Straight after Christmas, Claudius and I went South to escape the rainy and foggy Hamburg winter weather. Like the last years, Cape Town was the destination of choice: a place full of sun, wind, friendly people, lekker food and no water. Yes, the drinking water level is super low and water restrictions have peaked to level 6 meaning 40l per day and person and an anticipated day 0 beginning of April. For people like us living in a pretty rainy area, such a situation is strange and new. Nevertheless, it shows you to respect our global ressources much more! Saving drinking water gets pretty easy when you are forced to and it grounds you!
One way to reuse the water is to directly collect it while showering: it can be used to rinse the wetsuite and for flushing the toilet. Besides that tremendous water problem for the region, we are still enjoying Cape Town. We were pretty lucky with the conditions in the last week of the year and days were pretty much like "sleep, eat, surf, repeat " and some yoga inbetween. When the weather was not playing balls, we drove to Brandvlei Dam, a drinking water dam next to Worcester with strong thermical winds. New Year's Eve was spend with BBQ and suddenly some drops fall and it rained. Not much, but enough for the plants to get a long for some more days. I bet for a lot of people it was a sign saying 2018 will be better bringing back the water and all the jobs being lost due to the water restrictions. What I learned and what I will take with me into 2018 and beyond is to be thankful for the things we have, even cherishing the simple fact that there are no restrictions of drinking water in Germany.
