The Wanderers

October is a beautiful time to visit Switzerland: It is much less crowded than during summer, the weather is still very nice (at least it was this year) and the trees are changing colors, making for some beautiful scenery. Oddly enough, September was much less pleasant this year with cold and wet weather (with snow on the mountains).

We tried to capture the beauty of the fall in Switzerland in a series of photos which we took during two separate trips on the Klausen pass. The first time around, we had to turn back because the pass was closed for snow. The second time around, the pass was fully accessible.

Click on the image to visit the photo album containing these pictures. Enjoy!



BTW, if you ever need to check whether a pass / road is open in Switzerland, this page shows the current status of all the roads.

One of the things we noticed about living in Switzerland is how honest (most) people are: when anyone looses and object, others go through efforts to try to get it back to them. Typically, if people don't know who the object belongs to, the finder places it in a very visible place so the person who lost it can easily find it back.

Case in point was the following sign which we noticed at the noticeboard at the entrance to our building. Someone had found an earring and did not only not just take it, they went through the trouble of creating a sign and attaching the earring to the sign so the person who has lost the earring can easily find it back.


The sign reads "who has lost this?"

The same honesty applies when you leave your bag or suitcase sitting somewhere - you typically do not have to worry about someone taking it.

August 1st is a big holiday in Switzerland, very similar to 4th of July in the US. We were less interested in all the speeches that happen on this day in cities and towns across Switzerland, but we did attend some spectacular fireworks nearby, one in Fluelen, a town at the end of Vierwaldstädtersee (Lake Lucerne) and one on Buergenstock, a small mountain (1100m) overlooking the Vierwaldsädtersee and Lucerne.

Not only are there very nice professional displays, on the first of August, many people also shoot fireworks, sometimes big ones, privately. In the run-up to the holidays, you can buy fireworks everywhere, including at the grocery store.

Here are some pictures from the fireworks we attended in Fluelen. As always, click on a picture to get a larger version:

Switzerland ... they must have mountains there!

A few weeks ago we took a daytrip to the top of a nearby mountain, called Rigi. We took a train to Arth-Goldau (about 25 minutes from Zug) and took the blue mountain railway up to the top of Rigi.

After we explored the top and had some lunch, we came back down with the red mountain railway, which took us down to the other side of the mountain to a place called Vitznau.

From Vitznau, we took a beautiful boat ride on Vierwaldstättersee (Lake Lucerne) to Luzern (approx 30 minutes) where we took the train back to Zug.

The views from the top were beautiful. Click on the panorama below to see a full screen view of what we saw on the top:


And check out the other pictures of this trip in the gallery:

Last Sunday, we suddenly heard an odd sound coming through the windows. We were curious to find out what it was, so went outside to check it out.

Sure enough, there were a couple of men playing alphorns right outside of our window on the courtyard! The alphorn is a traditional Swiss instrument that looks like a very large trumpet, made from wood.

I had the chance to try to play one of those instruments a while back in a team building exercise at work and, like most people at the event, found it very difficult to even get a note out of the instrument, let alone actually playing a tune on it!

You can hear a short recording of what we heard by clicking here. If you listen carefully, you will also hear cowbells in the recording. This is another typical Swiss tradition, where all the cows have large bells hanging around the neck and you can hear them from far away! We have five of those cows on a nearby field and constantly hear the cowbells ringing.

Here are a few pictures of the two men playing the alphorns:

We did it again ... and added another country to our list. We moved back to Europe - Switzerland this time. More specifically we ended up in Zug in the German speaking part of Switzerland.

Although we are getting used to moving around (this is Johan's 8th country and Karl's 6th!), moving internationally continues to be a big adventure every time. We moved out in South Africa at the end of January and moved into our new place in Zug mid-February. We are still up to our necks in boxes, trying to shoehorn a medium-sized house into a city apartment, but we're getting things sorted out and starting to feel at home in our new location.

Changing from South Africa to Switzerland takes some getting used to, particularly since we moved from
summer in South Africa to winter in Switzerland. And, of course, everyone tells us we're having record amounts of cold weather. The snow-line has come down to visit the city folk, and enough snow comes off the balcony railing to make a couple snowballs. In South Africa, we'd still be using the pool.

