Over the festive break, I wrote about the tourists here in Cape Agulhas. How I recognised the importance of their hard-earned Rands for the local economy, but how much I disliked the crowds on roads and in the shops and restaurants and on the local cellphone networks, that were never made to deal with those numbers.
I said:
I don’t like it when it’s so busy here, but I get it: without these two weeks each year, there wouldn’t be anything here for the other 50.
But I am looking forward to some February sunshine and a beach to myself (and the beagle) again.
Well, this weekend is it. Cape Agulhas is back to its normal, sleepy self, and I’m loving it. Albeit that we had some business to attend to this morning, and then it was far too hot to head out for a walk. Tomorrow is looking full of promise, and the beagle is straining at the metaphorical leash to get out and about into the rockpools again.
There are a few fishermen out and about on the shore, making hay while the sun shines, but the angling competition starting this weekend is all about catching marlin and you need a boat, fluency in Afrikaans and the ability to sink A LOT of brandewyn and coke to enter.
It won’t involve me (I only fulfil 1½ of the conditions), and it won’t involve our beach.
And so tomorrow, early(ish) before the heat makes things difficult again, I thing that we’ll go and exorcise the ghosts of this Christmas just past with a nice little wander out to the lagoon and back.