Trip to South Africa, Day 6: Rock art!

I havent much time to blog today, having been out in the "wild country" and taking pictures with the infrared camera of (finally!) rock art, and now I'm going out to dinner soon.

My hotel, High street 137:

 The rock art site. Yes I'm wearing skiing clothes in several layers, but this was the first day I didnt acually have use for them. It was roughly 30 degrees at the site at most.
The thing with South Africa, like most countries, is that they have nothing like the "allemansrätt", ie most of the land is hedged in and owned by someone, so our guide, an archeolgist, had to borrow some keys from the helpful farmer owing the lands.

A partial hand painted on the rock, the other half being lost due to weathering. The motives varies very greatly in quality, from simple human lookalikes to finely drawn hunters and trees and strang beings.

SO, this is my last chance to blog for this trip, at least while on it. Tomorrow we will be traveling to Uppington, and then into Namibia, ending up in Gobabeb research station on saturday evening, where we will stay until wednesday for the SAAG conference. Then its more photographing in the Cederberg, and then the flight home from cape Town via Doha in Qatar. Be seeing you all!

Trip to South Africa, Day 5: Cell phone and sunshine hunting

Day 5, 4^th of September

We were at the doors of the dinner room at breakfast time, just to be able to get time to eat breakfast before the field trip, and hurried through that. Sadly enough our guide for the day had to cancel and postpone until tomorrow, so instead I recorded three 5 second time series at different times during the day of how the sun affects the temperatures at engraved stone plaquettes. My problem was that the sun didn’t want to show its lovely face, so I ended up “camping” 1h hour beside the church, working on my laptop. Later I found a second rock plaquette at the inner yard of the university.

Grahamstown down high street sometimes really looks lika an American frontier city a la some western movie:

At the lower end of the street is the derelict train station and an old locomotive:

Wanting to be able to actually talk with my family I wanted to buy a payphone of the cheapest sort, but it turned out I actually needed to both visit the local municipality office and get a special document (“proof of residence” I think it was. Bring your passport.), and then bring it and the passport to a *good* telephone store (I chose MTN). Before learning all this from Jan I just went into some store and bought a phone which proved to be a) without a working battery, b) without any SIM card and c) a used one. I returned that one…

The phone cost 169 RAND (~150 SEK), simple NOKIA telephone which was a nice history lesson of a time before iPhone; the hateful T9 function (I loathe autocomplete), actually using buttons, and all these menus. On the other hand: being able to phone home. A call for about 3-4 minutes didn’t actually cost more than maybe 8 RAND. I will have to double check that with a second call later on.

Jan and I were then invited again to Ians, where Jan treated us all with pancake wraps with brie cheese, homemade tapenade and salad. Delicious, and I managed to grab the spot infront of the heater… ;-)

Trip to South Africa, Day 3: Warm showers and Coral trees

Sunday 2^nd September

So did I mention they have no heating in the hotel? They don’t. Today I had a warm shower two times, beginning in the morning after waking up with cold feet, and in the evening after eating out (inside a restaurant, but still getting cold…). I do respect water being a greater commodity to treasure here, but I’d rather not catch a cold unnecessary. This night I will be sleeping with pajamas too.

Today the measurements of the church with the IR camera continued, and among other things we mapped individual uneven quartzite rocks on all sides of the church to see how temperature and topography (struktur typ) was related, with the main result being that downfacing (often shadowed) sides actually getting warmest. This is most probably due to indirect solar heating reflected in the ground (or emitted as heat radiation due to solar heating).

We went to the botanical gardens next to the university grounds, at which point the nature finally showed definite signs of not being Swedish (central Grahamstown being planted with so much plants that could easily be from gardens in northern Europe), with examples of aloe vera, and other tropical plants you usually see on vacation in southern Europe. The Erythrina or Coral tree must also be mentioned; we had a break below one and contemplated to impressions of the day and it being a winter’s day of 20 degrees plus.

From a higher vantage point, Jan noted to me how the previous apartheid division of the city still was evident, with the “white” old central town, townships for the black population (in the upper middle of the picture), and newer home projects (due to the ANC government) to the far right of that.

At the classic student restaurant Rat and Parrot afterwards we had some excellent pizzas (mine at least).
*BREAKING NEWS* You can actually turn on the radiator. I will be back with more of this in the morning news... ;-P

Trip to South Africa, Day 2: Church walls and dinner at Ian's

Day 2, Saturday 1st September 2012

Jan warned me ahead to bring warm clothes and I did. Also, in SA hotels in general desnt heat the rooms even if there can be elements to be used if needed, so when its 10 degres outside (like this night) you use en extra blanket. Beyond dreaming a little extra, I was quite OK.

The breakfast had several menus to choose from, so I of course chose an English breakfast with eggs,bacon, sausages and so on.

The first real day in Grahamstown and SA consisted of me an Jan measuring temperatures of walls of the Cathedral of ST. Michael and St. George. Sounds exciting, eh? ;-)

We claimed one of the spots used by people to get away from the cold wind and into the nice sun...

Actually it was, and todays most important find for me personally, almost as a side effect, was that I could see that the angle of IR photography didn’t affect the measured temperatures, ie I can measure “around” corners and uneven surfaces without worrying about temperature data being wrong. This result was a given for Jan, but I had secretly been worried about it; I should simply have asked him one year ago about it…

So to sum the initial conclusions up, it seems that the grout (cement mellan stenarna) is the hottest, followed by sandstone, and then quartzite rocks with the lighter of those being the coldest. Also there are obvious edge effects between materials, and a thermal gradient down into the rock (as seen when photographing around corners.

In the evening Jan and me was invited to a informal but warm dinner at Ian Meiklejohns home, with several of Ian’s collegues from the department  in which we ended up eating grilled fish, sweet potatoes, and a choice of cheeses as a starter. My and Jan’s gift of a bottle of Scottish whiskey was also appreciated in a double sense. When we went home we could again feel the south African winter bite, even if its nowhere near the Swedish one.