March to October 2009
Well since our last Blog Newsletter (yes it sure was ages ago) we have had the end of summer, dived into our South African winter and straight out the other side into Spring and early Summer. Yes cold weather lasts a short time here thankfully. YEEHAA!!
Since being in Hermanus for 7 consecutive summers now, I have to say that this last summer was by far the hottest and longest, which we all totally enjoyed. Bring on the next heat wave please :-))
Percy Tours on YouTube (finally)
Yes it has taken Percy Tours alittle while to broadcast our Video Films onto YouTube, but we have got it sorted now, so please check them out and enjoy our short movies of this amazing region – Beaches, scenery, wines, Whales, Sharks, Safaris, Penguins and much more action and adventures at –Percy Tours YouTube Videos
Percy Tours has loads of new photos for you to enjoy at our Gallery site, so check them out by clicking here at - See over 200 Percy Tours Photos
Whales are here in Hermanus
Hermanus is world famous for our Southern Right Whales and they are now here in great numbers, with last weeks aerial Whale count being 141 in the bay, 40 being new-born. The largest number of Whales ever counted in our bay in ONE day is 193 whales in October 2008. Let’s hope we can beat that figure this year. A brand new glossy and excellent coffee-table book called Hermanus Whales, was launched afew months ago by a local wildlife photographer, which took him 6 years to compile his excellent pictures.
Hermanus local Radio station
Percy Tours has now been broadcasting our weekly “Tourism Matters” radio show on Whale Coast 96FM since Feb 2009 and has discussed many important tourism related topics about our beloved town. Wines, Sharks, Whales, Art, Music, Festivals, 2010, sport, famous visitors, Restaurants, Accommodation, activities, places to explore and much more…..Our musical play-list is equally as diverse – chill-out, African, dance, rock, world and many points in-between. One day we might even get live-feeds of our shows onto the internet…….
SPORT -
WOW what an enormous amount of utterly excellent sporting events we have had take place in just afew months –
Cape Argus cycle race
Early March saw the annual and massive Cape Argus bike ride take 30,000 nutty amateur and professional cyclist from Cape Town city centre down to Cape Point and up the western coastline via Camps Bay. It was one heck of a windy day and it sure did blow the cobwebs away. Percy Tours transferred 6 cyclists from Hermanus to the start line, with them all surviving the cycle ride, where upon we celebrated by attending a rather excellent steak braai party held by local Cape Town celebrity chef – Peter Goffe-Wood
Matt Damon also rode in the Cape Argus.
Hollywood Movie filmed here
Matt Damon was here with a Hollywood movie film crew for 6 weeks, to film “The Human Factor”, which is due to be released across the planet in December 2009. The movie is described as “a look at the life of Nelson Mandela after the fall of apartheid in South Africa during his first term as president, when he campaigned to host the 1995 Rugby World Cup event as an opportunity to unite his countrymen.”
The film stars Morgan Freeman as Mandela and is being directed by Clint Eastwood. The film centres on South Africa’s 1995 Rugby World Cup win and Damon plays Springbok captain at the time, Francois Pienaar. They were all staying at the Cape Grace luxury 5 star hotel at the V&A Waterfront, Cape Town.
Clint Eastwood was also spotted entering the trendy Wafu restaurant in Cape Town, with a life-size blow-up doll under his arm, to celebrate the birthday party of cameraman friend Steve Campanelli. That must have been quite an entertaining sight.
Another Eastwood family member staying here with dad, also caused a stir at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival. Clint’s son Kyle played bass with his band – and has also performed and composed many film-scores, including for his father’s films of – Mystic River, The Rookie and Flags of our Father.
British and Irish Lions rugby tour
Rugby hit South Africa in a big way for 6 weeks, with the visit of the British and Irish Lions tour. Following them were over 50,000 energetic and enthusiastic British rugby fans who invaded every city that held games and injected into the South African economy over R1billion, which was a very welcome boast to our winter tourism market. With this influx, SAA had to organise 32 additional internal flights for travelling fans.Percy Tours did a day tour for a coach load of 38 players from Royal College Oxford Uni who were here as part of the Lions entourage – we even had 2 of the Lions girlfriends touring with us too – 1st we did some scenic sight-seeing of Hermanus and then down to the Township to teach rugby to 400 delighted school kids – all fabulous fun.
