Arrival

Our trip was incident free – after boarding at Edinburgh – and we arrived about 45 minutes early in Cape Town.

Unfortunately, immigration took 45 minutes while the car hire queue was even longer. Finally made it out of the airport about 2 ½ hours after landing, found our route to our home for the next three months at Pearl Valley – it helps when the car has a built-in satnav – and managed to unpack, get some essential shopping and have a walk around the area before we crashed out.

Our new home is a very comfortable townhouse with a lakefront view. It's on a golf estate, which is part of a larger ‘lifestyle’ estate called Val de Vie where our friend Ally lives. We have managed to find the Clubhouse, with bar, restaurant, and outdoor pool, been finger-printed by the security team and managed to negotiate the biometric system which appears to grant us access to all the facilities – at least I don’t have to remember any more passwords.

After our second trip to the local Mall, we are now online and both equipped with SA phones which entailed a lot more memory challenges since I had to remember a number of passwords for all those things which normally connect automatically. It didn’t help that my notebook with all these details is locked away in Edinburgh – and of course changing one password seems to have a whole series of unexpected knock-on effects.

Looking forward to lunch at one of our favourite Wineries tomorrow – we set ourselves a rule that we could only buy wine direct from the source so the cupboard is a little bare at the moment. However that is sure to be a short term issue.