Saturday, March 14, 2015

Johannesburg to Lady Grey

Day one of our little historical sojourn through the lands of our ancestors.

As I am writing this I am sitting on the stoep of the  Mountain View Country Inn where we are the only customers.  We have just taken a slow amble around most of the town, about 10 minutes walk all in all and I think it safe to say that Lady Grey is the epitomy of 'small town'; they only have a couple of restaurants and they are all closed, apparently they are only open during the week.

So while the white side of town is like a cemetery, the township next door is having a serious party, a bit out of tune but a party nonetheless.

The drive down here is an extremely pleasant one and stops short of becoming a 'long drive', very little traffic and the road, for the most part, was pretty good. We stopped at Smithfield for lunch at Pub and Restaurant and watched the end of the Lions being thoroughly beaten by the Crusaders.  The lunch was good, the results of the game not so much.


Even the drivers bar one taxi who insisted on overtaking us where the road narrowed down to a single lane due to the road resurfacing were pretty responsible.  We kept on overtaking and being overtaken by this one moron as he stopped and offloaded or picked his customers up.
 

Once we had arrived at the staffless inn we took the stroll and walked past a house which had burnt down and went in for a bit of a peek which turned out to be fascinating because it is so old that the bricks weren't actually fired, just sun dried and appear to be made of a mixture of mud and dung.


Some of the foundation stones had lost their veneer of paint and they appear to have been made purely of compressed dung but it is so old that it almost qualifies as fossilised dung.  Just across the road was this gallery, closed like everything else but interesting.


Had a bit of a fight getting online, I had forgotten that I had rebuilt my machine and never used it on the GSM networks before so had to set that up but everything went well so now you can appreciate the fruits of my typing.



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