FIFA Confederation Soccer Cup
At the very same time, the FIFA Confederation Cup was held over the last 2 weeks of June and show-cased the skills of Spain, Italy, Brazil, USA, Iraq, Egypt, New Zealand and South Africa. If you thought some of these lesser sides were going to be a push-over, then think again – South Africa and USA surprised everyone with their very much improved footballing talent; with South Africa only losing 1-nil against Brazil in the semi-final. USA made it all the way to the final, showing some outstanding talent and narrowly losing 2-3 to Brazil.
Each of the 4 match venues will be hosting 2010 World Cup games and the Local 2010 Organising Committee did an incredible job to bring these stadiums up to fantastic international standards.
The crowd attendance was equally as marvelous, with South African fans getting really into celebrating every single game that was played.
Judging by this show-case tournament, South Africa can be truly proud that the World Cup 2010 will be a world class event.
2010 World Cup
FIFA 2010 World Cup tickets have been selling-like-hot-cakes, with over 1million applications for the 1st 743,000 tickets and the second bunch selling faster than FIFA had predicted, probably after organising such a successful Con Fed Cup and the world watching these fabulous games on worldwide TV.
The draw for who-plays-who-where will be held in Cape Town Green Point Stadium on the 4th December, obviously after all the qualifying games have occurred.
We have it on good authority that the German national team will be staying permanently at the 5 star Arabella Western Cape Hotel and Spa, which is 20kms from Hermanus. The England team are rumoured to be staying at Knysna and Italy are viewing Pretoria as their camp. These are just gossip and rumours currently and we will confirmation more when we get it.
Carlos Alberto Parreira (Brazilian mega-star-coach) is back to coach the South Africa national soccer side Bafana Bafana – plus organising international training sessions to be held in Brazil for 4 weeks in January and another in Germany during April – both of which are designed to throw all manner of foreign teams against the South Africa players.
2010 Stadiums – all 10 are nearing completion – Green Point in Cape Town turned on its impressive lights last week and is scheduled to have – a soccer game in Jan 2010 with 20000 fans attending; a rugby game in Feb 2010 with 40000 fans and a gospel music night in March with the whole stadium full to the rafters with 70000 people.
Photo taken on 12th November, 2009 - this is one stunning Stadium, with the roof now on, the seats in place and the grass on the pitch - one amazing feature is that the sides act like a lamp-shade, so when all the lights are on inside, it shines and radiates thro', while illuminating the surrounding city - incredible :-))
For tons of excellent photos of how Cape Town Green Point stadium is coming along, then please check out this fab photo group on Flickr -
http://www.flickr.com/groups/southafrica2010/pool/
Loads more 2010 info when we have it, you can be sure of that :-)))
IPL Cricket
The Indian Premier League Cricket teams were hastily moved to South Africa, where they brought an amazing amount of Bollywood show-business colour and party atmosphere to every cricket match, during mid-April to the end of May. These matches were “bash-every-ball-as-far-as-you-can” events and so each match was utterly fast and furious entertainment.
Vodacom Challenge
Manchester City recently visited to play soccer matches against the Kaiser Chiefs and Orlando Pirates in the annual Vodacom Challenge. Man City received a right royal whipping of 2-nil against the Pirates one weekend, but finally immerged as the tournaments victors.
Ever wonder where un-used and old airplanes get moth-balled?
South Africa of course; deep in the hot and dry desert area of the north of South Africa is Upington airport which has turned itself into a massive “car-park” for planes. With the global down-turn, many airlines and the military can not afford to keep running loads of planes, so they “park” them here to be looked after. This has created a large amount of local jobs for this quiet town, as these expensive toys need constant attention.
The Upington air strip is SO large that it is one of 4 designated landing areas on the planet for the Space Shuttle, should it ever wish to land here. So it other words, it has a vast area in which to park airline and military jets who are lovingly looked after, to be ready for aviation action when (and if) their time arises again.
The USA already has the monstrous Sonora desert site, but it’s getting alittle too ram-jammed. Average total inventory value there is a whopping $27billion. Average value of all these planes in Upington is currently about $400million (and growing).
Hermanus Festival season
The Festival season in Hermanus fired-into-action, from the 2nd weekend of August, which presented not 1, but 2 major events at once.
