We continued our travels through the Northern Cape Province to Gariep Dam and Nature Reserve which borders the Free State and the Eastern Cape. It’s the beginning of November and hot as Hades. Gariep Dam Village is very beautiful, with manicured gardens and beautiful trees. Being next to a dam does sort of guarantee you water!

This recipe is not from me, but it is super anyway!! My lovely niece, Maya, made this for us and it is sooooooooo good. It is perfect for people on a low carb diet as it is low in carbs, duh! The photo does it no justice, but we ate it before I could take any more photos!

The great thing about South Africa is that I still have deevine family there and I had the opportunity to visit them this year – haven’t seen my big Sis, Patricia, in 7 years! My super nephew and his lovely wife made me feel old by making me a Great Aunt twice over…okay, so that makes me great, like you didn’t already know that!

We LOVE the Karoo. There are just miles and miles of “nothing”. I use inverted commas, because it is semi-desert and fairly deserted, but it is just so beautiful and full of things to see. The lovely Erika and Gerhard told us that people in the northern part of the country have farms with 400 000 hectares! We had a whopping 3 ½ ha…

We wish you all a wonderful Christmas 2017 and hope that the year 2018 will be a fantastic year for you and our beautiful planet.
Love
Crystal and Joerg

What we really ate a lot of in SA was beef. It is one of the few countries in the world that hang their beef long enough to make it so tender you could actually eat it with a butter knife. Jessica and Grant, South African friends of ours in France, are going to hang beef in France for something like 60 days – tell us when you’re ready Jess!

Also known as Bushmanspoort, this place is a little piece of heaven and we would quite happily have stayed there for the rest of our natural lives. It is owned and run by Manus and Erida – Erida was away, but Manus was a ray of sunshine everyday. We had planned to stay one night, but stayed 2 because it is just so wonderful.

This is such a quick and easy recipe that one can hardly call it a recipe. But what it absolutely is, is deeelicious.

Our last hosts, the lovely Erica and Gerhard, told us about a little gem of a place called Wuppertal. We found the name alone super as there is an enormous city with the same name in Germany which has a population of about 350 000 and the SA version probably has a population of 350 tops (I’m guessing here).

This dish is always a surprise to people as most people don’t associate cucumber within a cooked meal. But every single person who has tried this (and I know many a picky eater) just loves it. And to top it all, it’s so quick and easy to prepare, you’ll be a hero without any effort at all!