Helderberg In Cloud

The weather has dramatically turned here today, having gone from 35°C yesterday to about 28°C raining and thundery today. Needless to say this creates some spectacular views locally.

Look what We Can Buy...

This is bizzare! Paula was in a local shop (bearing in mind we're over 6000miles from Blighty) and came across a variety of tins from Tesco of all places. Just to prove she did buy them here, look closely at the label on the top and you'll see it's priced at R3, which is about 20p in UK money.

Quite why anyone in South Africa would want to import oranges from the UK is a bit lost on me. It's a bit like shipping coals to Newcastle or ice to Iceland!

Just to top it off, the oranges were produced in Swaziland which is a tiny land-locked nation within the borders of South Africa.

The world is truly a strange place.

Weekend

We've had a lot of fun this weekend mostly chillin' out at home. Dean went riding on Saturday morning so Paula took the boys to the gym for an hour and then onto the Nature Reserve so they could watch the emergency helicopter loading up with water before heading onto the fire on the Helderberg again. The helicopter filled up every 7 or 8 minutes so the boys were in paradise watching it coming in so closely. Sadly Dean had the camera with him so no photos of that.

Sign Of The Times

Saw this sign in a shop window in Gordon's Bay and have been left wondering just what 'circumstance' led to the closure of the shop.

We'll leave the spelling mistake for you to spot.

See more of this kind of silliness at Signs Of The Times.

Mountain Biking

It's now just over a year since I made the commitment to ride my mountain bike three times a week regardless of the weather or whether or not I had anyone else to ride with. Early on in my new endeavour I would end up riding quite a bit on my own, but I soon found a good crowd to ride with and ride regularly with Paul (on the left in the photo) who has become a good friend and cycling buddy.

A Typical Week?

This week has been a 'classic Chris Nissen week' for Paula. It started with confirmation of the bad news of drinking starting again amongst our church members - a none too auspicious start! I then had the great privilege of buying monthly food again for the very needy thanks to 2 wonderful gifts we received in the UK for this purpose. Thanks to these, we can continue the feeding programme for another 10 months - praise God! This month it was hard to decide who should receive the food as so many folk are struggling, but we had to make the difficult decisions. It was also a privilege to deliver quite a stack of dry food goods to the CNP créche.

Caracal

Early on Monday morning I was riding with a friend along jeep track on Sir Lowry's Pass when we saw what looked like some kind of strange dog. As we approached slowly the creature stopped and stared at us for a few seconds before sprinting off into the bush. We couldn't believe what we'd just seen, it was a wild Caracal cat with a rabbit in its mouth. He was obviously off for a hearty breakfast.

What an awesome privilege!