Category: <span>Travel</span>

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The lanes in Brighton are a wonderful set of pedestrian roads and alleys filled with little restaurants and shops. It is a complete maze, and very easy to get completely disorientated and lost in them.

Cds MG 1352However getting lost is part of the experience, you will simply another interesting little shop.

The shops used to be the fishermen’s cottages, and they still retain a lot of their character.

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There is also daily ghost walk, where you learn about the murders, lovers, ghosts and haunting in and around the lanes. It is a little cheesy, but for 5 pounds it is a fun 90 minutes.

Travel

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These beach houses remind me very much of the Muizenberg beach houses. Well that should not really be a surprise since the Muizenberg beach houses are based on the ones in Brighton.

However while Muizenberg has about 5 houses, in Brighton there are rows are rows of them, literally hundreds of them in a long ling all the way from the Pier through Hove into the next village.

If you plan on buying a hut you had best start saving; they start at 11,000 pounds!.

By the way, the rules dictate the colours that the houses are painted, but you are free to paint the door whatever colour suits you.

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One of the many daily commuters in Brighton cycling past the famous beach huts.

Travel

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A chocolate skull found in a remarkable shop in the lanes in Brighton. They specialise in morbid and gothic chocolates and cakes.

It is rather bizarre, but the artwork is absolutely amazing. I forget the exact figues, but the cake costs something like 200 pounds, but it feeds about 100 people.

The shop is called choccywoccydoodah, and their website is www.choccywoccydoodah.com.

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I think that their other shops do regular chocolates, but not this branch.

Food and Drink Travel

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Yes, it is true. Brighton does not have a real beach. The beach consists purely of round pebbles. Ok so yes the beach is real, just not to a South African.

They have been word down for such a long time, that they are almost soft to walk on. But it is really different to walking on the beaches in Cape Town.

The upside of course is that when then wind blows, you don’t get the Cape Town sandblasting.

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Here is a small pier with fishermen on the end (of course not to be confused with Brighton Pier)

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Brighton beach is a great place to sit and contemplate the world; these two people were shot in Hove, sitting and watching the sea

Travel

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There is a rather quaint fishing museum in Brighton, on the beach just below the pier.

This pic is of one of the old fishing boats. You can see the pier in the distance, and notice the jet trail cutting the sky across the middle.

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Here is another boat, parked just outside the entrance to the museum.

HDR Travel

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Brighton Pier can only be described as a little tacky. It has huge potential, but I get the feeling that there is no great effort put into it.

It is filled with ice-cream shops and penny slot machines, as well as a few restaurants that don’t look particularity exciting.

It is the kind of place that you visit and cross off your list of places to go to.

Having said all that, Brighton itself is a wonderful place and well worth visiting, I will be posting some pics of the village shortly.

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One of the many seagulls found in Brighton. These are the beach version of a rooster, waking you up really early in the morning,

Travel

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I caught this shop driving onto the M5 on the new the Koeberg Interchange flyover. I was crawling rather than flying, so I had the opportunity to catch this shot. The cranes are used to load and offload containers in the container terminal of Cape Town Harbour.

Cds IMG 9509These are the same cranes that I caught in this shot from the helicopter a few weeks ago.

Cape Town Travel

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I am not sure why, but this building freaks me out a little. It is an old factory in Port Elizabeth that has been converted into offices. However, it looks to me like the sort of place that a Stephen King movie might be set. I don’t think I would be entirely happy working there.

HDR South Africa Travel

We spent the weekend at Gold Reef City for annual Toastmasters conference. We arrived in a beautifully warn Thursday afternoon, and we had a couple of hours to spare before the formalities started. So what better way to spend it than wondering around the theme park.

The theme park is made to look like and old mining town, complete with mine trucks full of ore, old houses, and mining equipment strewn all over the place. It is a little cheesy, but not too over the top. The theme park is home to the (real) Crown Mines #14 shaft, which stretches over 3500m deep, and it its time was the deepest shaft in the world.

Today, you can travel down the shaft to a depth of about 250m and get a taste of what it is like working in a gold mine. being a theme park, there are the usual set of rides such as roller coasters and ferris wheels.

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Ferris wheel, note the soccer balls.

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One of the many roller coasters.

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Sign for town square. The whole park is laid out to look like Johannesburg around 1900.

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There are peacocks wondering around all over the place, in particular around the Protea Hotel where we stayed. The rooms have just been redone, and it is very nice.

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Old steam engine.

Gold Reef City is a great place to spend a day, but in honesty, a day is probably long enough, you could probably even get away with 1/2 a day if you were pressed for time.

South Africa Travel

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The ferris wheel at Gold Reef City in Johannesburg, taken late at night. I didn’t have my tripod with me, so a table and cell phone became my extra camera gear :-)

Travel