South Africa trip - Norman's farm

We landed in Johannesburg around 7 in the am and proceeded to pick up our rental car. There were 4 of us, CJ and I and CJ's co-worker Sam and his wife Samantha. They're also from Charlotte and moved here in July on a similar expat deal.

At the rental place it turned out that we got.... a 10 passenger VAN!! Hilarious! Here she is...

Sam was driving and I give him a lot of credit. As a former British colony SA drives on the WRONG (left) side of the road, plus the roads are pretty crappy and animals keep jumping out of nowhere into the roadway... Pretty interesting.

We drove from Johannesburg to Bela Bela, a small cummunity about 1.5 hrs away where one of Newell's Presidents, Norman, has a vacation house. He is South African and normally lives in Joburg and he's been on our case to come visit him and his wife on the farm for the weekend. And I am sooo glad we went!! What an experience.

Turned out that the farm is really a GAME farm. Norman and 5 other owners share a huge piece of land (hundreds of acres) covered in wild brush and they keep a ton of wild animals there: zebras, giraffes, impalas, elands, kudus, wilderbeast, warthogs etc... Insame!!
Here are some pics of the house and surroundings. Guess who has cabin envy now... of course CJ! All the cabinets were custom made by a local artisan. The house is full of gorgeous animal skins (not from hunting but recovered when their animals died of natural causes) and beautiful local artwork.

We spent a good amount of time sitting on this deck next to Norman's man cave which is really a separate building with a full bar and fire pit. Here's Norman being silly playing on his vuvuzela... you can see the bar behind him. Talk about cabin envy now!!

Just before sunset our hosts loaded us all into the van and we headed to the mountain top for a sunset drink and sunset watching. Apparently they do that a lot. What a cool tradition! Here's the guys enjoying their whiskeys... From left: Norman, Sid, Sam and CJ of course.

We actually came back to the house to see the sunset itself and here are some gorgeous shots of it.

Later in the evening, Norman and Elise treated us to a traditional South African Braai which means bbq. They served several kinds of yummy meat including lamb, local sausage and coke can chicken (not beer since Sid does not drink), and Elise made traditional SA bread and baked it on the open fire in the fire pit. So cool!!

They also served a local specialty called biltong - they pronounce it bull tongue and at first that's what we thought it was. But is it just general dried meat, tastes kind of like beef jerky.

After the braai we sat around and chatted and laughed for a while and then finally went to bed. We were all wiped out from hardly sleeping at all the night before (on the planes). Norman and Elise told us we could open the windows at night but make sure to close them before sun up because they have a pack of wild baboons coming down to the house every morning and they didn't want them getting inside and scaring or hurting us... WHATTTTTT!!!!!! Guess who kept the windows tightly shut after such an announcement! And sure enough, when I woke up early the next morning I heard the baboons barking literally a few feet away from the window. Slightly scary!

Speaking of baboons, Norman and Elise call their farm Bangwe which means Place of the Baboon in some african language. They have the name and a little baboon embroidered on towels and bedding. They plan to use the farm as a B&B after they retire. I can't imagine a cooler place to stay especially with awesome hosts like those two...

to be continued...