Now that I’m fully capable of driving with a manual transmission, I have the freedom to go into town and on various other adventures out of Klipwal as I please. I took advantage of that this weekend first by driving into town for my weekly grocery shopping. With the recent storms and rainfall we have had here the past week, the heavily pot-holed route out to Piet Retief has become considerably worse. With many of the potholes noticeably wider and deeper, the drive to town took an extra 10 or 15 minutes on top of the usual hour it requires. Once I arrived I did my shopping, sent off some letters from the post office, and went to the hardware store to get some yellow spray paint which I so desperately could have done with for mapping underground this past week.
Saturday afternoons this time of year are dominated by Currie Cup Rugby, and this Saturday was the semi-finals of the playoffs. It coincides nicely with the Major League Baseball playoffs, so I’ll use that as an analogy to attempt to give you some sort of an emotional attachment to the rugby playoffs here. If you aren’t a fan of baseball or rugby, I’m sorry. You can skip the next few paragraphs. The first matchup was between the Blue Bulls of Pretoria, the perennial powerhouse with a huge fan base and lots of money to buy good players. Their fans are arrogant and often crass (they’re the ones with the giant blue testicles hanging off the back of their trucks), and no season is a success unless they win the title. They are the New York Yankees. Saturday afternoon’s semi-final pitted the Blue Bulls against the Durban Sharks, an up and coming surprise package that easily took first place in the regular season standings this year. They have very little playoff experience but they had home field advantage and all the talent to get a victory. The Sharks are much like the Texas Rangers.
I walked the five minutes over to Jaco’s house to watch the game. He is a Blue Bulls fan and his wife Ann-Marie is a Sharks supporter, so things were already tense when I arrived. To make matters worse, the game was delayed 30 minutes because of a swarm of bees on the pitch. I kid you not. Finally the match started and the Sharks stunned the Blue Bulls with a try in the opening three minutes. The rest of the match was hard fought but yielded little scoring opportunities as the rain came pouring down in the second half. The Durban Ranger Sharks of Texas eventually prevailed 16-12 over the New York Blue Bull Yanks of Pretoria.
The next semi-final match-up immediately followed and pitted Western Province (from Cape Town) against the Free State Cheetahs. Western Province haven’t been to the final since 2001 and sported an experienced side anchored by national hero and super-quick winger Brian Habana. They are a traditional team with a storied history and play in Cape Town, a picturesque coastal city by the bay. Sounds a bit like the San Francisco Giants to me. The Free State Cheetahs have Orange and white jerseys, play their home games in Bloemfontein, and have a carnivorous mammal as their mascot. Just like the Philadelphia Phillies! Western Province ended up cruising in this semi-final, easily handling the Phillies – I mean the Cheetahs – 31-7. So my bold prediction based on South African rugby results is: There will be a Texas Rangers – SF Giants World Series. You heard it here first.
Enough of the sports then (I like sports), what else happened this weekend? Well I can now knock off another Ocean from my list, because today I drove out east with Nick to St. Lucia and dipped my feet in the Indian Ocean. Considerably warmer than the North Sea, the Indian Ocean was pleasant to wade in but the brownness of the water was slightly ugly to look at. The turbidity of the ocean was no doubt due to the recent storms that have churned up the waters in the area, but we managed to pick a beautiful day to go to the beach. I took the opportunity to do a little sun bathing and go for a nice run along what was a very picturesque beach with soft sand grading into rolling grassy dunes as you went inland. Reading one of the signs, I learned that the sand there was apparently highly enriched in Titanium, which you could see in the form of irregular black streaks of fine sand within the coarser beige material. It was amusing for a geologist. There were also hundreds of little crabs running around (or crab-walking around), but I could annoyingly never get close enough to one for a picture because they would just disappear in one of the thousands of little crab holes dotting the beach.
After the nice time at the beach which reminded me so dearly of West Sands in the auld grey toon, we returned to the tourist village of St. Lucia and I had an awesome seafood platter for lunch that included some Mozambique prawns and an ice cold beer to drink, which I have to say went down like a homesick mole. That’s one of Nick’s sayings and I hear it about five times per day so I had to include it at some point. After that it was back in the truck and Nick drove back the three and a half hours to Klipwal.
Tomorrow I will experience my first full shift underground. The underground shifts here have recently changed, and because there is only one morning shuttle in the Unimog down to the 6-level entrance, I now start work at 6 am (YAY!!!) and I’ll be underground mapping from 7 until 2. Until now I have only been underground about 4 hours at a time at most, so it will be interesting to see whether I enjoy working in the dark for that long a time!
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