Some might remember that in early 2009, Marie and I set out for a memorable road trip up the West Coast of South Africa, into Namibia’s incredible Namib Desert, across to southern Kalahari and back to Cape Town. I then wrote a series of 9 stories around the common theme Roasted in the Namib; they are regrouped here for sequential reading (yes, I thought of everything...)

Similarly, this year’s upcoming trip report should feature some 10 stories along with plenty of supporting photography. My current theme Cartwheels over Lesotho was inspired by the acrobatic driving style required for such expedition and also by the sobering fact that our Lesotho experience remained fast and superficial but was quite aerial.

In the coming weeks, look for tales of dirt roads and torrential rains, of camping kleptomaniacs and good-hearted traffic cops, of wine bottles hidden by a riverside, of game grazing freely on rolling hills and of wonderfully lush lands, of stars and satellites drawing perfect skies, of solitude and silence and peace, of unsettling poverty and proud herders, of hairy mountain passes and differential lock, and of all the small traveling links that glue all these together.

For now, though, here are a few simple panoramas to illustrate the many faces of the land we explored. At times hot and dry and harsh, later lush and green and soft, the South African landscape never ceases to amaze me. Voyez plutôt:

If our last trip to Namibia had been dominated by the color red, this one, to our surprise, was incredibly green. The area we visited had received unusual amounts of rain. The scenery reminded me of Zion and Arches at times, and at others evoked Scotland or Hawaii.

In the meantime, with the Argus on March 14th, I am going to have to train hard. I went for a first - and I mean literally first in 3 years - bike ride this morning, 70 km in total towards Cape Point. It stung. Biking definitely uses different muscles than running does. The Argus is going to hurt. Alleluia.

So stay tuned for road pictures, for stories of starry skies and foggy high plateaus, for zebras and antelopes, for the lushest of mountains behind walls of rain, for sunshine and sunsets and sunflowers, and for the goofy tales of two traveling addicts and a Landcruiser.

The 12 Apostles trail run was 18 km long and took 3:20 hrs, starting steeply above Llandudno, following the top of the Apostles on the back of Table Mountain, cutting across to the reservoirs, joining the jeep track, descending to the Constantia Nek, on to Cecilia and down the green belt. I called it the Good Faith run because I was afraid my strength might betray me somewhere around Judas Peak, a very steep and a rather exposed climb on which I walked up, as with all other uphills, pacing myself for what unknown might lay ahead...

In Cape Point, I was dropped off by Marie all the way down at the final parking lot below the lighthouse and ran back north with the Cape of Good Hope at my left, pushing on across the long plateau to the junction to Olifantsbos where I indeed turned left and went on to the end of the road, a 20 km run on paved surface that took 2 hours flat, in an increasing heat that was rapidly nearing the forecast 29°C, but with fantastic scenery, memorable waves on the west coast, the fynbos everywhere and ostriches, bokkies and probably a Cape Cobra along the way. We then had a recovery picnic down by Bordjiesdrif Beach. Perfect.

I have come pretty close to running my 100 km in the last three weeks (96 km in fact), mostly on trails, and that makes me very happy as the summer was rather bad and I needed to get back on track. [End of bragging]

[Update: Besides, as it stands tonight, I have to cancel the morning bike ride (see below) because I seem to have injured my right quad. How I could have injured such a large and strong muscle and done so running rather slowly on an even and relatively flat road is beyond me. It just goes to show that training, despite all the joking and bragging, is a very serious and methodical thing and should be approached accordingly, or else.]

In the news, I have now foolishly signed up for the Cape Argus Pick ‘n Pay Cycle Tour on March 14th. It’s 108 km in total and is said to be the largest timed bicycle race in the world. 35,000 people of all sizes and shapes will be on the starting line. I won’t be racing, of course, just trying to finish. But the route is magnificent and I’ll be riding in the inspiring company of Marie’s father Henri, who at 77, still bikes the Argus every year. Hell, if Lance Armstrong can win a race on one testicle - and he might since he will be there - I should be able to at least finish mine with two.

But before that Marie and I are borrowing the Landcruiser for our beloved yearly road trip, destination Lesotho, a small circular mountain kingdom completely surrounded by South Africa. I’m afraid it is extremely poor but we hear it’s also very pretty. We’ll stop in the Karoo and many beautiful places along the way. There should be lots of pictures and stories to come. But be warned, this blog will be taking a break during our trip. Back in 2 weeks or so.

Until then, cool runnings!

Oh, and here are a few snapshots from the runs above...

Four years later, South Africa is hosting the 2010 World Cup. The first match will be played on June 11th at Johannesburg’s 95,000-seat Soccer City Stadium. The rest of the tournament will be split between 9 South African cities. Five of these have built a brand new venue for the occasion, led by Durban and its impressive 70,000-seat stadium which features a cable car to the top of a 106-meter high arch suspended over the field. The arch was given double legs on one end that join into a single footing at the other, symbolizing the country’s new unity.

