the planet.

Of course, the computer geek in me couldn't help but ogle over some of the technology-enabled exhibitions on show, including the amazing 3D-printer work by Nomili. That's right – a three-dimensional printer. The type you hook up to a freaking computer. It prints out physical models and stuff.

A final shout-out goes to emerging designer Nick Rose, who specialises in jewellery design and industrial art. In human terms: he makes cool things out of computer parts. Heck, he wears a damn carbon kevlar trilby. This guy is one of about several dozen “emerging creatives” featured at the Indaba – basically a student equivalent of the main expo, featuring work from a bunch of 2008 design students. Another nice idea which yields some interesting results.

I leave you now, dear reader, with this picture of the nearby Woolworths:

Try not to get lost in here.

You could misplace a herd of humpback whales in here. Simply put, this is the biggest single indoor retail shop that I have ever seen – and seriously, you get elephant dealerships which require less real estate. This place has more escalators in it than the whole of Grahamstown, too.

Speaking of which, I promise that I'll be blabbing more about the good old “town of G” from the next post onward. I'd have posted sooner, but my cellphone has been kicking up a fuss and refuses to speak with my computer. I don't know when the fallout occurred – I didn't even realise before now that electronics had feelings, or the ability to sulk.

I guess you learn something new every day. I'll catch y'all in another 24 hours or so.

Ninja post: I'm in Grahamstown now!

2009-02-28T11:18:00.002+02:00

Well, the heading pretty much sums things up. In a surprise move, I am suddenly not in Cape Town. I snuck onto a Grahamstown-bound bus last night and have pitched up at the small university town just in time to wish my brother a happy birthday. Boy, I've missed this place.

So anyway, I spent most of my Friday at the Design Indaba Expo, and the rest of it on a bus. The former was absolutely amazing -- the latter much less so. If you're interested in design (and haven't checked the expo yet), I suggest you haul your ass over there by Monday and check it out.

Anyway, that's all for now. I'll write a more detailed account of the Indaba once I get settled down here and actually have time to blog. It's a madhouse at the moment.

A visit to UCT

2009-02-26T23:24:00.003+02:00

The University of Cape Town is supposed to be one of the finest institutions in the world, or something like that. While I'm not particularly interested in going into a diatribe about academic merit and all that boring rot, I will say this: it's a very pretty place. The upper campus possesses that delightful mixture of aesthetic and function that you'll only find with older architecture, and most of the paved pathways and side roads offer some truly astounding sights.

Here's an example of the Green Vine Monster devouring parts of campus that it deems unworthy.

Of course, it's the students that make the University, and I was fortunate enough to arrive on campus while they were holding their annual “RAG Olympics” – a charity event that involves students getting bruised, dirty and stupid. You know, the sort of stuff that all future leaders are good at.

The crowd bays for blood. Or maybe alcohol.

The Olympics entailed such noble events as stair racing (sliding down the Jameson stairs on a cardboard toboggan), trolley racing, tyre hopping and – of course – the mandatory downing of some sort of disgusting liquid. It was quite vibey and pretty impressive, not least because there was a promo crew hanging around and giving away free ice cream. I could get used to this sort of thing if I was a student here.

I spent a bit of time in the plaza being a great big show-off and juggling for the nearby students. Then I went to grab something from the food court at a nearby campus block known as Cissie Gool Square. This was awesome for two reasons. One was that the name was pronounced “sissy ghoul”, which is just plain rad. The other neat little tidbit about this place was that it was a freaking miniature mall complete with shops and outfitters.

After studying at a place like Rhodes University , with barely over 5000 students to its name and situated in a tiny town, I find the idea of another institution's food court dwarfing our entire social quad to be rather frightening.

They. Have. A. TELEVISION.

So after feeling like a small-town hick for several hours, I decided enough was enough and headed back home for some R&R (catching a Jammie Shuttle because, again, the varsity is just too damn big to walk across). A word to the wise: as hippy and nature-loving as it may seem at first to prance about barefoot, don't ever do it during a hot summer day. And if you do, stay away from the roads. The mutinous, blistery mass that was once my feet can testify to that. Never again, I tell you.

Super bonus extra: El Rondo the juggler

2009-02-25T17:05:00.005+02:00

I found a lot of cool stuff at the Waterfront yesterday, but I have to say that the highlight of my trip was the run-in with El Rondo.

Haaaai there, El Rondo!

El Rondo is a devil stick juggler, and I first met him last year at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival where he sold me two sets of devil sticks . I consider myself quite the enthusiast – for the past few months, I've been working with them rather diligently and now have a few simple tricks that I can pull off to impress laymen. There's something almost meditative about stick-wielding, and it's awesome to watch a professional going at it. If you're not convinced, then I urge you to have a gander at this vid of El Rondo in action:

No, there aren't any magnets involved. Seriously.

We chatted for a while about various things, and I even had a chance to show him a few of the moves I'd learned since our last meeting. Seeing El Rondo again – by pure random chance, no less – was pretty damn awesome. This guy is something of a living legend in my books, and there's a chance that I'll run into him again as I travel around the country this year. I look forward to our next meeting.

Waterfrontin'

2009-02-25T16:26:00.005+02:00

After deciding yesterday afternoon that I would never forgive myself if I left Cape Town without first visiting the V&A Waterfront, I hopped onto a train and made my way to the city centre.

Even in the midst of a big, smelly, crowded urban environment, Cape Town still somehow manages to feel colourful and coastal. I guess this is due to the proximity of Greenmarket Square to the train station. Greenmarket is basically an enormous craft market in the middle of Cape Town's CBD, with a concentrated nucleus of stalls in the square itself and a whole bunch of peripheral barrows lining the surrounding walkways and side roads. It's delightfully atmospheric.

I call this “the gauntlet”.

Unfortunately, the market is a bit of a tourist trap - to the exclusion of all else. Yes, rows and rows of African carvings, masks and random jewellery may intrigue foreign consumers, but there's not really much for a domestic traveller to look at. Not to mention that most of the stalls quite literally sell the same cultural doohickeys as all of the others do.

No, seriously: it took me about five minutes to realise that the vast majority of establishments had identical siblings scattered around the market. It's like they pushed a bunch of gimmicky crap into a cloning vat somewhere and accidentally sent every single copy to Cape Town. Not much variety, but I guess that's the sort of stuff that holiday couples adore. And it probably keeps the store owners afloat, too.

I found the Waterfront to be far more impressive.

One of the Waterfront hotels. I guess rich folk like the smell of fish.

The Waterfront is a pretty big place full of shops, craft markets and lovely photo opportunities. And since it's such a huge tourism spot, you'll inevitably run into a nice variety of interesting folk. Most of them will be asking you for money, of course, but it's a refreshing change of scenery and there's a lot of stuff for the dedicated sightseer to get up to.

I could blab for ages about the activities, events and shops at the Waterfront, and that's only counting the stuff that I actually saw. Lamentably, however, I had only the lesser part of an afternoon to take in all the sights and splendours of the Waterfront. I'm not one for doing the same thing twice when there's so much to experience out there, but I'm seriously considering the idea of heading back again on Friday after I swing by the Design Indaba Expo.

And now, a final related snippet for this post: what's the deal with the no-cameras policy everywhere? Half the places that I visited today had some sort of issue with photography, and the budding journalist in me died a little every time I was told to put my camera away. Of course, I managed to revive it a little here and there by taking pictures on the sly. I totally rebelled against authority, yo.

This one's my favourite.

So yeah. Pretty eventful day. Methinks I'm going to write some more about the Waterfront when I head there again.