dial-up

Well, for the last week I've bene back down in my parent's place in Waterford. In other words, I'm back down in 56k dial-up land for my internet connection. And all I can say about it is: "ecxruciating!". I'd forgotten what it was like to have to wait ages for pages to load, used as I was to my 6Mb connection in the apartment and the even faster connection at work. Now though, I'm back down to earth with a bang!

At the moment my surfing is limited to checking my email and seeing do I have any messages on my facebook/myspace accounts - because trying to do anything else just takes too damn long. I've goven up on one of my email addresses as I know that of the 200+ mails I get a day on that acount, 198 or 199 are going to be spam. And I'm not wasting 15mins of download time just to get all those "cheap mortgage"/"hot busty chicks gagging for action"/"generic viagra from canadian pharmacies" mails - if I didn't want their services the 1st time, I don't want them the 100th time. I have better things to be doing with my time/bandwidth, the spam can build up ont eh mail server for when I have a fast enough connection to dump it properly.

One page though that I go to that really really doesn't like dial-up is gmail. Every time I go on toi check my mail, I get:

This seems to be taking longer than usual.

If you are using a slow Internet connection, you can wait a bit longer for this page to finish loading, or just use basic HTML view for now.

If you are using your normal Internet connection and you usually get past this loading step without any problems, please refresh this page in your browser. If you continue to have trouble loading your account, please visit the help center for troubleshooting information."


Yup guys, I know it's going to take longer, I'm on the end of a 20-year-old phone line. If you wouldn't use goddamn cookies for your "basic HTML view" page and let me bookmark straight to it rather than having to wait the 2-3mins for you to realise I'm not on broadband and give me the link, life would be a lot easier for me. I could look up my mail on my mobile phone faster, if only I had GPRS coverage on my phone!

heading home

Well, it's all over now. Am all packed and am up ridiculously early to get to the airport in plenty of time do I can try to sweet-talk the check-in girl not to charge me full whack on the overweight bag full of wine! Liza better appreciate this bloody wedding pressie!

Last day didn't quite go as planned; was thinking of going whale watching, but is too late in the season to go from Cape Town, would have to have gone from Hermanus down the coast which would ave meant getting up at 7amish to get there, and since I got to bed at 3am after hitting the bars in Long st, that wasn't happening! Plan B then was to go on that "combat mission" helicopter flight, so I booked that for 5:30pm, but at 4 I got a call saying tehy didn't have enough numbers to do the flight so they were cancelling it. M other plan then was to do the red bus tour around the city center (which I didn't do before), but by the time they cancelled the helo tour, it was too late to take the last bus tour of the day! . So, all there was to do was sit outside on the quay, drink cold beer and soak up the last sun I'll see for about 6 months!

So, next stop: home!

Last day in work!

Well, here I am, the end of the line. Is my last day in work here. Things are ticking along nicely here for the last few days, we went live with the product yesterday (as in, we finally set it loose on some live production data), and while I'm not exactly taking it easy, I'm winding down. Am passing most of the work over to the guy who's replacing me on-site under the guise of "training" for him :-)

So, I have the last day of touristy stuff tomorrow, then home on Sunday. Sunday should be fun, up at 5am to get to the airport for my 8am flight, hitting Heathrow about 7pm local, back in Dublin at around 9ish, all going well and no flight delays. Long day! Am straight into a training course then at work on mon, could be a week long, I'm not sure yet (only got reminded of it yesterday).

I now also have to bring a half-dozen bottles of wine with me, as I was going to ship them home for a friend's wedding, but the shop will only ship cases of a dozen or more. So, the wine weighs about 9kg alone, my luggage was 14kg on my way over and the weight allowance is 23kg. Am lucky that all the rest of my gifts for people are low weight!

Am going to absolutely freeze when I get back - is about 26-30 here most days, is about 7-10 degrees at home! :-(

The Continents

I was thinking the other day; this trip now means that I've been on 4 of the 6 continents. Wonder what my chances of making all 6 are before my 30th birthday? All I need is S America and Australia to complete the set....

