Lateley I told you guys about the field fires here in J'burg. Well I took a foto yesterday, driving from the airport to my hotel. It is a normal thing here and nobody cares about it... also a strange thing for us European!

By the way, in about 5 hours I will once again climb into a plan and fly away! I will be in Hamburg on Sunday morning 8 am. So who want a wake-up call?

I will only be in town for 3 days! Wednesday morning I am on my way to cannada again...

*keep on swimming* ;-)

It is a funny world of its own - the town of Orapa. Approx. 10.000 people in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by bush and sand in an extremely hot and dry place. And Why? Because sometime ago somebody found - just there - little stones that were transparent, shiny and very hard...
Everything is dominated by the mine. De Beers controlls basically the entire village. Don' get me wrong, it is definitely not a bad place to be - in fact one of the safest in southern Africa - it is just so different to other places. It remindes me a bit of Asterix and Obelix, only that their village was surounded by a wooden wall and this place is by a big fence.

The entrence gates to Orapa look like big border gates or so. Booms, security etc...

Well one thing is for sure, once you are there you can relaxe and sleep a lot. Because in the evenings there is nothing else to do. So your days basically look like: getting up at 5.30, breakfast 6.15, 7.00 start working, if you are lucky knock off time at 17.00, supper at 19.00, a couple of beers afterwards and sleep! Easy!

At least in English it seems to be clear that the country's name is 'Botswana'. But in German it is not that easy. Still don't know what the correct spelling is like.
Anyway, Tuesday afternoon I left Johanesburg for Gaberone (Capitol of Botswana). It was an interessting experience because only another 10 people were waiting with me at the gate. The little 2 propeller machine gave more than enough space for all of us. A nice little thing you have to do in these countries is to identidfy your luggage before you enter the plane. All the bags and suitecases are nicely placed next to the plane. You as a passenger just walk to your stuff and make sure that one of the guys loads it into the plane.

Gaberone airport is a fascinating place! It has got the size of a standard school gym (basket ball field). If you remember that this is the capitol of the country...
For my connection flight I had to sit down and wait somewhere. Who ever I asked where I had to go, told me, that I must just sit down and the pilot will find me... (That's a new idea!!) But it worked! Half an hour later a guy with papers in his hands came to ervery single person to ask if he/she wanted to go to Orapa.
My next problem came with the check-in, cause my standard suitecase didn't fit into their x-ray. So what I had to do is to walk across the airport and get it scanned at the fright gate. Afterwards I just walked back to my gate - with my suitecase. Doesn't that make sence? SECURITY!!

Well, I will tell about my stay here in the middle of nowhere a bit later...

...to do the things you wouldn't do with your own car!

As done on one of the pans in Botswana with a nice new Golf V. It was great to experience the unpowered forces...

After that great weekend in Cape Town I spend 1 day in Johannesburg today befor I will fly up to Orapa again. It was quite a shock to land in Johannesburg! It is very dry now and from the plan you can see all the field fires and burned places in this area. There was a thick brownish layer over the city... What a difference to the beach of CT!

At least my 2nd home, "The Oakland Inn" was nice as ever:

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...

I am starting this weblog to improve contact to all my friends. Often I don't find time to send emails or call someone while I am away. My travelling activities have increased quite extend lately so that it gets more and more difficult to stay in touch with my friends.

Maybe this Weblog can improve things! We will see...

Please everyone feel free to comment any story!