The annual Hermanus Food and Wine Fair show-cased 70 local wineries and wine makers presenting over 270 wines for you to sample, while the Kalfiefees was 5 days of Afrikaan music, comedy and partying.
The food hall at the Wine Festival had budding celebrity chefs cooking-up-a-storm; local organic farmers selling their fresh produce; cigar and brandy lounge and local bands keeping our feet tapping. This years Wine Festival had over 5,000 people attending each day and was a roaring success.Percy Tours was commissioned by the Wine Festival organisers for the 3rd year running, to be their official chauffeur transfer service, as they wished for no-one to drink’n’drive and arrive home alive. Very wise idea.
Flower festival at Fernkloof was a delightful show of our beautiful floral species, with the central flower display being designed and constructed by David Davidson who has won many awards at the Chelsea Flower show in London.
The annual weekend of the Whale Festival in late September attracted over 80,000 tourists to celebrate our majestic gentle giants of the ocean.
While the Stanford Bird Festival had “twitchers” all excited about our many bird species.
The 3rd Great White Shark Festival is soon to happen.
Recent media publications
Hermanus (and Percy Tours ) have had quite a lot of media exposure recently – you must check out a fabulous new book called “Route 62 & the Overberg” that is a 220 page glossy guide book all apart our region. Published by Getaway and Sunbird Publishers ISBN: 978 1 919938 91 2
Out There Travel magazine had a 2 page colour spread on Hermanus, our whales and tours with Percy Tours.
Whale Talk magazine – our monthly 8000 print, 36 page glossy colour publication hits the shelves with Tourism related articles written by us too :-)) – check out their fab website to read our articles, all laid-out like a real magazine in your hand, with each page flipping to the next pages (really lush) – Whale Talk magazine
And Royalty
As a last note – Percy Tours was utterly honoured to have escorted around our pretty, lovely seaside town, our 1st ever royal client – Prince Rana of Nepal.
Regards and love to all
Well since our last Blog Newsletter (yes it sure was ages ago) we have had the end of summer, dived into our South African winter and straight out the other side into Spring and early Summer. Yes cold weather lasts a short time here thankfully. YEEHAA!!
Since being in Hermanus for 7 consecutive summers now, I have to say that this last summer was by far the hottest and longest, which we all totally enjoyed. Bring on the next heat wave please :-))
Percy Tours on YouTube (finally)
Yes it has taken Percy Tours alittle while to broadcast our Video Films onto YouTube, but we have got it sorted now, so please check them out and enjoy our short movies of this amazing region – Beaches, scenery, wines, Whales, Sharks, Safaris, Penguins and much more action and adventures at –Percy Tours YouTube Videos
Percy Tours has loads of new photos for you to enjoy at our Gallery site, so check them out by clicking here at - See over 200 Percy Tours Photos
Whales are here in Hermanus
Hermanus is world famous for our Southern Right Whales and they are now here in great numbers, with last weeks aerial Whale count being 141 in the bay, 40 being new-born. The largest number of Whales ever counted in our bay in ONE day is 193 whales in October 2008. Let’s hope we can beat that figure this year. A brand new glossy and excellent coffee-table book called Hermanus Whales, was launched afew months ago by a local wildlife photographer, which took him 6 years to compile his excellent pictures.
Hermanus local Radio station
Percy Tours has now been broadcasting our weekly “Tourism Matters” radio show on Whale Coast 96FM since Feb 2009 and has discussed many important tourism related topics about our beloved town. Wines, Sharks, Whales, Art, Music, Festivals, 2010, sport, famous visitors, Restaurants, Accommodation, activities, places to explore and much more…..Our musical play-list is equally as diverse – chill-out, African, dance, rock, world and many points in-between. One day we might even get live-feeds of our shows onto the internet…….
SPORT -
WOW what an enormous amount of utterly excellent sporting events we have had take place in just afew months –
Cape Argus cycle race
Early March saw the annual and massive Cape Argus bike ride take 30,000 nutty amateur and professional cyclist from Cape Town city centre down to Cape Point and up the western coastline via Camps Bay. It was one heck of a windy day and it sure did blow the cobwebs away. Percy Tours transferred 6 cyclists from Hermanus to the start line, with them all surviving the cycle ride, where upon we celebrated by attending a rather excellent steak braai party held by local Cape Town celebrity chef – Peter Goffe-Wood
Matt Damon also rode in the Cape Argus.
