On 1 January we left this:



In this:



And, on 2 January, arrived not far from this:



The drive on Friday was long, especially considering that we had packed all our CD's bar one in the depths of the trailer! But the drive was broken up by stopping off and seeing Tom's folks (in Heidelberg), Adi and Sav (in Plett), Jo's cousins (in Nature's Valley) and Jo's brother, Ken (in Port Alfred). All these stops meant that we arrived in East London later than we had initially hoped but, after dodging a black cow in the middle of the N2 at 120km / hour, we arrived safely. Saturday was spent doing a last minute shop in East London (which, for the duration of this year, will be considered our oasis of civilisation and a place associated with luxuries such as Woolworths) before the final leg of our journey to Zithulele. This journey comprised of 180 km of a decent road (the N2 between East London and Mthatha) before negoiating 50 km of "the worst tar road in South Africa" and 20 km of fairly average gravel road. They say paradise, by definition, is hard to get to. At least buying the Hardbody had now been justified.

Our first few days have been spent with Tom unpacking and Jo being sick, meaning that she missed her first two days of work. Tom's work only officially starts on 11 January, but in the meantime he has swum in the ocean (twice), gone for a mountain bike ride (what a pleasure dealing with sheep and friendly children as opposed to irate Cape Town drivers) and tried (mostly unsuccessfully) paddling an Eskimo.

It is early days, but we are both so excited to be here, and the year ahead does look like a promising one. Going forward, we plan for our posts to follow one of three themes: (1) general news, (2) intersting medical stories (Jo's work) and (3) developmental economics - a snazzy phrase for doing things like selling chickens (Tom's work). Comments are welcomed and encouraged!!

Finally, we thought it might be nice to end all our posts with one or two Xhosa phrases:
"Molo sisi / bhuti, uyaphila" (Morning brother / sister, how are you today)
"Ndiyaphila enkosi, kodwa kushushu namhlanje" (I am well, but it is hot today)