Tag: Cape Town

Missed connections

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I was the good-looking guy in the silver car. You were the bloke who looked like a fat, sour-faced Michael Vaughan, driving a pale blue Honda Jazz and who had no clue about how traffic circles work.

I braked hard (which is the only reason that this is a missed connection), you didn’t, but I saw the conflicted look – steeped in both arrogance and guilt – that you shot me as you ploughed onto the mini-roundabout at the top end of Struben Road, blatantly ignoring my right of way.

And then there were those awkward moments all the way down Bowwood in the morning traffic, me following your nasty little car with the Bonnievale Route 62 and silver baby footprint stickers on the boot, and you constantly eyeing me in your rear view mirror, wondering whether you should apologise or get out and fight me. For the record, I don’t do road rage so I wasn’t swearing at you*, I was actually singing along to DJ Shadow’s Nobody Speak, so I was basically just swearing, full stop.

If you want to meet up for some driving lessons, get in touch and maybe together, we can arrange something which might potentially increase the safety of everyone on Cape Town’s roads.

 

* Probably just as well, given how that video progresses [achtung: much swearing].

Licenced to k… drive

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I went to renew my driver’s licence today. It’s something you have to do every 5 years in South Africa, so that they can extract just a little more cash from your already hard-pressed wallet.

There’s a rather inefficient system in place to get the all important card. Firstly, you have to stand in a queue to get a DL1 form. It would be nice if you could get this online and fill it in in advance, but you can’t. So there.

Once you’ve completed DL1, you get to join queue two. That’s the eye test queue. Each eye test takes 4½ minutes, on average, so it’s not a quick queue. Still, you had nothing better to do with your Saturday morning than stand in another line, right? Right.

Only once you’ve passed your eye test with flying colours can you move on to the third queue. That’s the payment queue.

You’d think that simply handing over R140 would be a fairly speedy, uncomplicated task, but they seem to take quite a while considering the straightforward deal.

Open another payment window?

I think not.

And what do you get when you’ve paid? A piece of paper that you can hand back to them at a future date once they’ve printed your licence.

Of course, when that time comes, you will have to stand in a queue to pick it up.

Yep. If there’s something that the system to renew your driver’s licence in South Africa is trying to tell the general public, it’s definitely Four Queue.

Cape Town from space

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Astronaut Randy Bresnick shared this image of Cape Town taken from the International Space Station. He says it was this morning, but there was a lot of cloud over Cape Town this morning, so I’m guessing that it was just “a morning”. Still, decent pic:

Click through here for full size.

It’s upside down in conventional cartographical terms, so here’s a quick guide to what you’re looking at:
Robben Island bottom right.
Cape Point top right.
False Bay all across the middle.
Rooi Els and Pringle Bay top left.

You may also be able to pick out Steenbras Dam, just above Gordon’s Bay down in the bottom left corner of False Bay. Hint: Look for the light coloured sand, rather than the blue coloured water. Hmm.

Quick flight

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The Joburg-esque winter which has left us so critically short of water has made for some great flying conditions, with cold, clear, still days.

Sadly, life has been busy and so I haven’t really had the opportunity to make the most of it. But I found myself with a few spare minutes this morning and chucked the Mavic up for a quick scout around the neighbourhood and beyond.

I love the different perspective that the Mavic can give you – even when you’re looking at something as mundane and unattractive as Wynberg CBD.

For reference, that’s the Wynberg Girls and Wynberg Boys Junior Schools campus in the bottom right, the ‘boxy’ police station and courts just beyond them, and Maynard Mall on the left. In the distance – False Bay.

A few other views here.

Oh, and for those of you outside South Africa, I’m able to fly today because it’s a public holiday.

Rain a week away?

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I’m not sure how good these two week forecasts are (save perhaps to say that so far, this one has been bang on), but this image, shared by ‘Agricultural Economist’ Wandile Sihlobo seems to give us a bit of good news:

That little red spot at the bottom of the second picture is the promise of decent, heavy, significant rain for that second week of August.

If the previous forecast was accurate, then we can even say that that potential rainfall will take place somewhere between 8th-12th August.

But like I said, I have no idea how accurate these types of forecast are.