Word: capes
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PLAYING CATCH-UP Orbiting 200 miles above Earth at 17,500 m.p.h., the space station passes over Cape Canaveral, Fla., for just 5 min. each day. For the shuttle to catch up without wasting too much fuel, the timing has to be dead-on. STAYING IN LANE It takes 2½ days to intercept the station. The shuttle is launched into a slightly lowerorbit. Like a runner on an inside track, it catches up to the station, fires its thrusters and edges up to the station's orbit for docking...
...slogan ever likely to draw amusement-park crowds. Which is why most visitors to South Africa, steered to Kruger National Park in the northeast and to the coastal vineyards of the southwest, often don't notice the country is half scrub. That two-hour flight between Johannesburg and Cape Town? That was the desert...
...Reinet, the Karoo's prettiest town and the fourth oldest European town in South Africa; 220 of its buildings are national monuments. To stroll down Parsonage Street or Parliament Street is to walk through another era. The buildings' styles vary from the thatch, whitewash and green shutters of the Cape Dutch to ornate Victorian villas hugged by luminous bougainvillea - even the pharmacy is unchanged since the turn of the last century. Many houses have been converted into hotels. Best is the six-room Andries Stockenstrom Guesthouse on Craddock Street. In her high-ceilinged, 1819 manor house, award-winning chef Beatrice...
Many of the bigger houses are now museums where you can study the Karoo's harsh history: the Great Trek, when the Boers left Cape Town for the interior in 1835-40; wars between Europeans and Africans, particularly Zulus; wars among Europeans (the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902); the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and Boer mythology. Not all the area's troubles are past. There's more than a hint of enduring apartheid in the town's layout: colonial mansions for whites in the center, tin shacks for coloreds and blacks on the outskirts. And there's a lingering...
...decorated with finely ground multicolored glass, was the home and life's work of "outsider" artist Helen Martins, and it's now a museum. Around it has grown a small community of artists and other refugees from modern living, including André Cilliers, who moved to Nieu Bethesda from Cape Town when even that laid-back city became too much, and now serves up home-made goats' cheese, smoked kudu salami and delicious honey ale at his Two Goats Deli and Brewery. Time your visit for spring (September-November), when the desert blooms with orange and pink flowers, or autumn...