Day 112: Freedom Day — A Big Cleanout — Another Evening at Kath and Matt’s
Today’s our last full day in South Africa. Hard to believe we landed in Joburg from Brazil at the beginning of MARCH!
It was a very low-key day as we prepared for a new leg of our trip.
After exercise and breakfast, Teddy watched the kids swim and play with yet another resident hotel cat: Pippa.
Meanwhile I had coffee at the hotel with Kelo Kebu, a longtime contact via TED. She is the organizer of TEDxJohannesburg, a TED Fellow and one of the curators of TEDGlobal 2017 in Arusha — which inspired this whole trip.
It was great to chat with her and relay everything I’ve seen and learned and get her insights into it all. She admitted that she herself can’t stand Cape Town and never goes because it’s so stuck in the past. Confirmed what we’d felt: Beautiful, but problematic.
Around lunch Teddy went to get some Headfirst banking documents notarized — found a nice lawyer online and the guy even gave him a ride back to the hotel. Ha!
We spent the next few hours laying out everything from our suitcases and giving it all a good, honest scrub. Accumulated t-shirts and toys and trinkets either got trashed, donated or shipped home to the US. We reorganized everything and feel nice and Kondo’d.
Headed to DC: two duffels of souvenirs and the Anton Kannemeyer print we purchased.
By 5 we were ready for our sundowner and headed back to Kath and Matthew’s. The kids were so excited to see each other again and immediately jumped back into their games. Kath had set up a G&T bar and we spent the next two hours hanging out outside on their porch.
At some point Snuggles the hamster came out, to the delight of everyone small. There were also sparklers. Lots of fun!
They told us the most insane story from safari. Apparently a kid William’s age at a school close to them went on safari two years ago at a private game reserve. During lunch when all the kids were playing in the pool at lunchtime between game drives, a leopard snatched the boy and dragged him into the bush, screaming. His dad heard the screams and ran after the leopard, who dropped the kid and ran away. A couple of stitches and he was good as new (and the most popular kid in school obviously). I mean WTF?????
We had a lot of good laughs and fun catching up even more. So good to see them after all this time….
