SA Vacation July 2008

As the heading above states, I had a very sort vacation back to South Africa at the beginning of July. Because Luiza and Thorn went on their own to SA last year, myself and Chavez had our turn this year. Not much happened, and we were lucky enough not to see any crime while we were there. We were however only there for 7 days.

As I do on every vacation to SA, we visited the Krugerdorp Nature Reserve to go and take photographs. We were suppose to go back on Sunday morning at 10h00 to get photos of the lions feeding, but we came out of church too late.

Anyway, here are some of the picturews that I got there...

There are more pictures worth showing, but I am at work now and it is very late...I need to go to sleep...

Shaikh Nasser Bin Zayed Al Nahyan dies in Helicopter Crash in Gulf waters

Extract from the Gulf News on 3 June 2008...

The Ministry of Presidential Affairs on Tuesday announced the death of Shaikh Nasser Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of President His Highness Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan.Shaikh Nasser died on Monday night when the helicopter carrying him and his colleagues crashed over Gulf waters.
In a statement, the Ministry of Presidential Affairs announced a three-day mourning period starting on Tuesday.

MAY HE REST IN PEACE

But it's just so cute...

Living in the desert brings with it some really interesting creatures. Creatures that proberbly would not survive in a 'normal' environment, and as usual, the United Arab Emirates are of course no different...
Here in the UAE, we get a variety of spider called the Camel Spider...also called the Wind Spider, Wind Scorpion or Sun Spider.
The reality is in fact that it is neither a spider, nor a scorpion as it does not belong to any of those 2 families of animal, but it does in fact belong to its own family of animals called the Solfugae family. There are about 12 sub-species in this family of which one of them are actually found in South Africa...the Red Roman Spider. For those of you that have never come into contact with a spider like these, I guess it is fair to say that they can be as big as an Adult hand, and they DO CHASE YOU. Well, this is not actually very acurate...it feels as if they are chasing you. They have a fear of the sun, so they will run towards you in order to get into you shadow, which for most people is a little too close for comfort. This result in you moving away QUICKLY, and the spider following whatever shade is available...namely your shadow. So as you can see, they are not chasing you so next time you see a HUGE spider running towards you...let him come and just stand still...YEAH RIGHT !!!

I work at the local airport here in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates, and being out in a rural desert area, we occassionally get these spiders wandering into our office/hanger. These pictures are of the biggest one that I have seen here. About 4 days prior to this, we caught a slightly smaller one which I took home to show the family. We found a half dead cockroach in the driveway and fed it to the spider, which it gladly accepted. Thorn then said he wanted to use it for the science fair at school and I agreed. Later that day the spider died very suddenly. I guess a half dead cockroach should have been a warning sign. Why would an insect that can withstand a nuclear explosion be half dead in my driveway????? My only guess is that I fed a poisoned cockroach to my son's science project, thereby KILLING my son's science project...what a cool father I am. Anyway, luckily on the morining of the science fair, this new spider came wandering into the hanger and I was once again in Thorn's good books. This time we fed him a very much alive grasshopper, and I was able to get some practice with MACRO photography...It took about 30 minutes to eat the grasshopper completely. It starts by using it's jaws to 'saw' off the head. The other spider did the same technique with the poison cockroach.

Once the head was off, it is said to inject a substance that liquifies the insides of the prey animal, and it then drinks up the juices...apparently. Once it has finished, it does a really amazing thing. It breakes the legs off and actually SQUEEZES to juicy substances out of the leg, starting at the bottom and working its way to the top. When it gets to the top, it drinks whatever came out...the best way to explain it is...imagine you are eating crab or crayfish legs...pretty much the same way.

I guess it was inevitable. We have kept pretty much every other animal type we have come across, so I guess a spider is not so surprising. I will however not be keeping this 'pet' and it will be released back into the wild after the next meal.
All the best and I will keep in touch.
Mike,Luiza and the kids

It's about time...

It has taken us about 8 years to finally get Thorn to swim but we finally decieded to get him swimming lessons at the Hilton Hotel. The hotels are the only places here that give swimming lessons as they are only real places that have swimming pools here.

It took 18 lessons of 20 - 30 minutes each but Thorn can now jump into the deep end of the swimming pool and swim to the safety of the edge...and finally, I am getting to use my 'new' underwater camera that I got for christmas...


I will post more photos soon, but I seem to be having some internet issues at the moment. By the way, ignore the dates on the photo's, they are wrong.

Regards

Mike and the family

Shame, it's just a baby...

Hello again...

On the 22/01/2008 I had the unfortunate luck of bumping my baby toe on the right foot against Chavez's bed. So what you might be asking...we have all bumped our baby toe at some point in our lives...well, I guess I bumped it a little harder than normal...see picture below...

Once the pain and numerous choice swear words had stopped, my first priority was to take pictures for this site, then we went to the hospital to see if it was broken or just dislocated.
After a very long wait to see the doctor, he finally sent me for X-rays...

