Rusty gate and a tree.

Took this photo on Saturday afternoon, two photos actually and blended them in the Gimp editing programme.


Click to enlarge.

At the moment I am visiting family in our capital city Pretoria. Left home yesterday at 5:30am and arrived here at 11am, a distance of 500km +-, this included a half hour stop for breakfast. Beautiful four lane highway all the way, until you hit the outskirts of Johannesburg, where you have six lanes in both directions, the size of the highways still leaves this country boy dazed. Johannesburg and Pretoria are only about 60km apart.


South Africa has three capitals, Pretoria is the administrative capital, Cape Town is the Parliamentary, (legislative) capital and Bloemfontein is the judicial capital, seat of the supreme court. Every couple of years some politician starts rumbling about the costs involved, (as if they really care about wasting money) and starts talking about moving everything to one central point, until it's pointed out how many billions that will cost. Will write more about this strange set up in a later post.


Pretoria is known as the jacaranda city, with thousands of jacarandas lining the streets.

Jacaranda trees around the Union building, seat of government in Pretoria, built circa 1910 to house government departments, it's mainly symbolic now as it is to small - although it's a huge building - to house the bloated modern government departments, they are now scattered all over the city. The President does have his offices here though. 
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