April 26 & 27 – Getting to Stellenbosch

Now that we are back on line, some catching up...

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We almost missed out flight to Johannesburg. We both thought it took off an hour later than it did, so that when Karen saw the “Now Boarding” status while we were sitting in the lounge, it was a scramble. But we made it with plenty of time to spare.

We were in another A330, just like the Air Canada plane, but the South African Airways 330 had lie flat seats, meaning 18 in a space where Air Canada had 12.

Not Air Canada pods, but not bad at all

Still, the food and wine were excellent.

Ummm.... 

Yes, please 

These will do to (the Sauv Blanc was excellent) 

Canapés. VERY good. 

Pear salad. That's bread, not a banana, on the left 

Chicken dinner 

Tiramisu 

After dinner port & chocolates

Johannesburg was a fairly efficient airport, though we went out of the secured area and through the terminal to get to the domestic flights, and security didn’t impress me that much. Interesting views from the lounge, however.

I didn't know there was an Angola Airways, or that they had 747-400's

The flight to Cape Town from Johannesburg took us over some pretty desolate spaces and interesting things. For instance, I saw the racetrack where they used to hold the South African F1 Grand Prix decades ago.

Pretty track, pretty location

There were a bunch of these strange piles of something, mostly in the middle of nowhere. I suspect they are mine tailings, but who knows, for I could see no nearby mine workings.

I actually found this one on Google Earth

We flew right over Kimberley and its world-famous diamond mines.

The dark spots are diamond mines: holes in the ground

We passed over vast expanses of dry nothingness, which I suspect is kind of what Namibia will be like.

Cool escarpment 

A farmed valley high in the mountains

We had some pretty views descending into Cape Town.

Table Mountain on the left. Downtown on the right

It was fairly efficient to rent a car at the Cape Town airport. The 30 min drive to Stellenbosch was “entertaining”, past shantytown slums and pedestrians walking on the 4 lane highway, with some cars doing 130 km/hr and others doing 60. Driving on the left wasn’t a problem, but continually hitting my windshield washer lever instead of my turn indicator was. The GPS was worth it, though being a Tomtom and not the Magellan I am used to, gives me warning beeps and sounds I just don’t understand.

We arrived to our accommodation…

Bangkok Place Backpackers, complete with a pool. Our room is on the upper left corner.

…then wandered the pretty town, which has a nickname of “the City of Oaks” after all the English oak trees planted around here.

It's fall

Okay, so those are eucalyptus, not oaks, but they do have a lot of oaks, and they’re all changing colours.

It's fall

The core of the city’s only about 8 square blocks anchored by Kerk St (Church Street, named after this).

Pretty, but small

The city has a bunch of interesting architecture, which mixes Victorian with Dutch with English, and at times, reminded me of New Orleans.

French-influences in the balconies 

French influences here, too

They have some funky street art on display here, including this:

Meeting time! 

Brass toilets as public art

Stellenbosch is a pretty little town, and not surprisingly, a nice little “weekend getaway” from Cape Town. The botanical garden is excellent, and aside from horrible parking is a great place to explore.

One thing that is strange: some nutbar decide to import an animal he fell in love with on a trip to America a couple of hundred years ago. So the parks here are full of oak trees, and are also full of… Eastern Gray Squirrels.

Huh?

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Today’s Travel Tip: Hitchhikers

Hitchhikers are everywhere, and they are always Black. Pedestrians are all over the motorways wherever you go, and they, too, are always Black. Hitchhikers stand en-masse at on-ramps, but can stand anywhere. Some hold out R10 or R20 bills for some reason; I suspect to try and convince you to give them a ride or that somehow, they will pay you to get a ride (I even saw some holding out apples).

I never pick up hitchhikers ever, so it’s not really that important to me, but if you’re the kind of person who likes to give rides, South Africa’s your place.

The Africa Journey Starts

Ski season is over, which means I'm back on the blog, and it also means we're on our way to Africa. In fact, I'm typing this during a 9 hour layover in Heathrow.

That layover wasn't supposed to happen. After flying here via Air Canada, we were supposed to be on the ground for about 4 hrs, then head off to Cairo, then to Johannesburg (both on EgyptAir), then to Cape Town. But we got a call from Aeroplan on the morning of our departure with a schedule change. For whatever reason (the agent was slippery; flight cancellation? argument? civil strife?) our flights on EgyptAir were all cancelled. They rebooked us on South African Airways direct from LHR to JNB -- a 12 hr flight. We would arrive at the exact same time, but have a 9 hr layover in London.

