Kenmare

Our love affair with Ireland continues at Kenmare. We have come here mainly because some of my early family come from this part of the world and we are going to do our best to uncover some early family history. Brother Robin visited here a few years ago and found out some fascinating family details, including our Indian connections, which we had no idea of. We will see what else we can add to the picture

We have 8 days here. The first three we spent at the gracious Lansdowne Arms hotel in the centre of town.

The Lansdowne Arms 

 Main Street at 10.00pm at night. There is a real buzz in the air. Lots of pubs and each one has live music every night!

Had tea at the 'Cupan Tae' shop. How could I resist!

History everywhere. Andrew is crawling out of a tiny stone house built only from stones, referred to as "beehives". These places were built from about 2000BC!!!!!!!! 

We have visited Ardtully one of the old ancestral homes. Unfortunately it is now in ruins as it was one of the great houses burnt in the 'Troubles' of  1920-23. It still sits amid wide open fields facing the river Roughty. Andrew and I are not ones to see a great picnic spot wasted, so we spent a pleasant day swimming in the river and feasting on local bread, cheese and French wine. What a day!

We have now moved from the Lansdowne Arms to a B and B 'An Bruachan', just out of town. The owner is a wonderfully accommodating woman called Julia O'Connor and she has gone out of her way to help us in our family history search. Today she arranged for us to met with a local man who was born in "Riverside", one of the houses family lived in. He was a gold mine of information and so willing to share. He took us to visit three of the family homes including a tour of Ardtully and explained things we had no idea about.

Ardtully House in its prime!

Not all our time has been spent tracking down family. We did a couple of wonderful walks and marvelled at the beautify of the countryside. They don't call this place the Emerald Isle for nothing!

Julia has put us in touch with yet another local who was able to gain us access to another family house Dunkerron House. Pity those pics are on the camera and not quite as easy to put on the blog.

It is time to leave Ireland. Both Andrew and I have a sneaking suspicion that we will be back. There is so much family history's here, the people have been so warm and friendly and we feel very comfortable here. Thanks Kenmare for such a wonderful time.

 

Off to England now to  catch up with our wonderful friend Lynette, English exchange teacher from Kawerai days, 1987! Will be fun. 

Dublin

It is great to be in Ireland. It is pretty much picture perfect; at least to our eyes. Maybe that is because it contrasts so vividly with what we have been used to in the last 18 months.

Two days in Dublin was not early enough to see anywhere near all the city has to offer but we took in some of the main parts; drink, music and beautiful buildings!

The weather has been perfect. Last night one of the musicians we were listening to said "I would like to dedicate this next song to an event that hasn't happened in Ireland for 87 years; summer time!" Another comment from a chatty local, said with a twinkle in his eye, "How are you enjoying Ireland? It's a pity about the weather!" 

The streets were stunning - one huge basket of flowers trying to outdo the next. The summer evenings are warm and long - still light in the sky at 10:30 pm and walking around in a tee shirt. 

The Guinness factory was of course a highlight for Andrew. They have turned an old part of the factory into a huge self guided tour. Seven storeys full of Guinness history. It was brilliantly well done.

Our wandering around Dublin took us to the beautiful Trinity College University. First set up in 1311 as a monastery but it became a university under Elizabeth the First's patronage. Then the art gallery, and beautiful city parks.

Pubs, music and food all seem to go together and every night was a feast of all three.

Andrew looking happy in the Guiness show/display/old brewery.

 

Dublin was full of flower baskets.

Loved this painting, Joseph has such a fatherly smile! ( it was ok to take photos of most of the paintings so long as you didn't use flash)

Temple Bar at night, always busy, lively, happy, such a good feeling buzz here.

Inside one of the buildings of beautiful Trinity College where one of our great greats went to uni.

Church in Nenagh from the restored keep of King Johns castle. 

On our way South we stopped at Nenagh and had a wander around this lovely town. When we came back we had  a parking ticket! We hadn't seen the parking notices! A friendly local (who has rellies living in Christchurch) spotted our concern and came to our aid. He whistled up the local parking warden who kindly tore up the ticket! No bribes needed here.

Now it's onward to Kenmare.

Namibia

I am embarrassed to say that this time two years ago I didn't know Namibia existed! When the rugby World Cup was held in NZ in 2011. We decided to support the Namibian team simply because I had never heard of the country before. Now here we are visiting, seems a little unreal. We only have four days here before heading off to Europe. Namibia is huge and being mostly desert, is very sparsely populated, so in our four days we are going to drive a long way and see few people!