Second on the list of major accomplishments is Cape Town’s new stadium, having been built on the site of the old Green Point Stadium. It will seat 68,000 spectators for the 8 games to be played there during the Cup. It features a 9000-panel glass roof to allow sunlight in, a semi-transparent facade and, last but not least, 500 toilets and 360 urinals...

Last Saturday, February 6th, a first rugby match and second game ever was played at the stadium. Organizers, working in stages, had raised the attendance limit to 40,000 people. They just about filled the place. We were there.

For most spectators, us included thanks to Marie’s dad whom we joined for the outing, this game opposing the Stormers to Boland was basically just an excuse to go visit the venue. The event was a trial, a test run at 2/3 capacity aiming to assess the readiness of the city and the stadium’s functionality in large crowds. It would seem, to my lasting surprise, that they both passed the test with flying colours.

Apart from the yearly Cape Argus bicycle race that rallies 35,000 participants, Cape Town isn’t used to big crowds. The Green Point stadium merely held 18,000 rugby fans. There isn’t much parking available downtown. Until now, there was no need for it. So rather than build massive amounts of parking space around the new stadium, planners decided to spread the load and make visitors park further out. They would then ride buses to the game.

If that theory had been explained to me in detail before testing it, I would have laughed and prepared for the worst. There was no way to carry that many people back and forth in a timely manner. Chaos would surely ensue. Fights would erupt. We would miss the game.

I would have been wrong.

We parked underground at the Artscape Theater. When we emerged from the lot, a light crowd was flowing to the left and we simply followed. Many buses were parked nearby. They were requisitioned from the Golden Arrow fleet that normally mostly services the townships. Drivers sit in an armored booth but the buses are squeaky clean. We lined up behind some two or three hundred people, curious to see how this was going to unfold. A lot of staff was on hand, wearing fluorescent vests and holding various helpful signs: Queue Here, Standing Passengers Allowed, etc. But were they volunteers?

In less than 5 minutes, we were aboard our bus. It had gone so fast we could barely believe it. The bus took off along with 4 others - they were sending off waves of 5 buses every 5 or 6 minutes. More buses were arriving behind us empty and waiting their turn.

The drive to Green Point took some 10 minutes. Traffic lights were being controlled locally by the police who waved the buses through. At our destination, we followed the crowd once again and walked a half a kilometer to the stadium which finally appeared in all its glory from behind some low buildings. I had only seen it from Table Mountain. It is quite impressive. The security and police presence was even more impressive.

The only slow-down of the day happened at the gates where people initially queued up in an orderly fashion but eventually started jumping lines. The process was slowed down by a brief security check of each admitted spectator and a pat down that, given the huge relative cost of the stadium, might have been much more efficient if fancy metal detectors had been on hand - even though they were probably searching for booze as much as weapons.

We then had to look for the green section, the stadium being divided in 6 color zones. Panels or maps would have helped greatly. But they might be on their way, as some details still seem to be a work in progress. The stadium’s periphery is superbly wide and aerated. Even with a 40,000 attendance, the crowd never became unbearable.

We found our seats and sat down with friends of Marie’s dad. I immediately jumped on my G10 and began taking hand-held panoramic shots of the inner stadium. The public was thrilled, not so much by the perspective of the game than by the grandiose new toy the city had finally given them. They momentarily forgot that their tax money would be paying for this long after the Cup had left for different shores and a gigantic wave began to circle the stadium.

Soon the match began. Being French and having been raised playing football, I had a little trouble accepting the facts that a rugby ball is voluntarily deformed and that one player’s hands on said ball carried across the final line is a heroic act rather than the sacrilege I am used to, but in the end, I came to the conclusion that hundreds of years of divergent evolution must have created such drastic differences in the way people chase balls for the utter glory of it.

The sun shone straight down on us for most of the game and while I was blessed to have brought a baseball hat out of sheer confusion about the event, we were not so fortunate as to have thought of sun screen, and we watched the game with our sweaters over our heads in a typically African shade seeking ritual.

In a stroke of genius, Henri decided we should leave a bit early to beat the final exodus back to our car. The game was going along well and our favourite local team was beating the boerewors out of their visitors. They would eventually win 47-13.

We headed for the exit, surprised to see many others had had the same idea. Boarding the bus back didn’t take much longer than it previously had, but by the time we were rolling towards the city center, a huge line had formed behind us and people on the bus were whistling incredulously at the human snake that now stretched back all the way to the stadium gates.

