We’d like to thank everyone for being patient with our infrequent updating.  We have many good reasons for our infrequency, like the fact that it takes probably between 1 and 3 minutes to load a single picture, but we are learning the art of patience.

This third post is coming to you from the road. We said goodbye to Rozendal last week and are now nomads for the time being. Since Wednesday we have been venturing around the south coast of the country along what is known as the Garden Route. It follows seaside towns along fabulous beaches and through lush vegetation unlike that around the Cape Town area (hence garden route). We expected to be spending much of our time on the beach and in the water (which is much warmer than back near CT…we’re getting some Indian Ocean influence!)…but the beginning of our trip was mostly rainy and windy. Just yesterday we got our first full day of sun! Boy was it glorious.

One thing we got to tick off our to-do list: surfing! We spent an overcast afternoon in the water at Buffelsbaai (Buffalo Bay), a gorgeous local surfspot along our route, where a couple friends of ours suited us up and took us out to brave the waves. It was so awesome. I wouldn’t call what we did “surfing” exactly, but we did have the boards strapped to our ankles and we did paddle them out there, and we even rode some waves in splayed across our boards in an “upward dog” type position (our arms were so tired from all of the paddling that we had little strength left to actually lift ourselves up when the perfect wave came). So we didn’t quite stand up, but we had a blast and vowed that we will try, try again. I only wish we had some pictures to show for it. Maybe next time…

We are now in Oyster Bay—a small settlement 45 minutes down a rugged dirt road dotted with crater-sized potholes. The town is sleepy and out of the way…not a usual Garden Route stop…but most importantly it is the new home of our French friend Camille, who is working on a cattle farm here now. So we are staying with her and our new friend Mario, the farm manager, in a beach house across the street from enormous sand dunes and a gorgeous deserted beach. We are having a ball.

We’re here until Friday, when we head to the Addo Elephant Park to drive around and see elephants and other game. We’ll camp there before heading inland to visit a ranch in the Karoo (SA’s version of the outback) and then back to Stellenbosch. So now you’re caught up on where we are, where have we been and what have we been doing for the past…forever since our last post? We’ll have to update little by little, from internet cafes here and there…

One quick story: 

To tie up loose ends, the rugby game we talked about at the end of our last post was a total blast.  Well, more specifically, the all-afternoon braai beforehand, which we Americans would call tailgating, was the most fun part.  We spent many sunny hours sitting on, around, and under our vehicles, which were arranged in a tight, parking-lot fashion in a high school field right next to the rugby stadium.  Grills, coolers, and blue jerseys were everywhere.  Boys ran a-muck, weaving around cars and people, chasing their rugby balls.  Radios blasted the same ten pop songs imported from America that we hear constantly.  Old men chuckled in their beach chairs.  Basically, we were in a giant field of adjacent private barbeques.  It felt like a festival, except you didn’t have to walk around or pay for food.  It was lovely to spend time with our group of friends, mostly winery interns, and their co-workers.  Even more exciting was the late arrival of Midd-grad and dear friend Margaret Owen, of whom we have seen a fair amount.  The weather was perfect, the beer was cold, the meat—like all the meat here in South Africa—was delicious.

The rugby game itself was a disaster.  The local team is the Stormers, and as we filed into the stadium, they were number one in the country.  They had yet to lose a game this season.  Well, as our friends would tease us later, the American girls apparently brought bad luck because they played horribly and lost.  It was not an exciting game at all.  Hardly any tries were scored, and the crowd was bored and irritated.  In our customary fashion, we bickered intently on our interpretation of the rules of the game, whether it was “clearly like soccer” or “definitely more like football.”  As our respective theses reveal, neither of us had a firm grasp on what was happening.  We did do the wave, however, and I managed to knock the lady in front of me in the head, but turns out she was from New Jersey, so it was nice to chat with her.  Rugby is such an institution here, like soccer was in Italy, and unlike any sport in the U.S., save perhaps baseball back in the day.  Almost every South African male we know played rugby growing up.  Last night, one South African guy described the rhythym of life here.  “What is nice about winter is that there are a lot of rugby games on.  Saturday is rugby day.  Then Sunday, you relax and go to church.”  Rugby and church.  The  foundations of Afrikaans society.