Category: this is south africa

Some posts revisited

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It’s time to check out some posts from the past…

Still saving on shopping?

Yes. Yes, I am.

This wasn’t planned, but quite by chance, it’s almost a year to the day since I waxed lyrical about the Checkers Xtra Savings Plus card in my post: Xtra Savings Plus.

It wasn’t an ad than, and it still isn’t an ad now.

I give Checkers R99 a month, they give me several benefits including free delivery on my Sixty60 shopping, extra personalised deals around the shop, and 10% off one shop a month. That discount can be up to R200, and it always is R200, because I carefully hold fire on the big (expensive) items that we need, and lump them all together in that one shop so I make sure that I get all the benefit of that R200.

I’m not daft, hey? Despite what they say.

Today, I did even better than usual:

That was on a shop totaling about R3,300 before discounts. That’s more than 30% off, and while it’s still a lot of money to spend (because life is f*****g expensive!), it’s also R986.66 better than it could have been.

I’m still telling you to sign up. It’s such a good deal: spend a bit to save a lot.

Absolutely:

Best mundane grocery shopping thing I’ve ever done.

How’s the whole 6Music thing going, then?

Yes. The 6Music overseas listening thing, which started here, and continued all the way through to this much more recent post, which has been doing HUGE business for the blog. Zeitgeist.

Yes, you can still listen to 6Music outside the UK, but it’s a really crap experience. It’s via a page on a browser, there are frequent breaks and crashes, but there are no bells, no whistles, no rewinding, no listen back later options. It’s seriously basic. When it works.

But it does work. Mostly.

However, I’ve found that using a VPN is still the better way to listen. It’s a pain on my phone because it drains the battery quickly, it makes all my other browsing slower, and all my ads are…

NOTHING BEATS A JET2 HOLIDAY!!!

…on repeat.

But it does work SO much better than the straight link.

Want to give it a go? Here’s a mutually beneficial referral link to the VPN service I am using.

And talking of referral links

Admyt is still one of my very favourite local apps. Not least because I love the confusion, bewilderment and admiration on passers-by faces when the car park boom lifts for me as I drive up to it.

“Wow. He must be very special,” I hear imagine them whispering, and yeah…

And they are going from strength to strength, with several (or more) new locations being added all the time: Canal Walk (which has a Checkers), V&A Waterfront, Gardens Shopping Centre etc etc etc. It’s just a great system, and you can get some free parking by signing up on my link:

TRE162273

…when you get the app on Apple here, or Google here. 

Still down for a good time

Ostensibly, there’s one more month of winter left down here. We’ve had quite a lot of rain already this time around, and after 10 crisp, cool, sunny days, yesterday was a whole 28oC. And then the next cold front hit us. So how are we staying warm at night?

Hungarian Goose Down, that’s how.

We’ve had that duvet for 13 months now and, well, it’s that “No Ragrets” image all over again. I cannot fault evolution when it comes to the down of the Hungarian Goose, or fault the goose-plucking (careful now) farmers plucking their geese. It is so deliciously light and warm, but without the rubbish bits of the goose, like the honking and the poo.

This one was another success story.

We can dance if we want to

Let’s tie it all (well, some of it) together. I heard this song on 6Music while I was at the shops this morning, not buying a duvet. It’s fun, it’s mad, it’s… The Safety Dance.

Right. Let’s light the fire and prep for this incoming nastiness.

More tomorrow.

Orange Orange River

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Little Miss 6000 has left the country. I know this because we have one of those apps which tells us where she is, and where she is is not in this country. I’m not too perturbed about this: we have known that she would leaving the country today for quite some time, and I’m hopeful that before she comes back to this country – sort of medium-term permanently (see below) at the end of the week – that she’ll have a great time.

Crossing country borders is equal parts exciting and annoying. And in these days of air travel, we often forget that there are two parts to it: leaving one and entering the other. But when crossing land borders, this is brought home to you in no uncertain terms. Especially quieter border posts, where each official seems personally offended by actually having to do something in processing a traveler.

LM 6000 signed out of South Africa with the maximum of fuss, effort, admin and paperwork in Vioolsdrif, crossed a bridge over the Orange River and took this photo out of the bus window…

[you can see why they called it the Orange River/s]

…in no-man’s land (are we still allowed to say that?), before entering Namibia about 750m later at the Noordoewer border post with the maximum of fuss, effort, admin and paperwork.
Two separate countries, two separate buildings, 54000 different documents required by each.