Hollywood Movie filmed here
Matt Damon was here with a Hollywood movie film crew for 6 weeks, to film “The Human Factor”, which is due to be released across the planet in December 2009. The movie is described as “a look at the life of Nelson Mandela after the fall of apartheid in South Africa during his first term as president, when he campaigned to host the 1995 Rugby World Cup event as an opportunity to unite his countrymen.”
The film stars Morgan Freeman as Mandela and is being directed by Clint Eastwood. The film centres on South Africa’s 1995 Rugby World Cup win and Damon plays Springbok captain at the time, Francois Pienaar. They were all staying at the Cape Grace luxury 5 star hotel at the V&A Waterfront, Cape Town.
Clint Eastwood was also spotted entering the trendy Wafu restaurant in Cape Town, with a life-size blow-up doll under his arm, to celebrate the birthday party of cameraman friend Steve Campanelli. That must have been quite an entertaining sight.
Another Eastwood family member staying here with dad, also caused a stir at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival. Clint’s son Kyle played bass with his band – and has also performed and composed many film-scores, including for his father’s films of – Mystic River, The Rookie and Flags of our Father.
British and Irish Lions rugby tour
Rugby hit South Africa in a big way for 6 weeks, with the visit of the British and Irish Lions tour. Following them were over 50,000 energetic and enthusiastic British rugby fans who invaded every city that held games and injected into the South African economy over R1billion, which was a very welcome boast to our winter tourism market. With this influx, SAA had to organise 32 additional internal flights for travelling fans.Percy Tours did a day tour for a coach load of 38 players from Royal College Oxford Uni who were here as part of the Lions entourage – we even had 2 of the Lions girlfriends touring with us too – 1st we did some scenic sight-seeing of Hermanus and then down to the Township to teach rugby to 400 delighted school kids – all fabulous fun.
FIFA Confederation Soccer Cup
At the very same time, the FIFA Confederation Cup was held over the last 2 weeks of June and show-cased the skills of Spain, Italy, Brazil, USA, Iraq, Egypt, New Zealand and South Africa. If you thought some of these lesser sides were going to be a push-over, then think again – South Africa and USA surprised everyone with their very much improved footballing talent; with South Africa only losing 1-nil against Brazil in the semi-final. USA made it all the way to the final, showing some outstanding talent and narrowly losing 2-3 to Brazil.
Each of the 4 match venues will be hosting 2010 World Cup games and the Local 2010 Organising Committee did an incredible job to bring these stadiums up to fantastic international standards.
The crowd attendance was equally as marvelous, with South African fans getting really into celebrating every single game that was played.
Judging by this show-case tournament, South Africa can be truly proud that the World Cup 2010 will be a world class event.
2010 World Cup
FIFA 2010 World Cup tickets have been selling-like-hot-cakes, with over 1million applications for the 1st 743,000 tickets and the second bunch selling faster than FIFA had predicted, probably after organising such a successful Con Fed Cup and the world watching these fabulous games on worldwide TV.
The draw for who-plays-who-where will be held in Cape Town Green Point Stadium on the 4th December, obviously after all the qualifying games have occurred.
We have it on good authority that the German national team will be staying permanently at the 5 star Arabella Western Cape Hotel and Spa, which is 20kms from Hermanus. The England team are rumoured to be staying at Knysna and Italy are viewing Pretoria as their camp. These are just gossip and rumours currently and we will confirmation more when we get it.
Carlos Alberto Parreira (Brazilian mega-star-coach) is back to coach the South Africa national soccer side Bafana Bafana – plus organising international training sessions to be held in Brazil for 4 weeks in January and another in Germany during April – both of which are designed to throw all manner of foreign teams against the South Africa players.
2010 Stadiums – all 10 are nearing completion – Green Point in Cape Town turned on its impressive lights last week and is scheduled to have – a soccer game in Jan 2010 with 20000 fans attending; a rugby game in Feb 2010 with 40000 fans and a gospel music night in March with the whole stadium full to the rafters with 70000 people.
