It is crazy. It started at Cape Town International with a fuel delivery of such bad quality that the airport send it back. This caused a shortage of fuel so that on Saturday flights were delayed by hours or even canceled. Flight from overseas still came in and were filled up but not all domestic flights were. Some plains had to fly to Port Elizabeth to fill up. Private plains were not filled up at all. That was the reason why the De Beers flight to Oranjemund did not go and some guys from the project team could not come up. Meanwhile the problem is solved and the flight are in time again…

Now it starts on the roads. SA is changing the petrol to a cleaner standard. The result is that the oil companies cannot cover the demand. A lot of petrol stations have already run out of fuel. And they say the worst is yet to come because the holiday seasons only starts now.
Driving up to Namibia we came to 3 patrol stations without fuel!!! Fortunately we were always looking for new fuel when the tank was half empty so we managed to arrive in Oranjemund. Just imagine running out of fuel somewhere in the nowhere… The area between CT and O’mund is not really busy…
Being in Oranjemund did not really improve on that situation. The only fuel station in town is empty!! So far we don’t know how we will come back.. Maybe we leave the car in the sand and just fly back…

After those cold winter days in Hamburg I had such a wonderful Sunday in Cape Town. I slept long and then had a nice breakfast with the view of Table mountain. After lots of coffee and fruits I relaxed for some time on the balcony. So nice being only 30 meters away from the beach listening to the waves braking on the sand.
While I enjoyed the morning I suddenly realized that Signal Hill (the hill basically in the middle of the city was in flames. Three helicopters were flying in constantly to extinguish the fire. Everything was in smoke but after a few hours everything over and the city was safe.
In the afternoon I went to Blaauwberg beach for a bit of kite surfing! Oh it was soooooo much fun. It was the first time for me riding and so high waves. But the water was extremely cold. After 30 min I couldn’t feel my feet anymore. Since the wind was calming down anyway I stopped for the day.

But it felt so good. And it was a good day before driving up to Oranjemund…

My company was so kind to upgrade me to business class on my flight to SA. What a dream. To others it might be a normal thing but for me it was like literally being in heaven. It was so nice to be served with nice food and wonderful south african wine. But the best of all was the seat and the possibility of lying almost flat. It was the first time that I slept for 7 hours...

And now I am once again in Cape Town. So the above picture is valid again! :-)

After spending a 10 days in the dessert desert of Botswana (Orapa Mine) it was a pleasure to be able to fly to Cape Town for a meeting and spend the weekend there.
When I landed on Friday morning though, I thought it had actually been a bad idea. During the descent of the plan you could see nothing but a white endless ocean with many turbulences shaking the plan. Once through the cloud the plan immediately touched ground - the clouds were hanging very deep!
It was miserable and could in the city. It poured cats and dogs, it was windy and very cold. We had a meeting with ADP about the set-up of our MikroSort project in Namibia. Everything is on track and both companies (Scan & Sort and ADP) work very close together in a very friendly way. It was 20.45 when we finally left ADP.

The next morning most of the clouds were gone and we had a wonderful view onto Table Mountain from our apartment.

From then onwards Cape Town showed us its nicest side. Christian (my colleague from Scan & Sort) fell in love straight away with this part of the world. I must agree it was a dream to stay there!

Shame I had to leave to soon again...