They have T shirts that say this! Well, it's a bit wild here.......Zululand yacht Club hosted a welcome night that featured a welcome Zulu dance - very impressed, but then there was an impala pooh spitting competition. I'm not kidding! Needless to say I did not have a go but Oscar did and a few intrepid ARC people. it was the real deal. Oscar thought it may have been a plastic pellet till he squashed one to see. The yacht club is a little distance from the shopping Mall and the other Waterfront but the taxis (and everything else) are really cheap so we may not get a car. The South African rand is 10 to our 1 dollar and the hourly wage for general workers is R14.00!! We've got Zulus all over the boat cleaning a and polishing. South African wine and beer is very nice and super cheap. We have trouble getting up to the R50 for a round to use the eftpos minimum. We are happily abusing the situation! The repair guys have started so all is going well. The area round here is a mixture of very nice residential with high walls, lots of barbed wire and pictures of armed security response and snarling dogs - then dodgy looking shanty towns. The Boardwalk Mall is super but there is armed security at most shop doors and no loiterers. The chandlery at the yacht club even has a grill door where you have to be buzzed in and out. We've been advised not to go out at night or stray off the main roads. Things are a bit broken down here with little or no maintenance of infrastructure. 4 out of 6 of the local people we have met have plans to move to NZ or Australia with many of their friends and relatives already gone. Zululand Yacht Club's wifi is down because someone dug up the cable and stole it! Oscar went off to a safari park for two nights with the Cravens and Mindi and came back raving! They saw so many animals really close up and even had monkeys trash the girl's room! They were is glamping type tents. There are monkeys at the yacht club too and you have to be careful what you leave lying around on deck and to shut hatches as they have worked out how to get in!
Huw left us on Monday. He has decided that life with Laura is preferable to sailing with us! (she didn't like the sailing )It's been great having him with us this past 7 months and we'll miss him. He will now be walking/hiking round the world instead.