Photo taken on 12th November, 2009 - this is one stunning Stadium, with the roof now on, the seats in place and the grass on the pitch - one amazing feature is that the sides act like a lamp-shade, so when all the lights are on inside, it shines and radiates thro', while illuminating the surrounding city - incredible :-))For tons of excellent photos of how Cape Town Green Point stadium is coming along, then please check out this fab photo group on Flickr -
http://www.flickr.com/groups/southafrica2010/pool/
Loads more 2010 info when we have it, you can be sure of that :-)))
IPL Cricket
The Indian Premier League Cricket teams were hastily moved to South Africa, where they brought an amazing amount of Bollywood show-business colour and party atmosphere to every cricket match, during mid-April to the end of May. These matches were “bash-every-ball-as-far-as-you-can” events and so each match was utterly fast and furious entertainment.
Vodacom Challenge
Manchester City recently visited to play soccer matches against the Kaiser Chiefs and Orlando Pirates in the annual Vodacom Challenge. Man City received a right royal whipping of 2-nil against the Pirates one weekend, but finally immerged as the tournaments victors.
Ever wonder where un-used and old airplanes get moth-balled?
South Africa of course; deep in the hot and dry desert area of the north of South Africa is Upington airport which has turned itself into a massive “car-park” for planes. With the global down-turn, many airlines and the military can not afford to keep running loads of planes, so they “park” them here to be looked after. This has created a large amount of local jobs for this quiet town, as these expensive toys need constant attention.
The Upington air strip is SO large that it is one of 4 designated landing areas on the planet for the Space Shuttle, should it ever wish to land here. So it other words, it has a vast area in which to park airline and military jets who are lovingly looked after, to be ready for aviation action when (and if) their time arises again.
The USA already has the monstrous Sonora desert site, but it’s getting alittle too ram-jammed. Average total inventory value there is a whopping $27billion. Average value of all these planes in Upington is currently about $400million (and growing).
Hermanus Festival season
The Festival season in Hermanus fired-into-action, from the 2nd weekend of August, which presented not 1, but 2 major events at once.
The annual Hermanus Food and Wine Fair show-cased 70 local wineries and wine makers presenting over 270 wines for you to sample, while the Kalfiefees was 5 days of Afrikaan music, comedy and partying.
The food hall at the Wine Festival had budding celebrity chefs cooking-up-a-storm; local organic farmers selling their fresh produce; cigar and brandy lounge and local bands keeping our feet tapping. This years Wine Festival had over 5,000 people attending each day and was a roaring success.Percy Tours was commissioned by the Wine Festival organisers for the 3rd year running, to be their official chauffeur transfer service, as they wished for no-one to drink’n’drive and arrive home alive. Very wise idea.
Flower festival at Fernkloof was a delightful show of our beautiful floral species, with the central flower display being designed and constructed by David Davidson who has won many awards at the Chelsea Flower show in London.
The annual weekend of the Whale Festival in late September attracted over 80,000 tourists to celebrate our majestic gentle giants of the ocean.
While the Stanford Bird Festival had “twitchers” all excited about our many bird species.
The 3rd Great White Shark Festival is soon to happen.
Recent media publications
Hermanus (and Percy Tours ) have had quite a lot of media exposure recently – you must check out a fabulous new book called “Route 62 & the Overberg” that is a 220 page glossy guide book all apart our region. Published by Getaway and Sunbird Publishers ISBN: 978 1 919938 91 2
Out There Travel magazine had a 2 page colour spread on Hermanus, our whales and tours with Percy Tours.
Whale Talk magazine – our monthly 8000 print, 36 page glossy colour publication hits the shelves with Tourism related articles written by us too :-)) – check out their fab website to read our articles, all laid-out like a real magazine in your hand, with each page flipping to the next pages (really lush) – Whale Talk magazine
And Royalty
As a last note – Percy Tours was utterly honoured to have escorted around our pretty, lovely seaside town, our 1st ever royal client – Prince Rana of Nepal.
Regards and love to all
Percy – Percy Tours, Hermanus, South Africa.
Contact us for more details on how we can assist you on your perfect South Africa holiday, at -
www.percytours.com
Designer Tours (& transfers) of Hermanus, Cape Town and the whole Western Cape region.
Contact us for more details on how we can assist you on your perfect South Africa holiday, at -
www.percytours.com
Designer Tours (& transfers) of Hermanus, Cape Town and the whole Western Cape region.
