Hey! Hey?

Up in Vredehoek, on the hips of Table mountain and on eye level Lion’s Head, I think I have worked out why South Africans say ‘hey’ so much. It’s the speed and the volume of the wind. It rips the words right out of your mouth and steals them away so that you rarely hear what the person next to you is saying. So the ‘hey’ serves a dual purpose: firstly to get the attention of the person your wind-lost words are aimed at, and secondly – in response – as a means of asking that person to repeat what they were saying.

Trying to walk up a road into the wind is like trying to wade upstream in a fast flowing river. Make sure you have at least one foot planted solidly on the ground when the wind picks up like this. I am sure that if you jumped and lost contact with the pavement, even for a moment, you would get swept away.