January started relaxed with a nice concert at Kirstenbosch Garden featuring Freshly Ground. The atmosphere is always so positive and full of energy with people all over the Cape Town area joining those concerts. When I am in Cape Town, a concert at Kirstenbosch is always on my list. Since I am country girl by coincidence living in Hamburg, I love to spend time in the nature: if I am not at the sea, mountains and the country side makes me happy alike. Besides windsurfing a lot, we climbed table mountain early in the morning, went to a wine tasting at Hardenberg and were happy to visit Erika and Peter at their olive farm Boerfontein, which is next to Wellington and Paarl. The farm is stunning! If you want to spend some time within olive trees in the winelands not far from Cape Town, you should book a cottage or an appartment at Boerfontein.
Windsurfing-wise, Cape Town offered pretty good wave riding conditions with good-sized waves, which allowed me to improve my waveriding. Due to so much windsurfing it was always good to strech the body during one of our yoga sessions with Anna! Oh, I will miss those sessions and am already looking forward to come back next winter!
Looking forward to 2018, I hope that Cape Town can win the fight against the drought and the water crisis in the upcoming weeks and months. Being back in Hamburg it just makes clear in what a luxuriouness we are living in Europe: I felt so comfortable flushing the toilet and taking a shower for longer than 2 min. That might seem strange, but with one flush you use 7 - 9 l of water, which is just too much when you are not allowed to use more than 40-50 l of water. I will for sure check Cape Town`s water dashboard the next weeks, which by the way is brilliant just like the whole social media information program of the city about the water crisis. I hope that the Cape Townians start to save more water to avoid Day Zero: until now, only 40 % of all people manage to stay below the water limit per day, which will not help to make it until May/June, when the first desalination systems will be ready and the first big rain falls are likely to happen. It will be important to have a good plan securing the water supply for the are for the future, but I am confident that the town and its citizens will make it.
