Shopping

We’ve just come back from the shopping trip of our lives. Two weeks in Johannesburg, zooming up and down the highways between one soulless shopping mall after another. The South Africans love shopping malls, where you can buy anything from zebra biltong to spray-on mud (for those who like to look cool after a weekend pretending to be in the bush). We focused on slightly different things, though, as we have lots of mud and dust of our own.

The coolest purchase was a wind turbine which will supply us with enough power to run fridges, freezers, laptops, etc, and is more environmentally friendly and certainly cheaper than getting hooked up to mains electricity – Escom gave us a quote of an astonishing US $84,000, at which we smiled politely and walked out. And it’s nice to think that we now won’t have any bills to worry about: the wind and the spring on the mountain will supply us with everything we need.

We also managed to get all our white goods, and a load of beautiful fabric for curtains, cushions, bed covers and the like, while the African Crafts Market supplied us with some great camel-hair Algerian rugs and Congolese wall hangings. Now we just need the local pottery lady to makes us some pots, and a few Malawian carvings. It’s nice to begin to be able to picture how the lodge will look.

On Tuesday the lodge is ours [ed: this was written a week ago]. I can’t wait to get started on the work. Though we’re starting out with borrowed pillows and a camping stove, I’m sure we’ll get it kicked into shape before too long; we’re hoping to open up in mid-December. Bookings taken now for Christmas!