Climbing Table Mountain

Well, now I really know how fit I am. Not very!

As if we hadn't punished ourselves enough with our 21hr day, me and Marcin decided to go and climb Table Mountain, all 1,000m of it! So, after spending the morning in the Sunday Market down by Green Point (where every 3rd stall is pretty much selling the same trinkety crap), we hopped into a taxi and told him to head for the mountain!.

Our starting point was a place called Puttaclip Gorge, one of two ways to climb up, and the closer we got the more I wondered how the hell you get up to the top. The bottom half of the mountain is a steep enough slope, but the top half is nigh on vertical! Once we got to the bottom though, we saw that the gorge sort of cuts into the side of the mountain at an angle, so it's not vertical (just pretty damn close to it). So, we started climbing!


It wasn't "real" mountain climbing I guess, as there was a path with steps cut into it, but it was a lot of very steep steps! I also made the mistake of letting Marcin (who goes hillwalking for fun back home) lead the way, and I had the backpack with the 2 2-liter bottles of water in them! the temperature was hovering up around the 30 mark as well, which didn't suit me very much. The pain started pretty quickly as a result, and after the first few hundred meters I was having to take breaks every now and then.

Naturally we weren't the only ones on the mountain, and pretty soon we got into a sort of a leapfrogging rhythm with a few people - we'd stop for a break and they'd overtake us, and then a few mins later they'd stop for a break and we'd overtake them! Of course there were a few people as well who were a lot fitter than us who overtook us and then just disappeared up the mountain! We also ran into a few people who were literally running down the mountain - were bouncing down the steps at full speed! These folk apparently run up it as well, whereas we're busting a gut just to walk up it!

Took us about 1h45m to climb the thing, which is not too bad - they say it normally takes anything from 2h to 2h30. Was fairly puffed when I got to the top, and the 2L of water we'd brought each was just about all gone! The view from the top was great as well, we could see all of Cape Town, Camps Bay and as far south as Hout Bay. After only about half an hour on the top though, the clouds started to roll in and the opportunity for good pictures started to get a bit less. So, we decided to head back down again. This time though, we took the cable car!

Long Day

Well, that was a long Day. Up at the crack of dawn, got to bed at nearly the crack of dawn! I haven't been up at 5am for a long time, so it was not a nice feeling when that alarm clock went off! This is the price you pay I guess for going on SAFARI!

The trip itself to the park was fairly uneventful - just very long. We met the minibus at 5:30, and we got to the safari park at about 8:45. This long journey was not of course helped by the driver's taste in music - we had "The Best of Phil Collins" the whole way! :-( Luckily we were able to doze through moat of it, and finally reached out destination, the Aquila Game Reserve.

After a quick orientation and a buffet breakfast, off out we went in the jeeps before the heat of the day made the animals all disappear off into the shade. Now, most ppl will probably have a mental image of a safari being endless acres of grasslands, with herds of zebra, rhino, wildebeest and the occasional majestic lion silhouetted up against the horizon looking like Simba from "the Lion King". Well, that's Kenya you're thinking of, it's a bit different that close to the Cape. The landscape is more desert and scrubland than forest or grasslands, and pretty much none of the animals we saw (bar the springbok) were indigenous to the area, and were brought into the game reserve from outside.

We were driving around for about 3hrs, and in that time we saw 4 of the "Big 5" - Lions, Rhinos, Hippos and Buffalo (there were Leopard as well there but they're apparently damn hard to spot - so much so that we couldn't spot them). As well as the "stars of the show", we also got to see elephants, zebras, springbok, alligators and cheetahs. Is good seeing hem in the wild all right, but I was thinking as we were pulling back into the game lodge "yeah, good, but not worth the early start and the price of admission".

