Tales from a nation of story-tellers

IF YOU WRITE AND SEEK STORY IDEAS - romance, horror, bigotry, or travel - you might struggle to find a better location than where I am now.
I'm in Cape Town, probably our world's most attractive ocean-fronting city. Whales play close to the shore, shoppers and sellers gossip non-stop in the main street under the gaze of astonishingly high mountains just, almost, a stone's throw away.

Look out to sea and the mighty Southern Ocean shimmers all the way to the horizon.
Stare up at the often cloudless sky and it's as if you are gazing into Space, albeit Space tinted a gorgeous light blue by day, and blacker than black in star and planet strewn nights.

Breathtaking, often horrifying

A visit is wonderful for the eyes, the people good for imagination, and the tales they tell surprisingly breathtaking, often amusing - and often horrifying.
Of course, wherever humans gather in the world, anecdotes - stories - are exchanged. It's what our species does.
But to me anecdotes seem to be told more passionately, more intensely, and often more desperately here. It feels as South Africans are really hungry for story-telling, perhaps because unlike most of the world, TV was denied them till the mid-seventies ... Continues on the website for the story of my very last oceanic voyage, SailingToPurgatory.com