South African author
Interlude. A pause between activities. A pause in the restrictions placed for Covid. I know, fancy word to use for a fortnight in the Mediterranean. We spent a week in Corfu with our London family, and then a week in Malta. Corfu was about family and comradeship. Malta was about history. The opening picture is…
This picture was taken on September 28, 1967 and published in the Eastern Province Herald. It’s a bunch of young people sharing a table at the Walmer Hotel in Port Elizabeth. Included are people who worked at the newspaper, and they probably motivated the get-together. Three of them were young reporters in the newsroom: myself,…
It’s taken me a while to subject myself to the challenges of the new Nikon mirrorless cameras. Cost, advanced technology and the need to use my older lenses with an adaptor were my main concerns. I should not have worried. The Z6 is great. Look at the way it handled direct sun in this panoramic…
Zane Grey wrote romantic western novels, the emphasis on romantic. So this picture would have found favour with him: a pretty girl in front of a western scene, Bryce Canyon in Utah. When I am not writing I do photo albums. Zane Grey Country contains photographs and commentary of a road trip Cathy and I…
We last visited Kruger on my 60th birthday, two weeks short of 17 years ago. Our journey started in the north, the Pafuri region, home to the Makuleke Conservancy. Home also to Baobabs and Fever Trees, elephants and the best bird viewing in the park. The Makuleke people were removed in 1968, and only returned 30…
In September 2013 Cathy and I did our second road trip to Namibia, once more including a visit to the main view site of the Fish River Canyon, the second biggest canyon in the world. On that occasion we stayed at the Canyon Roadhouse, the interior of which provided the photograph that was used for…
Bushman’s Nek has a special relevance for my wife and I. We went there initially to do research for my book For the Love of Frances, the skirmish at the top of Bushman’s Nek Pass between the escaping AmaHlubi people and the small expeditionary forces led by Anthony Durnford the purpose of the visit. Since then we…
My latest book, Others Will Have Their Say is going through the final stages before publication. The picture above is a candidate for the cover if the book is self-published. It was taken at Madisa Camp, Namibia, one of the locations in the novel. What follows is the Preface, Chapter One and a part of…
We thought the first Covid 19 wave was over. We thought we might be lucky in South Africa, that if anything was to threaten our lives or our economy it might only come with winter in the middle of 2021. We were wrong. It has come again with a new strain, ironically during the season…
THE MAP CHAPTER ONE
During the lock-down I had great fun doing three photo albums. The one with this cover paired thirteen of my poems, most written in late 2007 and early 2008, with photographs taken on a cruise on the Queen Elizabeth II from Cape Town to Southampton. Featured below is a page from this album, with a…
Jo Petzer of Cosmic Creations is clearly not satisfied with doing the conventional when it comes to turning a photograph into a book cover. For my new novel, Nowhere Man I gave her two photographs to choose from, both taken in Namibia, both of a man walking alone, coming from nowhere and going nowhere. The one was…
Hi Peter, I really enjoyed Motor Games – such a human story and a story too, of humanity. I’m always interested in the working of businesses other than the one I spent my life in – primarily mining and minerals. As a fairly normal male I’ve also always been interested in motor vehicles. And my understanding is…
On our recent trip to northern Europe we had a five day introduction to Norway. It included a ride on the renowned Flamm railway and a trip in a high speed ferry down the Sognefjord – the longest and deepest fjord in Norway – to Bergen. The ferry ride was broken in the small town…
A motor journey through four Southern African countries.
Carte Blanche in early February had an expose of the crooked side of publishing in South Africa; promises being made to aspiring authors to have their books published and promoted for over R20 000. I felt for them, with their dreams being dashed after parting with a substantial amount of money. It brings me to…
How an image captured in a desert restaurant found its way to the cover of my new novel, Motor Games. The photograph was taken at seven thirty on the evening of September 16, 2013 in the restaurant of the Canyon Roadhouse near the Fish River Canyon in southern Namibia. The camera was a Nikon D7000…
I am not one to take photographs of groups of people. Faces are a different matter – the gateway to the soul. I first discovered how rewarding this subject can be when my wife and I were doing research for Death on the Kunene and we visited Himba villages in the Sesfontein and Epupa areas.…
After the visit to Petra we stayed in a Bedouin camp called Bait Ali, in the Wadi Rum area. We arrived after dark, perhaps fortunately for nothing was as it had been on their website. Amongst the issues were two shower stalls in the men’s ablutions to accommodate a camp of over 50 tents. The…
Our journey started in Eilat, the Israeli city on the Red Sea. We crossed the border into the twin city of Aqaba, the port city of Jordan, then took the double carriage highway north towards the capital Amman. The road rises through barren mountains to a plateau, with desert vistas and isolated mountains, then west…
