Cape Town
We left Lagos late on Sat 17th December and were delayed for 2 hrs because they had to offload a drunk Shell contractor and his luggage. This meant we missed our connection in Johannesburg the next morning. But all that was quickly history when we arrived in Cape Town and picked up our hire car. What a fantastic city!

The first day we met up with friends from Lagos, Craig & Susan Winton, in the Two Oceans Aquarium. It was a great aquarium, with a huge tank with sharks, turtles, barracuda, rays, etc. Mathilde liked the singing penguin show! My parents arrived that day from the UK and it was great to see them, though unfortunately my mother's is having trouble with her legs so that she wasn't as mobile as usual.

After the visit to the aquarium, Erik and Daniel had a go on a kind-of bouncing-bungy-thing and some little go-karts which they loved.



We got some fantastic summer weather in Cape Town and one fine day we took the cable car up Table mountain. What a view!

For Inger-Lise, shopping was high on the agenda of activities for Cape Town, so she was quite upset when she found out that she (I?) had forgetten all her credit cards in Lagos. Fortunately the parents of a friend of Daniel's was coming down and we arranged for them to bring Inger-Lise's cards (Yes, it was that important!)

Needless to say, we had to go and see the penguins on Boulders beach, a few hours drive south of Cape Town. It was fantastic for the children to wander around amongst the penguins and I stripped off and jumped in for a swim with them!





My parents have old friends, Bob & Shelley Blythe, who live in Capetown. Their sons also live there: my mum is Godmother to Warwick and it was nice to meet up with him and his family. We calculated that it had been 38 years since we'd seen eachother! Funnily enough, like me he has done a lot of strategy development work for oil companies but as a consultant. We had a barbeque with them one evening which was very pleasant.

Just before we left for the next stop on our itinerary, on 22nd December we celebrated Mathilde's birthday. She had already had her birthday party together with Daniel, but we opened her presents in the morning which she enjoyed.