And then we got to the bikes. After lunch, we hopped on our quad bikes and zoomed back off out into the park for the afternoon. Now, I haven't driven anything more powerful than a go-kart in over 6-7 years, never mind anything where I had to worry about gears, so things were a bit scary until I got used to things (at one stage I'd hit the electric fence around the park - 10,000v! Was a case of "put it into reverse and don't let your foot touch the ground!"). After a while tho I got a bit more confident and was zooming around with the best of them. Once I lost the fear of death from crashing though, there is definitely something exhilarating about bombing along at up to 40km/h on dirt tracks, over rocky hillsides and skidding around corners! Things nearly came to tears a few times, not least when a couple of springbok ran right out in front of me and I had to jam on the brakes to avoid hitting them!

By the end of the ride we were all tired, dusty and very hyped up. Luckily we had the 3hr drive back to cape town and the mellow sounds of Phil Collins to bring us back down to earth!

Once we got back tho, there was a call from one of the guys from work", "come out and join us for dinner and drinks out in Camps Bay". So, we had just enough time to hop in the shower and head out for dinner! Dinner naturally turned into a few drinks, which turned into a few more drinks, and we ended up getting to bed at 2:30am, or nearly 22hrs after we'd woken up! A long and action-packed day indeed!

Safari

Well, I'm off on Safari tomorrow. Up at 5am to catch a 5:30 bus. Going to be a long blery day.....

Pictures

Well, there's not much happening during the week apart from long days at work, so here's my collection of pics from last weekend. I'll be adding to the collection as I go along.

fun & games in work

I was in the loo today on the 10th floor at work, and I saw this sign up in the cubicle:


I love the 1st point and the 3rd bullet point - this has to have been written by someone in HR! I wonder is there a similar sign in the ladies loos, or are us blokes just considered more messy than the girls?

Then, when I was washing my hands, I saw this on top of the hand dryer:



Now i know there's a big problem with AIDS in Africa, but having these in the toilets in work? Now that's one project meeting it would definitely be interesting to go to! :-P

Of Wine and Sea and Ducks and Penguins

So, 7:30 sunday morning rolled around, the alarm went off and as usual after a night on the drink it took a second or two to get my bearings. The first question I asked myself after I remembered the all important "when" and "where" bits was "Why the hell was I setting my alarm for 7:30 on a sunday?". The answer soon follwed: time to get touristic!

After meeting an equally tired-looking Marcin for a fry-up breakfast (or as close to it as I could get in the hotel), we headed out to meet our bus. On the tour, we had an Irishman, an Englishman, a Pole, a Lebanese and three Brazilians. Am sure there's a joke in there somewhere! We headed out in what was now familiar territory, out past Clifden, Bantry Bay (thought I was back home here with all the place names!), Camps Bay, Llandudno and down to Hout Bay. The tour guide was explaining all about these places but I'd heard it all before so was concentrating on just staying awake. When we were nearing Hout Bay tho, the clouds started rolling in, and I started thinking "oh shit, here we go again". Seems this year, every time I wanted to do some touristy stuff, the rain decides to come along for the ride. Happened in Bandung, happened in Bali, Singapore, Galway with Sharon, and looked like it was happening here too. The rain held off tho, so it just stayed overcast - am well used to that! At least as well it meant that I didn't have to worry about sunburn this time!

Alto it didn't look very far on the map it still took a good couple of hours to get down to the cape (looked like no distance at all on the map, but then again I was comparing it to the size of the country...). The closer we got the more barren and windswept it got, and by the time we got to the gates of the National Park there I could almost believe that I was in a slightly scaled-up version of the West of Ireland, around the Burren (of course the cloud cover helped with that impression too). I suppose one windswept lump of rock perched out in the atlantic looks pretty similar to the next. Then tho I saw Zebras and Ostriches, so I knew I wasn't at home! Just as we got to the cape, the sun came out as well, which was a nice change.

I always thought that the Cape of Good Hope was the point where you couldn't go any further south on Africa without getting your feet wet, but it actually isn't. The Cape is off to the side a bit, and is the most south-west point you can go to, but sticking out about another mile or so is Cape Point, which is the bit where the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic meet. Where one stops and the other starts I couldn't tell you, there's no dividing line or anything and they both look the same color, all you can say is that if you're facing the pointy bit at the end of the peninsula, the Atlantic is on your right-hand side and the Indian is on your right. I would have liked to have gone to the very edge and looked down but the path we took only goes to the lighthouse about 200m from the actual end. You can get out there, but it's aparently a 30min hike (that was 200m as the crow flies), it had taken us 15mins to get from the bus to where we already were, and we only had 45mins total there. Ah well.

