#Photography

Not too long ago, I told you about my new obsession with plants. This plant obsession is of course accompanied by a pot obsession, and I am fortunate to live five minutes away from the best pottery place in Joburg: Liebermann Pottery.

I visited Cape Town for the first time more than 11 years ago, with my mother. During that trip, Mom and I attempted to climb Table Mountain in a hilariously foolish way – I’ll let you read about it yourself in the blog post I wrote back then, called How Not to Climb Table Mountain. We ultimately turned back and took the cable car to the top instead.

I recently moved to a new house, and for the first time in nearly half a century of life I’ve become interested in plants. Actually that’s an understatement: I’ve become obsessed with plants. Most of my plants have names. I spend lots of time googling their care and gazing at them, admiring how they’ve grown and lightly touching their soils to determine if the need to be watered.

A couple of weeks ago, I complained to a friend that I never have good big cat sightings when I go on safari. (I know it’s an absurd thing to complain about. But I’m a travel blogger in South Africa, after all.) The very next day, I received a last-minute invitation to Thanda Safari, a five-star game lodge in KwaZulu-Natal.

I don’t have time to write a long post this week. But I can’t wait any longer to tell you about Chappy Vintage, my new favorite Jozi shop.

Chappy opened about nine months ago in Linden, which is fast becoming one of Joburg’s hippest suburbs. I first discovered Chappy in early December and planned to blog about it right away, but then I got covid and couldn’t get back there to take photos until a few days ago. And I needed to do a proper photoshoot before writing this post because Chappy is a ridiculously photogenic place.

Ludwig’s Roses, a huge rose farm north of Pretoria that has been running for more than 50 years, had been on my radar screen for a while. Several people told me I should visit, but that I must go at the height of summer when the roses are all in full bloom. Somehow the summers kept passing and I kept forgetting to put Ludwig’s in my “to-blog” list.