Right, thats what I thought...hot...sun...dry...sand...desert...cactus maybe...small shrubs...
...yea we are wrong...today we woke up at Le Jardin Backpackin' to snow capped mountains!
Now Nita and Terrance, the owners of the hostel we slept at, tell me it practically never snows in town like it did last night...and by never they meant maybe once every three years...but yea it did...check out the video if you want more proof. And I trust Nita and Terrance as both of them are amazing individuals. In less than an hour Nita explained the history of the neighborhood and town. She also shared tales of Terrance, her husband, running the local club/bar. Terrance revisited is SA military past with us. He even told us some top secret intel about SA former Nuclear program. On top of it all, my dad says Terrance has the best accent that he has heard yet. Here is a picture of the two:
Check out some of the shell casings and other SA military weaponry Terrance had laying around:
Anyways, the snow affected our plans for the day...just a little. We were planning on going to Nieu-Bethesda to the Owl House. The short story is a crazy widow lived there and filled the house and backyard with some "abstract" "visionary" "outsider" art. And a lot of it is related to owls. Seeing as Hartford High's mascot is the owl and my dad is an outside that like art (hahaha) it seemed like the perfect place. So....after driving through road blocks and policemen telling us different mountain passes were closed, we drove 1+ hours in our tiny Nissan Tida on snow covered dirt roads to Nieu Bethesday...turns out, the staff closed it for the day as the backyard was covered with snow and there is a lot of artwork on the ground that could be tripped on. After my dad made friends with a local musician who was playing a three string guitar for money...we realized someone forgot our backpack with passports and most importantly FIFA match tickets back in Graaff-Reinet...so we made the trek back to Nita who was faithfully guarding our valuables in hand for us. With tickets in hand we were then ready to begin our drive to Kimberly in the Northern Cape. The drive took us through more of the Great Karoo and through some awesome small towns on the 500km+ drive.
You must watch the video to see our snow adventure. Oh, and I almost forgot. Because snow is so rare, there were 10s-100s of people pulled over on the side of the road building snowman and having snow ball fights. It was awesome to share the excitement of so many people playing in snow for the first time. This included busloads of middle school boys who were in Graaff-Reinet for a week-long Rugby tournament. In the video you can see a bunch of them on the side of the road throwing snowballs!
Oh yeah, check out this photo I took while we stopped off the side of the road to do some star gazing. My mom's fancy camera has a lot more potential than I am capable of taking advantage of...but I'm pretty proud of my first attempt so please don't burst my bubble! : p
No comments:
Post a Comment