Load shedding and Lingo

 Sunday, March 12, 2023

We woke up to a lovely morning, with a cool breeze.   We are on day 28 of our 33 day trip.  It's hard to believe how quickly the days have passed by.  It seems like Cape Town was ages ago.

We turn in the campers tomorrow, so everyone is busy cleaning, and packing and doing laundry to try to determine how short they are on suitcase space!  There are no washers and dryers at this campground, so we had to do washing by hand, and dry on the clothesline!  Lucky it was a sunny and breezy day.

There are a few campers with a little body damage and a broken window to be reported...both got a little bit close to the left hand side!

The campground is busy, with boaters, and campers  We've seen quite a few of these unique tent setups. It would be bad to get up in the middle of the night to step outside and forget where you are!

 The campground here has published a schedule of  load shedding hours--where the electricity goes off.  It is 2-4:30am, 10-12:30pm and 6-8:30pm.  They have a generator for the restaurant, but the rest of the campground is dark during those periods. (i.e. no electricity). These rolling blackouts are an attempt to handle the energy crisis going on in South Africa. It's strange to understand this problem,--even the trains run on electricity.

When there is a load shedding period the traffic lights go out.   If the lights are black, the intersection becomes a four way stop.  Crazy and confusing!

In addition to the load shedding, we've learned a lot about South African lingo.  For example, they call traffic lights robots, and shopping carts trolleys, and "to go" is "take-away"and restroom and shower house is ablution block, and barbeque is braai.  We can learn the words, but can't quite get the accent down.   One thing that is not different is a slushie!   Several of us got together for a vodka-infused blueberry or cherry sushie--it doesn't matter how you say it or what you call it...yummy!    

And we closed out the night with dinner on the braai.