Good bye!

30 mins to go and I’m panicking. Not because I wouldn’t be ready. No all is packed, everything is ready. It’s just that I realised that I’m actually leaving Bloemfontein behind. (Ok, Bloem wasn’t that exciting place, but it’s more what’s happened here.)

On top of Table Mountain with some friends.

It’s a 24 hour journey back to North (to what I’ve heard is not much of a winter, sadly). I’ll miss all tmy new friends, but hope I’ll see as many as possible of them again anytime soon!

I’m happy.

My final presentation is over! And it was good, although I was nervous like never before. The successes of today also include having both coffee and lunch with the IIASA director general Pavel Kabat.

Tomorrow is the second day of presentations (14 of them still) and the closing ceremonies in the evening. And party, party...

That’s Table Mountain with the ‘tablecloth’ in the background.

Another hot Saturday

A week to go. My brain is melting in the heat and fever.

But it is not as good as Bokomo Oats.

Just for fun

‘Do people go to Finland for fun?’ asked one my colleagues quite casually during a breakfast last week in Cape Town. I didn’t know the answer. I told her that I’ll be going there pretty soon to live there (and will have lots of fun), but I’ve never thought if foreign people actually want to got to Finland just for the fun of it. I know that quite a number of at least British tourists fly every winter to Lapland to see Santa Claus and realise in horror that they are served Rudolf the Reindeer as dinner. But I don’t know if that counts as fun. Maybe they just drift there because the Mallorca resorts where already full. Maybe people who have moved to Finland could tell me. Please.

To the same thought I might add this: We saw some baboons on the way to Cape Point, the most south-western point of African continent. I had never seen one before, which greatly surprised my friend Simon. I tried to come up with an animal that I had seen (in Finland or elsewhere) which he had not seen. Couldn’t. Tried elk and reindeer. He had seen elks and caribous in Alaska. No luck, and animals in zoo don’t count. So one would probably not go to Finland to see the not-so-special fauna...

A baboon, the alpha male of its troop.

Nevertheless, I still have quite a handful of reasons to go to Finland. Last Wednesday a visit to the Khayelitsha township (township means apartheid era non-white residential area) and the informal settlements (slums) spreading around it to every direction, gave me a bunch of more reasons.

Still, somehow I think going back to my homeland of security, abundant food, water, energy, everything is not going to help these people living in their shacks. But think of this: Because we have messed up the European economy and subsequently the carbon credit market, the price for emitting a ton of CO2 is lower than ever. Well, how does that relate to a township in Cape Town? In a neighbourhood called Kuyasa, more than 2,000 houses have been equipped with solar water heater and proper insulation. As part of the Kyoto protocol mechanisms, they can then sell carbon credits for European companies. All the investments being made, that is just pure income, but the price now is just a fraction (6.30 €/ton as of 11 Feb) of what it was in the beginning of the trading system (about 30 €/ton). The world is small.

African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) on Robben Island.