We flew into Windhoek, the only airport I have ever flown into where apart from the airport building there was not another building in sight. We picked up our grunty diesel Hilux four wheel drive and off we went. 240ks of gravel road latter we reached our desert camp. On the drive we passed six cars, about ten houses,  some baboons, a mongoose, a dassie, a warthog some eland a springbok and a herd of goats on the road.

The night sky was fantastic, so dark and just so many stars it made the usual constellations like the Southern Cross and Scorpio difficult to pick out!

Thursday morning we were up at 4.30am to drive another 140 ks into and dune country, the Sossusvlei. The pictures will show how spectacular it was.

Back at our camp by late afternoon we had a quick dip in the swimming pool. Afterwards we sat on huge rocks and drank some very good South African wine and gazed at this enormous, beautiful land. Doesn't get much better! 

Goats and fat tailed black sheep sleeping on the road. 

A Social Weaver nest. Up to 200 birds in here!

The Moon and Venus over the Namib desert.

In the Death Vlei.

We climbed Dune 45. Pam in the red top. 

Sunset over our desert swimming pool at the lodge. The water was cold!  

Crossing the Namib Naukluft desert Friday 12 July, on our way to Swakopmund. 180 km's of this! Glad it wasn't hot but it was bright and my eyes were pretty tired by the end of it. 

 

Hard to tell where road ends and desert begins....   Almost all of the country's main roads are gravel. 

To be fair, it wasn't all dead flat. This is the Kuiseb River gorge. Every few years it must rain reasonably hard and this river fills up.

Above the gorge some very rugged land with big lines of rock strata. 

If you were a lizard, this is what your world would look like 

Found this amazing jewel of a plant. The leaves are covered with tiny translucent spheres that sparkle in the sun. Can't find out what it is. 

You can just see the white speck that is our car in the distance while we were out walking. We didn't want to lose sight of it. 

 

Durban and Cape Town

From the Drakensberg we drove to Durban to stay with Andy and Lorraine, friends from the project. We were only in Durban a short time but enjoyed what we saw. The soccer stadium, built for the 2010 World Cup, is a fantastic building. A huge arch spans the stadium and they have a cable car running up to the top, a clever way to make sure the stadium doesn't become a white elephant like some sports arenas built for big one off events.

The stadium. The cable car is half way up on the right hand side of the arch.

The view from the top.

The big Cape Town events were a drive down the peninsular to The Cape of Good Hope and a walk up Table Mountain.

Looking from Camps Bay ( where the rich and famous live! ) down the peninsular.

Interesting part of the road built into the rock.

Andrew at Cape of Good Hope. Cape Point is in the back ground.

Looking up the track to the top of Table Mountain. We are heading for the notch in the rock. The proteas and other flowers were gorgeous and we saw sunbirds. It took us an hour and a half to climb the 600 m from the road and we were sweating!

Looking back down to Cape Town CBD. 

We rode back down on the cable car to save our knees! Took comfort in the fact that we weren't the only ones to do so. Lions Head looks huge from sea level but tiny from up here. 

We spent a pleasant few hours at the Victoria & Alfred waterfront development. 

One drizzly day we went for a drive in the mountains south of Wellington. The winter flowers were in full  bloom - the yellow proteas were a highlight. 

Die Tolhuis - a nice place to stop for coffee near Ceres. 

Drakensbergs

We said a tearful goodbye to the staff at Safubi on Monday 1st of July. Then staff had clubbed together and bought us a beautiful set of towels embroidered with Africa on them. They will be treasured.

We headed south to the Drakensberg Mountains. The drive took longer than we had planned, by the time darkness fell we were still not at our destination. We got a little lost, I panicked a little but Andrew remained calm and eventually arrived at  Hlalanathi. We were in the garden cottage, a typical thatched  rondavel type cottage but furnished with antique type furniture, quite lovely. 

We had a couple of wonderful walks in the mountains. This part of the "Berg" is called The Amphitheatre. As the name suggests there were huge flat topped mountains that form and arch bounded at each end by even higher mountain buttresses. We had planned for cold weather there but actually it was mild and warm. Except cold at night and we were grateful for the hot water bottle provided!

The Amphitheatre!

The walk on day two near Cathedral Peak..

The roof of the Garden Cottage. I have been fascinated with these from when we first stayed in a similar one in Kruger.