Now, we would have booked that routing originally, had it been available in Business class, but it wasn't. Instead we booked a reward ticket with the best Business class seating we could get. That mean a Calgary-LHR economy seat, but Business for the rest of the routing. We kept trying to get upgraded to a Business seat on Air Canada for YYC-LHR, but got nowhere.

Till we got to the airport.

When we checked in, we were told they might have a seat for us at the gate. We were already resigned to sitting in the "back of the bus", so no matter. We were also told we couldn't use the Calgary lounge, though, because our boarding passes were for Economy. But we knocked, and asked, and they let us in anyway, which was nice.

Sitting in the peaceful lounge, sipping a glass of wine that didn't cost $12 and didn't taste like crap, we thought more people would travel if it was like this.

We got to the gate ~10 min before boarding time, asked (without expectation) if we were going to get into Business, and... they were all apologetic we hadn't been put there already. Zap, into Business, zap, onto the airplane.

Karen in her pod 

My pack in my pod 

The view from my seat

Holy crap, these lay-flat seat pods are huge. Where they used to have 18 big Business Class seats they now have 12 pods. And the seats are so complex, they come with instructions.

Complicated

But comfy? Oh, yeah. Combine that with good wine...

The wine list

...pretty good eats...

The dinner menu

...and an entirely lay flat bed with a lovely comforter, and you know? Air travel ain't all that bad (so long as you don't want to talk to someone. The pods are miles apart).

We got into LHR pretty well rested, showered in the lounge (an excellent invention), and debated: leave the airport and head into London, or just stay? Well, we would only have had 4 hrs to "play" in London, so we just opted to stay put, snack on the excellent food in the Maple Leaf Lounge, and read/be bored/ watch airplanes.

And one plane we saw? There's a Concorde parked on the other side of the airport.

It's just parked there at the end of runway 28

T-minus 4 hrs to our next (long) flight.

Proof I'm average

I was talking to Sunshine Mountain Operations Manager the other day, and he mentioned that Sunshine has an injury rate of 2.2 per 1,000 skier visits, which is basically industry average. When I heard this, I did some checking and found the "2.2 per thousand" rate is indeed pretty normal. "Injury rate" in the industry is the frequency that ski patrol attends an accident that requires care delivered by patrol on the hill.

Now, my brother the statistician is going to probably give me a hard time for this generalization, but if you flip that around, that rate is one injury per 454 skiers per day, or one injury per 454 days of risk exposure. Which got me to thinking...

I'm an anal-retentive engineer and have tracked every day I have skied since 1996 (19 years of data). That year, I got a recording altimeter watch, and I've just been logging my info ever since. Now, I first started skiing in 1978 (on borrowed equipment from a friend of mine, through a University ski club that let me learn dirt cheap). So I'm missing 18 years of data, or half of my ski years. But I am certain that:

• I only got ~10 days a year from in my university years from 78-81, virtually all of which were in lessons;
• I probably only got 5 days a year from 81-84 (before I moved to Edmonton);
• I hardly skied at all from 84-89 -- perhaps 2 days per year -- due to living in Edmonton (too far from the mountains to ski much), work and getting married;
• I didn't ski at all from Nov 90 to Nov 92, since I was living in Victoria;
• I was so broke from 92-95 that I was lucky to get 2 days in per year.

So I add that up and probably only add 60-70 days to what I have skied since keeping records. And looking at my records, I have been injured exactly twice.

• On logged day 178 (Day 250?) I crashed on ice at Big White and broke a rib in my back. No lost time, no ski patrol, but an accident nonetheless.
• On logged day 540 (Day 610?) I broke my leg.

If you ignore my broken rib (a non-injury accident according to Sunshine's stats), my injury rate is 1 in 610 ski days, or 1.64 per thousand days of exposure. If you include it, it's 2 injuries in the same time, or 3.28 per thousand days of exposure.

If you look at the time between those accidents (362 ski days), that's 2.7 injuries per thousand days of exposure.

I'm feeling like an average kinda guy right around now. 

