Had a great wine evening at Parker last night: Liz uncovered a superb wine known as Pendana Shiraz. It’s made by a small estate called Amani (www.amani.co.za) and boy, was this wine a corker! At less than R150 a bottle, you got the most amazing velvety texture coupled with a really herby and spicy [...]
Finally, we’ve done what we promised a long time ago and that is to add a little more privacy to the strange bathroom we inherited in the Koi Pond Room. Imagine, if you will, how a romantic evening could be affected by a half wall between the bed and the bathroom. Hmmm. It [...]
It always comes as a serious shock to visitors here to find that Cape Town has virtually no (or rather had virtually no) public transport in the city centre. But since the World Cup’s buses (there were special routes set up all over town) sat idle, the City has started a new company, MyCiti, [...]
In the spirit of our aims to take Parker off grid by 2015 (slow and expensive but hopefully worth it!), we’ve started changing our lighting to LED. Old news perhaps if you’re living in a Western country but really quite fascinating here. The bulbs now fit conventional light fittings, meaning that the old [...]
It comes as a surprise to lots of our guests, particularly a couple staying with us from D.C., that Africa can be cold! Poor guys: they also didn’t know that South African houses don’t have central heating (the winter’s so short it’s just not worth it) and arrived with summer clothes in August. So, [...]
Yes, really. The Ten Hoope family who are staying with us at the moment were up on the cable way yesterday when, all of a sudden, they saw a large grey cloud heading their way. Being Dutch, they knew what to do, ran for the upper cable station and just 50m from the entrance [...]
Yes, they’re only snaps and not professional shots but do go and check out the images we’ve uploaded of the upgraded Paterson Room and the new Hamra Room on Facebook. Some attached to this post too.
Yesterday, I was driving around town in a hurry as usual when I had to stop at the lights on the corner of Strand and Buitengracht. It’s a long light and I was getting impatient. A small boy came up to me and asked for money for food (there are always people asking for [...]
Liz and I took a drive last week out to Durbanville, ostensibly to buy some brass fittings for the new bathroom in the Hamra Room but actually to have a bit of a day out! We drove out to Bellville and then over the N1 to Durbanville. Our first stop was the Durbanville [...]
Anyone who’s ever done refurbishment will know all too well that whatever time and money budget you set for a project needs to be tripled. And the Hamra Room, as it’s now called, was not the exception. We’ve taken the smaller of the two bedrooms in the Family Suite and added a bathroom to [...]
