Saturday, March 19, 2005

Hermanus & South Africa craziness. Percy Tours Update 7

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8th Feb – 19th March 2005

Hope those of you in Europe have been enjoying the pesky SNOW – been thinking of you all and what an utter nightmare it must be to get from A to B – especially knowing how useless the UK highways agency is at clearing it out of the way on the roads and pavements.

So what has been happening here ???

This month I have mainly been..........working my butt off actually - AAAAAAA!!!

So no more sitting on the beach picking the sand out of my butt – PERCY TOURS is well and truly up and running in a big way, like a greyhound of out the box catching the preverbal hare.

Check us out at – http://www.percytours.com/

Shark Transfers.
After answering an advert in the local newspaper for - "transfers to Great White Shark cage diving urgently needed."

And insisting upon being the 1st to get an interview from 35 applicants, I blow them away and they signed us up on the spot. YYYEEEEHHHAAA!!!!!

So now every morning I wake up at the ungodly hour of 6am to collect and drop off mad humans that want to be breakfast for Great White Sharks. I have also taken tourists on wine tours at the local Hermanus wineries, a tour down to the southern tip of Africa (Cape Agulhas) where we saw Ostrich, Zebra, Springbok, loads of eagles and many sea birds; and afew airport collections and drop-offs. So at bloody last the business has started and some cash is coming in. :-))))

Have had 10,000 colourful flyers printed up and bought some wicked Perspex flyer holders to put onto hotel reception desks, so over the next few weeks we will going around local businesses to sell our executive services.

Music Listening Pleasure.And this month I have mainly been...........listening to (VERY LOUDLY) Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit and anything hard and pounding (well I wouldn’t be me if it wasn’t pounding would I ???) so I have been pumping it all thro the minibus cd stereo or thro the 300 watt speakers I now have installed in the house.

And not a word of noise complaint from the neighbours. Haahahahahahaahh – love it…

Been trying my best to catch up with music new releases – and have purchased the new Chemical Brothers album (ok-ish) / Trickys new one (ok-ish too) / Fatboy Slim (very average) / Depeche Modes 3 cds remix album which is utterly excellent – some brilliant tunes / Thievery Corp / Groove Armadas best ofs…/ Eminem / The Hives (which rocks like a bar-steward). And have just got some tickets for Avril Lavignes show in May in the huge Bellville Velodrome in Cape Town. We don’t get too many international acts over here so it will be good to see what this venue is all about. We have standing tickets so a scrum down is bound to engulf us. Mosh pit anyone ??

Now that I have ADSL installed at my house/office – I have been listening to XFM and BBC Radio 1 online so as to keep up with new stuff too. OOHH the beauty of the internet – don’t know how we ever survived without it years ago. Same goes for Mobile phones too. :-))))

Extra Earners!!!
As a little extra earner I have been installing computers at various places – the 1st big customer is Hermanus Backpackers where I have just put a computer into their bar with 3000 songs on it, as all their old cds were so scratched that the music always always skipped (which was very annoying) so those that know the bar will be very relieved to hear that we can now party all night long without skkkkiipping music – and then yesterday I and 2 other gents installed ADSL and another computer for them to offer the services of an internet cafĂ© in their quite lounge.
As well I am now teaching people here how to use their computers much more efficiently – and have already got 3 customers who I spend afew hours a week with and I would hope that as word spreads I will have quite afew more people to train up.

Trance Party.
In South Africa there is a large following for Trance music and psy-trance dance festivals, so we went to see what it’s all about at an event called Alien Safari. Situated in the most idyllic remote location – a huge mountain range in the distance with little fluffy clouds floating by; the sun beating down at 30 degrees; set on the banks of the Breede river which is extremely shallow and therefore allows all to splash about in the cooling water wearing very little and some revellers not giving a damn and swimming in their birthday suits :-))) – very entertaining viewing; and an enormous Olympic sized swimming pool for those that prefer to not get sand all over them; a large market selling all sorts of food, drinks and all those items you thought you’d never need until you see them i.e. jewellery, clothes, sun hats, tattooists, piercers, tarot readings and much more.

They had a large stage with loads of psychedelic multi-coloured painted huge backdrops, amazing sound system and a dance floor that’s just a lightly sloping big field filled with over 2000 punters wearing very little indeed in the screaming heat. The sun is so hot that there’s absolutely no need at all to erect a marquee. The crew had installed a garden hose that had a watering sprinkler attached that kept the crowd cool, which also made for very entertaining viewing. People trying to catch water in cups that they held over their heads. God people are crazy :-)))

Now as luck (or not) would have it I decided to drive the minibus in as close to the stage and dance floor as possible, this I thought would be very handy to get back to and wasn’t miles away in the large campsite. And so it was very handily positioned about 50 metres away and made convenient for us to keep going backing to, to get cold beers out of our cooler box but when we decided to eventually try to get some sleep, the bus would act like a large bass bin and vibrated as if we were connected directly to the soundsystem. With the music playing non-stop for 24 hours, we didn’t get much sleep so there was really only one thing for it and get back on that dance floor. There’s some mad DJ from Israel there called Skuzi – doesn’t he realise that Skuzi in the UK means rubbish – idiot!! :-)))

School silliness.
My German friend Steffi is currently doing a degree to be a school teacher (at a German Uni) and is here to experience and learn how other countries teach. So one day she asks if I can video film a class room full of 7 year olds doing a task that she has set them to do. Utter chaos :-)))

Cricket Match.
The men from Hermanus Backpackers engage in some utter silliness and organise 2 games of cricket against the high schools "A" team.
What fully grown men trying to trash a bunch of school boys who can’t even shave yet – what a challenge – not :-))))
I go along with my video camera and edit a full dvd of action set to mad music.
Sadly for this big butch of men they get totally trashed TWICE!!! I don’t think they will be doing that again in a hurry as their huge egos have been well massacred.

It’s a long while since I had a soothing massage – so I call up my favourite masseuse and get totally pummelled. RRRRR and relax!!!

Off tonight to a friends Braai, so will be fun – hopefully some of those outrageous huge crayfish will make an appearance on the fire – YUMMY!!!

Well that’s about it for this month of hot news on the bottom of the planet. Keep warm all those in Europe and hope to talk to you soon –

cheers and a bucket load of LOVE to you all. XXX

Percy “Suffering from over work and Ravers knees”

www.percytours.com

Designer Tours of Hermanus, Cape Town and the Western Cape region.