The weird thing is that in paddling down the Orange River – the “middle” of which marks the boundary between SA and Namibia here – her whole group will be repeatedly crossing from one country to the other without any form of fuss, effort, admin or paperwork at all. When we did this trip 8 years [weeps] ago, we even camped in alternate countries each night.

Human imposed borders are sometimes bizarre things.

Ag, just looking at that screenshot is making me jealous. The landscape there is beyond lunar. It’s stark, angular and unforgiving, with that incongruous green strip right through the middle of it.

But it’s also absolutely breathtaking:

It’s been a long day. Meet-up was 4:30am this morning, for a 5am departure, and no-one sleeps properly when they are excited about a week away in another country or they have a 3:45am alarm set.

A good night’s sleep tonight will do no-one any harm. Some of us will get up tomorrow morning and live our daily lives, with jobs to do, tasks to complete and all that other mundane stuff. Some of us will get up tomorrow and set off on an adventure down (some of) Africa’s 6th biggest river.

I know where I’d rather be.

Barcelona closes two cruise ship terminals

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Obviously, they’ve been reading 6000 miles…, and have decided that action is required.

Ostensibly, this is – as you can see – a plan to fight the city’s overtourism problem. And we’ve heard a lot about the clashes between tourists and locals recently. Must be equally nice and awful to have that sort of problem. But I’m not sure that Barcelona needs the money quite as much as Cape Town does. So shutting down two of your seven!!!!! cruise terminals might be a viable option to cut tourist numbers to some degree.

But then look down at that last paragraph: green power supplied to cruise ships while they are berthed. And while that doesn’t remove the tourists (the two closing cruise terminals do that) or the visual distractions, it might at least reduce the amount of pollution that these ships add to the ports in which they are staying.

Perhaps, since Cape Town is seemingly (and reasonably) anxious to grow our local cruise ship business, we should be looking at providing a similar green energy policy and hook-ups for the cruise ships visiting the Mother City? We have wind, we have sunshine, and we could place something right down in the port area without the need for extensive infrastructure like power lines.
Given how much money the cruise ships bring into the city, surely some it invested in making them a greener way of accessing Cape Town – and protecting the health of the local population – would be no bad thing.

How to listen to BBC 6Music (and all the other BBC radio stations) if you are outside the UK

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Hey, Music Lover! I wrote this back in July 2025. It’s now November 2025 and if you want to use the BBC Sounds app from overseas, pop over to this new UPDATED post to find out how.

The original post continues below:

We knew it was coming.

The BBC Sounds app has closed for me and the other people living outside the UK. I’m sure that you could slip in the back door via a VPN, but the BBC are (allegedly) rather good at spotting those things and not allowing them to work.

The signs of trouble were there this morning when I was in the gym, as the app glitched onto Radio 4 Xtra, and gave me a bit of Steptoe & Son while also still playing Hit by The Sugarcubes on 6Music:

Sample lyrics:

I’ve been hit, with your charm.
How could you do this to me?
You dirty old man!

But mixed messages aside, just a couple of hours later, it really was gone:

Ironically, when I clicked through onto that new app, I found that Radio 4 was about to broadcast this show: 6. The Only Friend That Mattered.

Ouch. Way to rub it in, guys…

But don’t worry. Hakuna matata. Nem panikus.

There’s still a perfectly legal, perfectly straightforward route to listen live to your favourite BBC radio stations – including 6Music, wherever you are in the world: here are the details.

Let me save you some time: here’s the direct link for the 6Music feed through your internet browser. And it’s working for me.
Three dots in the top corner, save as shortcut to your home screen, Bob are your uncle. The logo even looks the same.

Sadly, there is no obvious route to listening on catch-up or for downloading shows for those of us outside the UK. Aside from trial and error with a VPN. And (allegedly again), that can often be rather hit and miss and somewhat tedious. Or so I’m told, etc etc.

I’ve also just tested whether I can still get 6Music on my smart speaker (IYKYK) and yes, even right down here in the far bottom corner of Africa, that’s still working fine. Whether that will continue (I actually don’t know from where it plays it, it just plays it), I just don’t know. Time will tell.

This hasn’t been a clean break: some of the links from the new feed pages don’t work, although the actual feeds are fine. If the site thinks you’re in the UK, it tries to take you to the app, but then the app doesn’t work. There are clearly some issues that need to be ironed out, and whether that will affect our ability to continue to listen from overseas remains to be seen.

Or… er… heard, I guess.