The following pictures from both sides of our move give a glimpse of some of the differences (click on the image to get a larger version of the photo).



More about our adventures in Switzerland will undoubtedly follow!

In our post of June 7, 2007, we mentioned the "Birds of Eden" bird park. Right nextdoor (same parkinglot) is another animalpark called "monkeyland". Monkeyland is a monkey sanctuary (who would have guessed) where different types of primates roam around in a section of forest.

When you visit monkeyland, you first end up in a visitor center with restaurant, where you can observe the monkeys around you and have something to eat or drink. If you are not paying close attention, the monkeys may steal some of your food though! Entrance to this area is free and is a great experience.

If you want to see some of the more shy monkeys and want to see monkeys in their natural habitat, you have to take a paid tour around the forest with a guide. The guide takes you along the different paths, including across a suspension bridge, and points out different monkeys along the way. As the monkeys are free roaming, you never know what you may end up seeing where.

We really enjoyed this sanctuary on the Garden Route and actually went there a couple of times. You can have a look at some of the photos we took during our visits there by clicking on the picture below.

Best wishes for 2008 from South Africa!

This is our third New Year in South Africa and we are still not used to celebrating Christmas and New Year in the middle of summer! Hot weather (the last few days it has been approximately 30C/86F) does just not seem right for this time of the year. Particularly when you see Christmas trees, hear Christmas charols and people shoot fireworks for New Year. We celebrated by making several trips to the beach and going swimming in our pool at home ... in the mean time we are hearing about cold weather in Europe and the US. What a different experience!

All of this will change soon: in February, we will move to Switzerland where Johan will take up his next position in the company. We will move out of our current place by the end of January and will make a little trip to Cape Town, both for leisure as well as for work, before we make our final move. The move may prove quite a shock as we will go from summer weather in South Africa to winter weather in Switzerland, which will take some adjustment!

A couple of weeks ago we visited Wavecrest, a beach resort on the wild coast in the Transkei, approximately two hours drive from where we live. Going to the Wild Coast is always a great experience as it is one of those places where you really feel like you can have a whole beach for yourself. You also drive through a more remote area to get there and experience a very different side of South Africa. Here are some pictures of our experience. As always, please select the picture to see a larger version.

Panorama of the lagoon and the beach - click on the picture to get a full screen version and experience the location!

We use Panorama Factory to create our panorama's. Not only does the tool do a fantastic job at stitching pictures together, it also works under Linux and Mac. As both of us run Ubuntu at home, this is an important criteria!

Pretty rocks by the beach:


Two people canoeing on the lagoon:


In order to get to wavecrest, you drive on a dirtroad in the remote Transkei area. The Traskei is a hilly, green area and feels very remote and poor. This picture shows one of the the views along the way. Judging by the size of the dwelling, the family living here must be of pretty well of:


Driving on dirt road takes some getting used to. You have to drive carefully as there are animals on the road, such as this cow:

Our website has gone very quiet lately, mainly due to being extremely busy. For those of you who are wondering, we still are alive and well and still are in South Africa.

In general, living in South Africa is like living in any other developed country with reasonable good road infrastructure, good housing, shopping malls, telephone, etc. It would be easy to forget that one is actually living in Africa.

Now and then, you get reminded of this fact when reading the local newspaper with stories about a witch being killed by her fellow villagers, a chieftainess being killed because the village does not agree with having a female leader or a four-year old being killed by a traditional healer to ensure a successful hairdresser business. Of course, you also learn about some of the local Xhosa traditions such as the initiation rituals or boys stick fighting.

It is amazing to think that all those stories happen so nearby and you are not really aware of it on a day-to-day basis. However, we are also reminded about the fact that we are living in Africa every time recently we have electricity cuts. This happens on almost a daily basis, often for several hours at a time. Much of this is due to "load shedding" as there is not enough electricity to go around, so the power company turns of different parts of the country at different times. It would not be that bad if it would be announced when such cuts would happen, but the power company, Eskom, and the city, who send us the bill, cannot agree on who should inform the public so nobody knows when the cuts will strike. What we do know is that the problem is not going away anytime soon. In fact, it has become such a normal event that people hardly react when it happens. The other day I was in a business meeting when the electricity, and therefore the lights, projector and airconditioning, went of. People just continued to talk as if nothing has happened as it is such a common occurrence. Similarly, you learn to live with it at home.

