Homeward Bound

Thursday started the great trek back up to johannesburg and back into the frenetic Johannesburg life. I went for my last dive on thursday morning and much against my intuition and experience was convinced by the instructors to do a "wreck" dive on the produce which is at about 30m. Having done several deep wreck dives before my experience is that there is little to see and you get precious little time within which to see it, unfortunately over time this memory fades and one finds oneself wondering if it really was that bad. Better try it again, maybe something has changed and it will be a great dive - hope springs eternal. Nope, it wasn't, same experience as before. Don't do wreck dives - they're awful and the only positive to the dive was seeing four large brindle bass which apparently can grow up to 2.7m and 600kg. I don't think that these were that large but at a guess I would say about 1,5m and probably 100 to 150kg which is still pretty massive and uncharacteristically these ones were particularly shy and moved off quite quickly so I didn't get a chance at a good photo.

Met Caron back at the shack pictured below, packed up and then we were on our merry way.



Caron and I have a perennial holiday game called "Wouldn't it be great to have a house here" which we don't seem to be able to give up. Fortunately, the games mostly ends in nothing but it is quite enjoyable speculating. This holiday we saw two properties, neither of which we are going to buy although they both had really beautiful views as shown below:


Farm in the Kamberg area


Farm in the Dargyle valley

On friday at about 14:30 we picked up Megan and Alistair from Selma and Bruno's (Carls parents) in Howick for the long trip home. Megan and Alistair are normally quite a quiet pair of kids but for some reason today was their coming out day. It was like having two random word generators in the back seat, no reason or logic or even context, just words and lots of them. We had the inevitable altercation which we managed to defuse before too many tears were shed and as the sun set over the FreeState the noise from my back seat diminished until we were driving through the darkness in total silence. Bliss! Delivered two sleeping kids to their parents and retreated homeward after a little bit to eat. We dutifully delivered a "must read" book from Bruno to Carl which is very funny because it goes on top of the two or three books that I have recommended as well as a few more from other people. The look of despair on Carls face knowing that his father had gone out especially to buy the book for him and that it was going to take a long time to read and that there really was no option. Amusing for me, not so funny for Carl.