As you can see by the above x-rays, I broke my baby toe rather badly. I was then infored that the treatment was very simple. Straighten the toe and bandage up for a few days...sounds simple enough. Modern medicine needs some serious assessment when the treatment is more painful than the injury itself. They gave me two injections into the base of the baby toe. WOW. Never again. Next time I think I will just let the toe heel in that position and I will look for shoes to fit.
And for all the pain and suffering, I got 3 days sick leave...3 days...bear in mind that I work 1 24 hour shift in 3 days...hardly worth the effort.

Cheers

New Year's Resolution...

The New Year's Resolution...

And so with the new year, comes the new year's resolution. Ours was to try get outdoors a little more often and to experience more of what the UAE has to offer us.

With that in mind, we went camping in the mountains of Oman, just behind where we live. More of a trial run than an actual camping trip, we noticed that we were a little short of the space that we would have liked to have. Two days later I had a roof-rack fitted to my vehicle to give us the extra space that we needed. And, in true UAE style the installation left a lot to be desired. The attached the roof-rack to the existing runner things on the roof with 4 screw-able pipe clamps...can you imagine? Anyway, they seem to be holding for now.
Camping trip No.2 was a little more adventurous than the first. At the tip of the Arabian Peninsula is an area that fulls under the jurisdiction of the Sultanate of Oman, and not the UAE. This was our destination. With my broken GPS in the shop for repairs, and only my vast knowledge of the UAE landscape to navigate with, we set of on Friday morning into the wide blue yonder...and ended up about 200km away from where I thought I was...lost and alone.
After eventually winding our way through the back mountains of the UAE, we finally made it to Dibba on the East Coast of the UAE, through the border post in Dibba and into the mountains of Oman on the Peninsula tip. By now however it was dark and we had no idea where we were. We decided to stop and camp at our first opportunity and continue through on Saturday morning.

Saturday morning was rather pleasant, seeing the landscape that was dark the night before. We began the drive through the mountains, heading for the border post on the other side that would take us back into the UAE in Ras Al Khaimah in the North of the country.


As you know, not all stories can have a happy ending, and upon reaching the border post at Ras Al Khaimah, we found out that it had been closed due to high rainfall in the UAE. The only thing left to do was drive back from where we had just come. It was beautiful scenery, even if it was a 2 hour drive back. At the end of the trip our poor car had really looked after us well, and earned its place in the family.

Stay tuned for scenes from our next episode...

Christmas Dinner 2007

On the 26th December 2007, the UAE Wallis house was transformed into what would resemble any Christmas spent at the Grandparents House in South Africa. The one difference is that here in the UAE, nobody has family to spend Christmas with, so friends will have to do. Another difference is that in South Africa it is the husband (Grandpa) doing all the catering, and the Wife (Granny) telling him repeatedly that he is going overboard...with us it is the other way around...every year Luiza caters enough to feed a small army, with me in the backround saying repeatedly...'You are overdoing it this year...', and this ritual happens every year, without exception. Guess I should have learnt by now. But, having said that, I must be the first to admit that every years the dinner is a huge hit and I ALWAYS end us saying a big thank you to the wife for making it happen.

On the menu this year was a variety of well prepared meats, including Roast Duck, BBQ (Braai) Turkey, Roast lamb and BBQ (Braai) Piglet, with all the salads and side dishes to go with all of them...including apple sauce and mint sauce. As usual, the job of cooking the Turkey was mine again this year as we BBQ the turkey whole on the Weber Braai. This years turkey was smaller that last year weighing in at only 6.5 kg. To BBQ a turkey that size takes about 4 to 5 hours. This year I also had a second BBQ running with what started out as a full baby pig in the BBQ but ended up in pieces as it was not cooking properly. I dont think I will be doing that again next year.

After dinner and drinks, we had Santa hand out gifts to all the children (both young and old). There were a total of 9 children and 10 adults present (pardon the pun), which included a pair of identical twins.

We spent the New Year in Dubai waiting for what was suppose to be the biggest Fireworks display in the world. After braving the chaotic traffic for about an hour, we were still stauck in traffic when the fireworks began and we missed them all...typical. It took us another 30 minutes or so just to turn the car around to begin the trip home to Al Ain, which by the way is about 1 1/2 hours drive from Dubai. We finally got into bed at about 04h00.

And so we start 2008 and we hope it brings good things to all...

Regards to all...
Mike,Luiza & the Kids

Bithday and Christmas 2007

Welcome back and Happy 2008...

Firstly, I must apologise to those of you that dont have broadband internet connections. It seems that some of my images are too big to open on a dial-up connection. I will reduce the size of the images in the future.

HAPPY 8th BIRTHDAY THORN

As you know, 22/12/2007 was Thorn's 8th birthday and as usual things went by very quickly. Things did however seem to calm down a little once all the presents had been opened.

I unfortunatley had to work on his birthday, but I did manage to get the night off which Thorn was rather happy about.

And, as usual 3 days later was

Christmas...2007

And once again, the sound of tearing paper and happy children was heard for miles...

In my next posting, I will include pictures of the christmas dinner...

Regards to all

Mike, Luiza & the Kids