Snowshoeing (with moose)

I'm not a monster fan of snowshoeing for a number of reasons, but I like to get out there occasionally. When my friend Monty said he wanted to get out, I thought it would be fun to introduce him to the walk to Karst Springs.

We have been there a few times, the last in 2009 when we rode our bikes in. We saw moose that day, and I kinda figured we would see some today, too. And we did.

Near water, as always

Mom & the kid 

Through the car window

Funny part was that they were in the EXACT same place when we went by again 4 hrs later.

Karst Spring is in the middle of the Mt. Shark XC ski complex -- where there were exactly 2 skiers out today. It has been cold, but today it was only -10° when we got to the parking lot at 1 PM and -7° at Watridge Lake at 3:30 PM. There was between 5 & 15 cm of fresh snow, which I would call nigh on perfect XC conditions.

As a snowshoe walk, it's kinda boring. Very little wildlife (recent pine martin and squirrel tracks), straight, flat, wide (it is, after all, a fire road). But it makes for "effortless" walking (if snowshoeing is ever effortless), and it is nowhere near avalanche terrain.

We did see American Dippers in the stream.

A not exciting gray bird 

There were at least 2, maybe three

The ice formations in the creeks are cool.

Drips 

Waterfalls 

Fingers

The springs were indeed springing, gushing out their usual way. I expected clouds of fog and ice, but the springs are about +5° C, and the air was only -10° C, so probably not big enough of a temperature difference to create ice fog.

The upper lookout from below 

Looking down from the lookout 

Winter and summer meet

Rushing water and green moss

We spent most of our day breaking new trail. It therefore took longer than I was expecting (1:30 one way, versus the hour it takes in the summer). It's a shame it wasn't a blue sky day, and that we didn't see much other than the moose, the dippers and the waterfall. But it was a good day nonetheless.

The Importance of Having fun

One of the most influential people in my entire 32 year career was a landman by the name of Syl Kramer, a jovial fellow I worked with at Esso from in the 1980's.

Syl had the kind of infectious attitude that made coming to work a lot of fun. No matter the challenge, Syl was up to it, and he enjoyed doing it. Syl was not a young guy. When I first met him, he was in his early 50's.

Back in those days (and probably still) Esso went through waves of growth and downsizing. Esso's population was generally older, and their defined benefit program was expensive to the company, so Esso commonly tried to downsize by offering enhanced early retirement packages. In about 1983, the package was opened up to people 50 & older, and was so good that the company had a 96% uptake Canada wide. But not Syl.

I asked Syl why he wouldn't take that rather lucrative retirement package. I remember his words to this day:

"Because I'm having fun," was his reply. "Having fun is everything. As long as I'm having fun, why would I leave? But if I ever stop having fun, all the money in China won't make me stay."

Three years later, Syl announced his retirement. There was no program going on at the time. He just decided to retire, and so I went to see him and ask why.

"Because I stopped having fun" was his answer.

He explained to me that there were indeed times in his career that it wasn't fun, but they were short and he could readily see his way through to when it would be fun again, or when he could make it fun again. He told me that in the previous 6 months, he had stopped having fun, and couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel (the late 1980's was a terrible time in the oil patch, and for Esso in particular. I was in planning at the time, and things were looking pretty bleak). So he retired.

I asked him whether he was sad about leaving all the money he could have had on the table. His answer was "Not a chance". He had had three years of a lot of fun doing his job, and that was worth more to him than all that money.

I have lived Syl's advice for 30 years, and I personally think it has resulted in nothing but positive outcomes. In your work, or in your personal life, things are just a lot better when you're having fun doing them. I have been disciplined in life to only do things that are fun, or that I think I can make fun. I have learned to leave "not fun" situations, and am the better for it (though the leaving part, and the decision to do that, are never easy). In any circumstance where I have been required do something "not-fun" I have suffered for it, physically & mentally, and the fact that I was often paid scads of money to do "not fun" stuff didn't make it better. I left one "not fun" job for a lower paying "fun" job, and it was the best move of my entire career.

And now, I do a LOT of things in retirement, and each and every one of them is not just fun, they're a riot and I love them all. Because if they're not fun, and I can't see them becoming fun, I stop doing them. One of the joys of retirement is I don't have to do anything I don't want to. When I tell people that in retirement, I only do things that are fun, I don't think they really understand what I mean.