We counted the buses on site, plus the ones arriving behind them, and all the empty ones we saw on our way to the drop-off point. Best guess, 50+. It was all quite impressive. We got to our car, drove off, and looked at each other. The whole thing had been mostly glitch-less. In and out without a scratch. The new Cape Town Stadium was holding its own and it appeared it would handle a 70,000-people game without flinching too much.

And that would be really nice. Cape Town needs the good publicity. South Africa needs the good publicity. After the country woke up from its terrible nightmare last century, it was slowly rehabilitated into the world scene, reappearing shyly on maps while embargoes were lifted; tourism slowly came about and the past was painfully shoved under the dirty carpet of History.

But it seems to me the country has since then been struggling inwardly with its own new identity and never managed to achieve total recognition. Crime remains incredibly high and social issues are as pressing as ever. The shadow hasn’t yet passed. To brighten things up, attention from the outside could probably do a lot of good. The touristic and economic boosts a worldwide event such as the FIFA World Cup can yield are incredibly powerful. But this is a double-edged sword, one that can make or brake a country’s reputation.

While it is one thing to hold the Cup in an accessible, high-tech and popular country like Germany, it is quite another to hold it at the southern end of Africa, far from just about everywhere in the world, in a country that in most people’s mind still carries the stigma of Apartheid, that is kept on the watch/warning list of many foreign offices and who’s white minority mostly ignores football for rugby.

The South African 2010 FIFA World Cup, to me, is a major gamble. I hope it’ll work. Everybody here deserves it.

The 2 CV wasn’t only driven by Inspector - pardon me, Chief Inspector Clouseau. It’s actually one of France’s most iconic cars ever built. Its production began just after WW2 and the car was literally meant to encourage a popular switch from horse driven carriages to the automobile.

The 2 CV (as in deux cheveaux vapeur, or two steam horses) was a brilliantly designed and very innovative mechanical jewel, but in a minimalistic and economical way. It was light, very easy to repair, had an independent soft suspension and high clearance that allowed some off-road driving, and it didn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Of course, with these attributes, it was also a little fragile. I distinctly remember putting a nice dent into a side panel with a poorly aimed shoot of my childhood football. It also had nasty flap-up windows which, when open, threatened one’s fingers in tight curves. But even with production ending in the late eighties, many 2 CV’s have managed to survive and are being lovingly maintained and cared for. With such a simple design, one would think they could last forever.

Kalk Bay is a quaint little seaside town built around a small fishing harbour, visited by whales in the winter and home to the fantastic Harbour House restaurant and also the much more simple Olympia Cafe, where I was thrilled to finally find my favourite spinach polenta back on the menu.

I’ve been hoping for the weather to turn winter-like and for a freakish storm to hit the coast because waves hitting the pier and lighthouse in Kalk Bay are an incredible spectacle. I’m afraid my wishes won’t be granted. We’ll have to come back.

Either way, a 2 CV is always a happy sight.

They seem to favour the bright green livery no matter what they stand on and I’ve only seen a few individuals choose a darker shade of green while holding on to a higher branch with less leaves. I’ve still got to find one in full tones of brown.

The way their eyes move is fascinating; the entire eye socket can pivot in a full 180 degree motion, obviously independently. No actual feeding observed yet, but I wonder how much our presence alters their behaviour. The chameleons certainly don’t like the proximity of a camera. I’ve stopped taking close-ups and now shoot with the camera on macro but fully zoomed in, which gives me an actual distance of a foot or two to the subject.

They seem to prefer the sunny side of the little trees they hide in, but that could be very subjective. There is no way to keep our observation rigorous unless we are going to seriously track individuals on an hourly and then daily basis, which we can’t afford to do unless we put a serious dent into our other casual activities like sleeping, running and dining...

But I’m having fun and the chameleon quest helps me forget about pity issues such as global warming or the FIFA ticket sales.

Here are more pictures, probably the last, but also the cutest...

Anybody with valuable information about the species and an iron-clad reference letter can apply here for conditional Constantia location disclosure.

As a rough guide, here’s my workflow: I bracket each frame into 3 exposures at -2, 0 and +2 EV, usually taking 4 to 7 frames to cover the scene (I rarely do full 360 deg. panos thus far), moving the head horizontally by 25 to 30 degrees between frames, or overlapping them by some 40%. Once home, I convert my Canon RAW files to DNG, process them with Tim Farrar’s FFDD6 to obtain EDR TIFF images (my own term: Extended Dynamic Range, as this is not the standard HDR + tone mapping process), develop them in a RAW processor with identical settings for all files and then stitch them together and apply the finishing touches such as sharpening and cropping.

The final output is a 16 bit TIFF file in the ProPhoto color space that’s up to 200 MB in size and measures up to 80 in. at 240 dpi. That final panorama should be pretty much free of noise thanks to FFDD’s brilliant scripting and contains superb detail. I must say it’s hard to scale it down to a web-friendly size and still have it look as good.