A few weeks ago, the electricity outage caused our ADSL Internet connection to go down ... and stay down for 8 days! The local telecommunications monopoly, Telkom, had many issues countrywide resulting in waiting times of up to two hours for phone support. The people providing the support often did not know what was happening and our ticket was closed automatically after a few days, even though the problem was not solved! Mind you, for all of this, we are paying among the highest ADSL prices in the world for very poor speed.

So, yes, we still are living in Africa ...

As mentioned in our previous blogpost, we visited Birds of Eden, the worlds largest aviary on our recent trip to Natureś valley. This particular aviary covers two hectares and includes different habitats such as a river, an indigenous forest, a lake, etc. There is an amazing variety of birds in the free-flight aviary and you sometimes can get very close to them. There are also some smaller mammals such as bushmonkeys and the Golden-Handed Tamarin. If you are visiting the Garden Route in South Africa, including the Birds of Eden (and their neighbors Monkeyland) is highly recommended!

Click here or on the picture to see our pictures from our visit to the aviary.

During the long Easter weekend (4 days), we visited Nature's valley in the Garden Route, Western Cape, South Africa. Nature's valley is a small village which is a good base to explore the area from, including Elephant park, Monkeyland, Birds of Eden, Nature's valley and the Garden route area. We will post the pictures for Monkeyland and Birds of Eden separately. You can find pictures of the trip here or by clicking on the picture underneath.

For the third year in a row, an annual "shavaton" took place all over South Africa, including East London. During this day, you can get your hair shaved or sprayed green for the benefit of the South African Cancer Association CANSA.

We went crazy and decided to go for the "real thing" and had our hair shaved. The result looked like this:


Karl's hair was surprisingly soft after the shave. His haircut looked like this:


Johan's hair, on the other hand ended up very "sticky". So much so that he had a hard time pulling T-shirts over his head as they became stuck in the hair, similar to velcro.


When we got the haircuts, the weather was very hot and humid and therefore the advantage of the cut was that we were able to "keep our heads cool". However, a day later, the weather changed and it became suddenly much colder. I guess the haircut worked to keep us cool!

Over the last week or so, comet McNaught was supposed to be visible on the Western sky in the early evening. Unfortunately, the weather has not been that great lately, so we were unable to see it because of clouds.

However, when we were at a concert on Saturday night, a group of people suddenly got up and went outside and started looking at the sky. We followed them and saw the comet very clearly in the sky with its tail trailing over a large section of the sky. It was spectacular.

Since we didn´t have a camera on that Saturday night, we went to a friends place on Sunday night to try to take some pictures. He lives at a farm away from the light with a great view of the Western sky. We found out it is very difficult to get decent pictures of a Comet. However, here are some of our best photo´s. As always, click on the photo to see a larger version:

Tony Linden was responsible for the IT infrastructure team within the company until he left us at the end of 2005. It as great to read in the local newspaper that he appears to be doing well after he left us!

According to an article in the daily dispatch, Tony won a car worth 290 000 Rand (42 000 USD/ 31 000 Euro) for a video he took about a wasp protecting her nest from the rain. You can read the full article here. Tony has always shown interest in photography and it is great to see that he managed to win a prestegious prize with his hobby!

Well done, Tony!

This year will be our third christmas in South Africa and we are still not used to this whole "Christmas in summer" concept. Yesterday, we wrapped Christmas presents after a swim in our 27.4 degree Celcius (81.3F) pool. Today, the weather is wet, but warm, and people are planning their braai´s (barbeque) and beach walks for the next couple of days. A very different atmosphere from Christmas in the Northern hemisphere!

I would like to share a picture with you that I saw in the Daily Dispatch, our local newspaper, that gives you an idea about the Christmas atmosphere in South Africa:


Many of you, who are from colder climates, will therefore understand why we often "dream of a white Christmas" out here in South Africa. For your enjoyment, in case you have not yet seen it, here is a brilliant little flash video with reindeer singing "I am dreaming of a white Christmas" . The animation has been around for a while, so you may have seen it before, but it does the trick for me every time!

Anyway, best wishes for the holidays from South Africa!