And when I tell people that I only do things that are fun, it's because of Syl. As far as I know, Syl is still around and active in the Esso Annuitants Club, though I think he lost his wife in 2012. I wonder if he knows just how influential he was to a 22 year old engineer?

Feed the birds...

I like having birds in my 'hood. While I'm sitting at my desk at home, it's fun to see them flitting around, and for the window from November 1 to April 1, I put up feeders to try to get them to hang around and stay. Canmore has restrictions on bird feeders in the summer to reduce bear attractants; we don't, but I like the concept. We put up hummingbird feeders in the summer, but only put up our seed feeders in the winter.

I know that my local birds don't need my food. They can do just fine on their own. Hummingbirds become "addicted" to feeders, so once you start feeding them, you can't really stop without causing issues. But that's not true for the seed eaters.

After attending a talk by local Conservation Officer and bird lover, Glenn Naylor, I changed the food I feed my birds and now get many more birds that I used to. Turns out the only winter foods the birds around here eat are:

• peanuts, preferably shelled;
• black oil sunflower seeds, preferably shelled; or
• suet cakes.

In the past, the mixed bird seed I tried using was thrown on the ground and eaten only by the deer mice. I started off feeding just peanuts, but watched as they went through more than a pound in a day (but I sure got on their radar screen), and peanuts are expensive. My new seed mix is 50% sunflower seeds in the shell, 25% shelled peanuts and 25% shelled sunflower seeds. My little pigs love it.

Normal visitors I see every day are:

• Red breasted Nuthatches (peanut pigs)
• White breasted Nuthatches
• Black Capped Chickadees
• Mountain Chickadees
• Boreal Chickadees
• Clark's Nutcrackers (pigs in general, but especially peanuts and suet)
• Blue Jays
• Downey Woodpeckers
• Pine Grosbeaks

The Clarks are worst. There are about 5-6 around my yard, and when they come in, they chase other birds away. These bad boys will:

• Chow down a suet cake in under 24 hrs. If I put out 2, they're both gone in 24 hrs.
• Jam a cup of shelled peanuts into their crop, fly away, then come back and do it again and again until the peanuts are all gone
• Take every peanut in the shell I give them, fly away with it, and come back for more. I now see squirrels plus other birds with peanuts in the shell, as they find where the Clarks are stashing them
• Fling everything out of a feeder to seek out just the peanuts.

But they're pretty

It became clear on Day 1 that I had to do something to stop the Clarks from getting everything. So I built a cage around my main tube feeder. It's 1" mesh, so I cut a whole lot of 2" x 2" ports in it. Small birds can get in, but the big ones can't.

Unhappy Clarks

Well, Clarks are corvids (like crows and ravens) and corvids are smart. It took the Clarks 24 hrs to find out there wasn't a bottom on the cage. Even though it was a struggle, they flew in from underneath. I partially blocked it, and they figured out a way around that.

Sneaky bugger

So I put a full bottom on the cage, and they haven't been in since (though they still occasionally try to jam their heads through the 2" portholes).

Back to being mad

I like them around, though, so still throw out a handful of peanuts in the shell each day.

So now I get daily shows of birds doing cool things.

Male pine grosbeak 

Another

Red breasted Nuthatch with a peanut 

Female Downy Woodpecker on the suet before the Clarks got to it 

Male Downy inside the cage 

That male making off with a peanut

De-bugging my fence

My next door neighbour feeds on the other side of the fence, and she started hand feeding the Chickadees a few months ago. So I had to try.

Fearless

The Chickadees and Nuthatches both try to feed while I'm trying to fill the feeder. I've had birds fly into the cage to feed while I was trying to hang it. If I stand outside, it's not unusual for the Chickadees to fly right up to me. Today I was standing next to the cage, and there were 8 Grosbeaks on the ground around me, basically ignoring me.

Watching the intra-bird dynamics is interesting. Some don't mind having other birds in the cage. Some freak if ones fly by. The Nuthatches are quite happy to chase the Chickadees away. The Grosbeaks are normally tree feeders, but never go near the feeders, preferring to scour the ground for discards. If a Clarks is around, he'll chase other birds to try to get them to drop their peanuts. There's a suet cake hanging inside the cage, but for some reason, the Chickadees will try to eat from the one outside the cage in competition with the Clarks rather than use their own.

It's true they don't need me. But I don't care. I just need a new budget line item to pay for all the freaking peanuts they eat.