After waiting about an extra 15mins for the Brazilians to quit taking photos (could have made it to the edge after all!), we headed off to Stellenbosch for the wine tasting part of the trip. First tho, Penguins! Part of the tour was to see some real life penguins in their natural habitat, at a place caleld Boulder Beach just outside of Simonstown. Am not sure are penguins by nature a fairly phlegmatic breed, or is it just that these guys are pretty used to tourists, but you could get to within inches of them without them batting an eyelid. So, being tourists, lots of pictures were taken. There was a bit of a distraction from the penguins while we were there, there was a duck out walking her family and one of the ducklings managed to get itself separated from the group, tried unsuccessfully to jump across a crack in the rocks, plopped into the water and looked like it was being dragged out to sea. At this stage you got a great look into the differences between men and women, all the girls looking on at the beach looked like they were thinking "Oh no poor thing!" and all the guys looked like they were thinking "Heh, he's toast!" :-) The next wave brought him back to shore again tho, much to the delight of the girls and the secret disappointment of the guys, who were probably hoping there'd be a shark cruising just off the rocks. Reckon those ducks got more pics taken of them as a result than the penguins did!

Finally, after our little bird detour, we got to Stellenbosch itself and stopped for lunch. Am not sure would I like to live there, is supposed to be a university town situated in the heart of wine country (recipe for disaster right there!) but nearly all of the buildings on the main street date back to the Georgian or Victorian period or even further back, and nearly all have preservation orders against them - would be like living in that show village beside Blarney Castle back home! We had an hour and a half for lunch so we split into two groups, the brazilians went looking for veggie food, as the girl in the group is a veggie (no surprise it was the girl), and the irish/english/lebanese/polish folks went searcing for real food. We ended up picking an indian restaurant (as you do when in wine country in SA). The food was good, but we forgot that it seems to be a feature of indian restaurants that they take forever to serve you - we were supposed to be back at the bus at 1:30 but it was only 1:15 when we got the food! Good food, just too bad we had to rush it so much.

And now the piece de resistance of the trip, the wine tasting! We headed out to the Zevenwacht winery just outside of town to get our drinking on! Our menu for the event was 5 glasses of wine and 4 types of cheese, as the place did their own cheese as well. I'm afraid I have to say that I was less than overwhelmed with either, the first wine we tasted was nice enough, but the rest weren't to my taste at all (nor by the looks of the others, to their tastes either). Were fairly small glasses as well, so even had the wines been nice enought to drink all of what you got, no-one was getting pissed on this trip! the most fun we had was winding up the brazilian chick about the cheese. Seems she was a veggie for moral rather than dietary reasons, and she was a card-carrying member of PETA as well, so we told her the cheese may not be vegetarian friendly as they could have used rennit from the cow's stomach lining to make it :-) The guide got cornered as soon as he came back to the table with the next wine, but was able to reassure her it was veggie-friendly so she didn't have to run out to the loo for a quick purging.

After the tasting, the tour. We were wondering why we had the tour after rather than before the wine, but as it turns out you'd maybe need the bit of alcohol to find the tour interesting. First was the "cellar", and while we were expecting a big cavernous cellar with arched roofs as per the stereotype, was just a big white room filled with barrels that was a bit cold. Lots of wine tho, 1,000 barrels holding a grand total of 400,000 bottles of wine! Not an overly bad place to be accidetally locked in for the weekend (if you liked the wine, that is). Then on to the factory floor, where "the magic happens". Now I know that there's not a lot to see when you do a tour of a distillery or a brewery, but still, is like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory compared to this. Grapes come in on the left, get crushed, go into these big tanks to get the yeast added, then it's pumped over to some other big tanks to ferment, sits there a few weeks and gets put in the barrels. So, all you see is a set of big tanks with no indications as to what's in them. Wow.

