Toes in the ocean!

 After dropping Bill at the plant on Friday, I went to look for the zebras, but only got a shot of them at too great a distance to be seen (boo).  I didn't have a camera the first time we saw them, crossing the road right in front of us and jumping a fence into the field on the other side.  Will try again another time, but here's a picture, in compensation, of a lone springbok--you usually see them in herds.  Let's call it "Springbok with Transmission Towers" ; )

What looks like fog in this photo is actually smog.  There is no central heating in this area, and many people, rich and poor alike but especially poor, keep themselves warm in the winter weather (which can be in the 40s at night) by burning wood.  As a result, the Cape Town area seems to have a smog issue to rival LA in the bad old days.  I'm hoping summer weather will bring a reprieve.

Bill gets off early on Friday, so we went for a very late lunch to Seaside Blues, a little restaurant/coffee house at the Melkbos beachfront, and then took a walk along the beach.  It was beautifully warm, so I ditched my shoes and rolled up my pants legs and finally dipped my toes into the surf.  It was delicious and no colder than along the Massachusetts coast, where I lived as a child.

Here are a couple of pictures of the beach from the coffee house.

You can see the curve of a little cove that seems to protect Melkbos from some of the heavier waves, though there were plenty of surfers in wetsuits on the beach.  Beyond the far end of the curve to the left a ways is Van Riebeeckstrand, where we are living.

The photo below is to the left of the one above and shows the kelp beds in which, I'm told, the whales sometimes calve.  We've been seeing them regularly offshore from our balcony--but always quite a ways out, signaling their presence with v-shaped plumes of water.  Temporary but regular neighbors, passing through.

 

 After our late lunch, Bill and I walked the long crescent of beach to where a "river" divides it from our beachfront and then turned and headed back.  You can't cross it with shoes on unless you want them sodden for the rest of your walk, but at the edge of the surf the water's only ankle deep; so, once we're regularly barefoot, we'll be able to walk from our house to the Melkbos strip on the beach.

As we got back there, around 5:00, the surfers glistened in the evening rays of the sun like so many playful, oversized otters.