Drawing all over the map,
July & August, 2008.
Straight off the plane and into the mountains:
Cathkin Peak, Champagne Castle, et al.
We didn't go very far, just a little way along the countour path, towards Injasuti, but they're nice big mountains up close.
Tom remembered to bring a kite,
the one sure way of making the wind stop.
We drove across from Upington to the Fish River canyon, past an awful lot of empty space.
Lots of tracks but no people: despite almost 30 people a day on the walk, we saw nobody at all for the first three days (of five).
Surprisingly, you are allowed to make fires using driftwood that the floods wash down. So we did, every night.
Climbing off the floodplane on a shortcut, which also gave welcome views, and a path to walk on instead of sand & boulders.
More pictures from Namibia...
The Camps Bay side of the mountain, from Lion's Head one evening for sunset Champagne.
And walking up to the same rocks on another evening, glad of the late light, to spend the night on top.
View back towards Lion's Head.
Emmrentia park. After visiting so many times in winter, I now struggle to remember Jo'burg not being quite this dry (in summer, when it rains) and likewise Cape Town not quite so luminously green.
The airport at the left (East) connects blue flights and green drives. The first of these now is to the Magaliesberg, bottom-right, past the big Google sign...
Down into Tonquani kloof, with Ben who was visiting. (We got in one climb, but no swim.)
Then out to Nelspruit area...
Me at Kaapse Hoop, Mpumalanga. (Tom's picture.)
Zak, Titania and Erica.
We stopped for a day of climbing on the way home, on the red walls at Waterval Boven.
Actually none of my pictures from Utrecht are all that great, so we'll go straight to Amsterdam, with its famous canals:
Oh dear.
But you can escape the tourist kitsch pretty quickly, to find residential streets like this one:
From the top of the round tower.
I took far far too many pictures, and attempting to spare you wading through them all, have hidden most of them on these pages:
The Fish River Canyon, Namibia
Johannesburg, the Magaliesberg and Mpumalanga
Utrecht, Amsterdam & Copenhagen
(I've now copied this page's pictures into these too.)
The reason for all these maps, by the way, is that my brothers gave me a little GPS gadget like this, which I had to try out you see... You can view the whole trip in google maps, or download KMZ file for google earth.
Photos by Michael Abbott,
posted 27 August 2008.