After all this heady excitement, we all were ushered into the gift shop to catch our collective breath. Decided to get a bottle or two of the one wine I liked (the xmas shopping starts here!). After that, we all climbed into the bus to go home, a tad tired as we'd been going all day. So ended the first day's real touristy stuff in SA! Next stop, safari! :-)

taking it easy around cape town.

So, the first full day of freedom dawns over Cape Town. Seeing as I only found out on friday that I didn't have to work on the weekend, me and Marcin 9the other CAPE guy on-site, over from Poland) didn't have anything organized so it was a case of schlep around town looking for stuff to do. I was hoping to get up to the top of Table Mountain, but it was covered in cloud so that was no good for us (once you get to the top, it'd be nice to be able to see stuff.....) So, we went to the Aquarium instead, which was sort of nice but generally when you've seen one aquarium you've seen them all. After that we went to the tourist office to see about doing some tours. We were thinking about something like the Cape of Good Hope or the Wine Tour for sunday, but we managed to find a tour that combined the two! After booking this, we again were at a bit of an impasse for something to do, so we headed out to Camps Bay for a while, Cape Town's main beach area.

All I can say is I never really thought before that I would be standing on a beach sweating on the 1st december! the beach was packed full of people - it's just the start of the summer holidays over here - but no-one was actually in the water. I went down to see what it was like, and discovered the reason: the water was quite chilly (about 13 degrees I think someone said). I suppose that's what you get when the nearest land mass to you is the Arctic! So we took a wander along the beach, taking in the sights. And some of the sights were quite interesting indeed. Not as many as I would have thought, but there were some very nice things wandering around in bikinis (or even half-bikinis in a few cases). It was hot enough that I was tempted to take off my t-shirt myself, but seeing as everyone around me was all nice and tanned (and in a lot of cases a bit more than just tanned) and I haven't seen any amount of sun since probably last august 12 months, I decided against it. Remember the scene in Jaws where al the people were rushing off the beach screaming trying to get away from the Great White Shark? Well, in this case it would be trying to get away from the Great White Irishman! So, for the sake of other people, I stayed clothed.

After a while of wandering around, we felt a tad peckish so headed up to grab some grub. All of the bars, restaurants etc are on the opposte side of the road to the beach, so was easy enough to find some place. Naturally being so close to the ocean, the restaurant menus tended to trend towards the fishy variety, but we managed to find a place that did steaks so we sat out on the balcony eating, sipping beers and people watching for a few hours. the great thing about people watching is that you get to see all shapes and sizes, in this case including a couple of muppets in a BMW with no front bumper and a big dent in the passenger side door who obviously believed that they hadn't wrecked their car half enough and disappeared off into the distance with a screech of tires and a big enough trail of rubber that you'd think they were in a DeLorean and trying to get up to 85mph to go back to when their hairstyles were in fashion.

After that the evening was drawing in a bit so we headed to this bar/restaurant that the guys in work had mentioned called 'Le Caprice', and settled in there for the duration. Again, more people of all shapes and sizes were around, including a few we'd seen on the beach with (slightly) more clothes on, so the people watching was resumed. The vibe was a bit different to pubs at home, but there was a bit of craic nonetheless, so drinks were had and people were chatted to, and more drinks were had and finally an unexpected hitch was discovered: Unlike my normal tipple at home, Bulmers, where you know by the taste that you're drinking alcohol, Savannah Dry cider pretty much goes down like lemonade but is 6%. So, as sat night rolled slowly into sun morning, we were getting more and more "tired and emotional" Eamonn Dunphy style so seeing as we were leaving for the Cape at 8:30am, we decided to call it a night. Not a bad introduction to Cape Town weekend life!

How I spent the 1st december :-)

Here's what I was doing on the 1st of December this year!



On the beach in Camps Bay, Cape Town. I hear the weather is quite bad at home....... :-P