How to escape load-shedding and make hay while the sun shines

Eish, eish, is all I have to say about having a house full of guests while enduring the punitive load-shedding schedule this past week.

What’s in my washing basket is mutating and growing right out of it, it’s been impossible to fit in a thorough vacuum-clean and so the cat’s biscuits are migrating out of their bowls and have sort of rolled themselves around the kitchen floor and are headed for permanent residence under the fridge.

My housekeeping has gone for a ball of chalk. I just sweep debris on the kitchen floor into a corner for the ants.

When Eskom gives me a gap, I chuck everything into the washing machine so full that everything comes out crumpled and another shade because it’s not like we are afforded enough time to sort colours (well that’s my excuse anyway).

With lots of house guests, towels breed — just seeing that pile of them glaring at me from yet another laundry basket is absolutely terrifying.

Now that it’s heading towards winter, it would be very useful to be able to wash early in the morning, but it all depends on Eskom. Washing isn’t drying very well in the weak wintry sun so I just put semi damp clothes on hangers and shove them back in the cupboard — the trick is to leave the doors open in the hope that air will somehow circulate and this will prevent miff-smelling clothes.

There are rechargeable lights, lots of them on window sills, catching some energy and rays of sunlight, before being plunged into darkness again with the inverter barely managing these four-hour stints.

There are wires and inverter plugs lying everywhere along with dead candles and some wax that fell on the wooden floor which I am considering scraping off at some point.

Just about every coffee mug we own is in the dishwasher waiting for the green light to switch it on and I’ve lost track of all the cutlery that has gone missing.

Thank God it’s just my sister Debbie and Gaile visiting because we are all South Africans and know how to roll with the punches.

My son Ryan is here from Greece and it’s notorious for lots of things to not work well here (like the six months it takes to renew a visa) but he does point out Greece have electricity.

Right now, we are waiting for the singing kettle to do it’s thing on the gas and we all realise how much we rely on toast for breakfast.

There is something very unappealing about cold bread because the butter doesn’t melt into it.

Needless to say, we are all discussing how much worse this load-shedding situation could actually get — a conversation that dominates all social interactions.

Whether it’s the small tobacconist who can’t get the card machine to work for me in the gloom of his little shop to the misery at Woolies where they are behind on their rotisserie chickens, this is all insane.

At some point I decided that having a happy home, even if it looks like bedlam, is far more important than letting load-shedding and chaos get to me and so here are my suggestions to combat it all: Work around the four-hour stints by finding activities that take the longest time possible, but obviously this is weather permitting.

We have had gorgeous weather this week, but had it been cold and rainy, I really don’t know what I would have suggested — except perhaps visiting our Garden Route wine farms to drink a lot.

Thank you Featherbed company for taking our guests out on the four-hour eco-tour. They say it is one of the best things they have ever done.

While you can take a cruise on the John Benn or the famous Paddle Cruiser, the eco-tour is fabulous and it lasts much longer.

You arrive at the Cruise Café, take the Three Legs ferry to the other side of the estuary, then a 4x4 vehicle and trailer drives you up a steep head land into the nature reserve.

A guide tells you all about the history of the area, the fauna and flora. Then there is a 2.2km walk through coastal forest and fynbos including seeing some ancient sea caves.

This walk can only be reached by doing the Featherbed eco-tour. The pièce de resistance is a splendid buffet lunch outdoors under a canopy of Milkwood trees that happens whether there is power or not.

Miraculously since the 2017 fires, the whole Featherbed area is looking simply glorious again with indigenous fynbos having come back in full force.

The birds, insects and small creatures are flourishing. We locals are so used to seeing the Paddle Cruiser and John Benn on the water that we forget how special the Featherbed activities actually are and what a show-stopper it is for visitors to the Garden Route to do one of their cruises.

In fact, the next time I hit a four-hour load-shedding crisis, I am off on that Three Legs.

Another trick that requires no electricity and is also a hit, is to go to Buffalo Bay for the day.

Do a walkalong the beach, or even the Buffalo Bay Trail, to kill some hours then choose one of the braai spots right on the grass overlooking the sea and eat, drink — just look at the waves — and shoot the breeze.

Then hours can be happily be spent in Plettenberg Bay — in fact two-bouts of no power.

Walk the Robberg Trail, which is world-class and takes about four hours, then have fish for lunch literally on the sand at the Plett Ski Boat Club and they stay open all day into the night, so linger here as long as possible.

Or join the locals who take sundowners to the Robberg viewpoint and you can even braai here.

Long and short of it, there are more than enough activities on the Garden Route that murder load-shedding schedules whether they be walks, picnics or braais.

In fact, perhaps there is some sort of silver lining to all this power outage because it forces us out into fresh air and outdoor adventures.