Of course, these are just my first baby steps in a broad direction and I have a lot to learn. A better camera and lenses will eventually yield much better results, and a more powerful computer will help the post-processing tremendously; my laptop, as it is, struggles painfully through the process and crashes regularly...

This will get better.

They lasted me well over 1500 km without flinching. I only changed them after 3 years because I was worried to see everybody else rotate their shoes much earlier. But I suspect I ran better in these than in my current Asics. Oh, that Nike model? Of course they don’t make them any more.

The second best purchase ever, well, that only happened this year (2009). I was leaving Vancouver and my all-time favourite Seawall route behind and was quite worried about what lay ahead in New York in terms of running paths. It felt like I would never find anything as good as Stanley Park and would have to get used to streets again. I would have to spend hours on the Gmaps Pedometer plotting multiple routes and calculating possible and probable distances.

So I was weak. I invested in a Garmin Forerunner 305 personal trainer, a heart rate monitor with integrated GPS capability. Equipped with the little beauty, I’d be able to follow my progress in real time and break free from pre-run distance calculations. I would be able to improvise and adjust to the Eastern Seaboard.

I’ve now been running with the Forerunner for almost a year. My last 3 trail runs down here in South Africa relied on it heavily. I simply love it. It is the most extraordinary tool and I seriously doubt I would be able to accomplish as much without it. Despite the obvious heart rate monitoring - which I am not really using these days, having temporarily stopped interval training when I left Vancouver - the Forerunner offers a multitude of features that really all boil down to this: its GPS capability allows for real-time tracking of distance vs speed and time.

That’s it. It’s that simple. With a glance at my watch, I know instantly how long I have been running, and how far. And what remains ahead if I’ve plotted a training course. This makes such a huge difference in terms of pacing myself, I can’t imagine running without it any more. I can double-back and run in my tracks, I can follow a previously uploaded route, I can run against myself to improve  time, I can choose paces, heart rate zones and speeds at will, backed up by alarms to stay within chosen parameters. I have direct access to sunrise and sunset times, I can mark interesting spots as way-points, and later, everything gets uploaded to either of my 3 favourite pieces of training software, on the laptop or online, and the run is fully detailed and mapped onto Google maps.

Yesterday’s run once again led me over Table Mountain. Marie had a meeting in downtown Cape Town with an editor and dropped me off at 3:00 PM a little beyond the lower Cableway station, at the base of Platteklip Gorge. Platterklip reminds me very much of Vancouver’s Grouse Grind. Steep, straight up, painful, it took me a bit under an hour to climb. Two major differences here, though: the South African mid-day heat - it was about 27 deg. C - and its consequence, a welcomed absence of crowds. I couldn’t choose my window, having caught a ride, but I would recommend going much earlier in the day, or later.

In any case, no running up Platterklip for me, I don’t train on uphills often enough to manage it. And with 13 km to go once at the top, the name of the game was pacing. I was bringing along two energy gels and two Powerade bottles. I also knew I could count on water at the beginning of the Jeep track, near the reservoirs.

Platterklip, just like the Grind, is basically a long staircase. Initial elevation: 400 meters ASL. I started in the sun and eventually got some shade as the two walls converged on me and water sang weakly in the gorge, despite the summer. I sucked an energy gel two thirds of the way up. Towards the top, legs a tad shaky, I met up with an unrelenting sun again but the wind finally picked up as I came out onto the plateau at 55 minutes. A signpost indicated the cable car station to the right, and Maclear’s Beacon to the left.

I aimed for the latter, running on a pleasantly flat trail of large rocks and some sand, and reached the beacon at 1:15 hrs. Altitude, 1087 meters. I snapped a few shots and pushed on. From Maclear’s Beacon, I was on known territory. I negotiated the long descent on the Smuts Track, passed Skeleton Gorge (a tempting shortcut back home) and Nursery Ravine (an even more tempting shortcut to home and the swimming pool) and eventually came upon the beginning of the Jeep track, at 2:00 hrs sharp.

I filled my empty bottle with a water that is most probably drinkable but, as with all fresh water on the table, looks a little yellow and doesn’t really inspire me. I had Powerade left and decided to use the fresh water for cooling off, the sun still fiercely frying the top of the mountain.

The steep Jeep track is quite easy on the way down as long as I pay close attention to my knees. At the Constantia Nek, I took a sharp left and followed a trail into Cecilia, descending and crossing the road into the top of the Green Belt and running down a bit faster on my last reserves, like a horse smelling the barn.

I arrived on Brommersvlei Rd. at 2:47 hrs. The Powerade was gone, and so were my reserves. Once home, I drank a ton of water and jumped into the pool. The dogs looked worried, either about my redish face or about the risk of drowning. Theirs.

Beautiful run.