I was rather surprised when I scanned an article title in someone else's paper about a proposed extension to a third term for president. Since the ANC policy and Mbeki himself are opposed to the idea, I'm not quite sure what I think of the South African National Civic Organisation's call, but it sure looks like a play. Karima Brown seems to think so too.
A week ago, the KnowledgeTree team released Beta 4. Kevin put together a Windows installer that configures a previous installation of XAMPP to run KnowledgeTree, setting up Apache and MySQL for a single-click install. The guys were busy while I was away - we resolved lots of issues, and we're most of the way through the known issues before our RC1 release early next week.
Kulula's new web site
31 Jan
While noticing Kulula's new Southern African destinations, I noticed Kulula's web site got updated. Of course, it's utterly broken, and won't render useful things like your itinerary and price. Also, their day of departure/return makes finding out whether there are flights on the once a day but not every day routes (such as Windhoek) really hard.
It seems SAA may continue losing African marketshare, as budget airline Kulula will soon be adding Zambia to its destinations, bringing to three the Southern African countries to which Kulula flies to from Johannesburg (with Zimbabwe and Namibia). Anything that makes SAA suck less is probably a good thing.
I shared much of my marathon return journey from Kalangala with resident African travel genius, Karl. Showing a cool familiarity with the idea of a seven-hour stop at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, he led me to the SAA business class lounge. That's where the adventure began...
Air Kenya
28 Jan
Just a short recommendation to those who may be flying around Africa soon. I really enjoyed flying with Air Kenya (between Nairobi and Entebbe) - much more so than I did on SAA. I flew SAA business class (bumped up due to overbooking?) followed by Air Kenya business class (due to being out of seats at time of booking), and the difference was noticeable. I flew economy back (admittedly, I spent most of the time passed out after only enough time to get an hour of sleep at the hotel), and I still preferred them. Given my
previous
experiences with SAA, Air Kenya will hopefully be my African carrier for my two or three trips planned for later this year.
Back a while back...
28 Jan
I've been back from Africa Source II for a while now, after a good 34-35 hours of transit between the camp and home. I'm in the process of writing a piece on Africa Source II, but for now it's enough to say that it was the best use of 8 days I've ever made. Since then it's been KnowledgeTree solid...
Off to Uganda
06 Jan
It's 04:30, and I'm doing final preparation before heading to the airport to start the 13 hours of travelling to Entebbe (and more travelling from the airport to the venue) so that I can meet up with NGO supporters around Africa at the Africa Source II event in Kalangala. Marek from Tactical Tech is already writing from there on the Africa Source web log. And I'm away...