On Friday radio station Kfm announced the winners in each of the 30 categories in its 2022 Best of the Cape Awards.
The winners are from Cape Town as well as from other areas in the province. Kfm introduced the competition in 2021 for the first time. Continue reading →
Tuesday 26 January 2021, Day 30 of Level 3 Adjusted, Day 307 of Lockdown 😷
Corona Gratitude 🙏
#Grateful for a lovely relaxed day, at 24C, the South Easter blowing now; for a productive working morning; for a surprise call from a former Camps Bay guest house neighbour in Camps Bay, needing a Social Media Manager, giving my day a pep; for a late afternoon walk to Clifton Fourth Beach and back, and for little litter along the way; for a power nap; for a beautiful sunset; and for being happy and healthy. 🙏💙 Continue reading →
Friday 7 August 2020, Day 68 of Level 3, after 66 days of Levels 5 and 4 😷
Corona Gratitude 🙏
#Grateful for the most fabulous day, starting with the perfect sunny day, forecast at 17C but in the 20sC for sure, a taste of summer again; for a busy morning, not having slept as much as I should but being very happy today just from the sunshine plus more; for meeting Vivian Warby for tea and a croissant 🥐 at Maison J, not having seen each other since Lockdown, so much catching up to do; for having a crown made, made in the dentist rooms with a 3D laser, taking 12 minutes, technically unbelievable; for finding a pair of walking shorts I was looking for at Sportsman’s Warehouse, with less good service than I usually receive at The Point Branch; for picking up some more poppy seed bagels at Kleinsky’s; for meeting Bryce Shapiro at Latitude Café to tackle my Amazon problem, but we needed to contact an Apple Wizz friend of his, to understand the Browser problem we are experiencing in the application process, my phone software and Browsers all being up to date; for selling my house in Hermanus Yipee Yay ❤️; for meeting with Lisa Hayden, coming to fetch a slice of the cheese cake which I kept for her; for a cat food bulk pack pet food shop at Pick n Pay; for dancing to Kfm 💃; for bumping into Tidal Pool swimmer Dave Talbot at the Pool on my walk, his first swim in more than 4 months, what a fabulous hug 💙; and for being happy and healthy. 🙏💙
My Blogpost today was the Sweet & Sour Service Awards, which went to Maison J and Telkom, respectively.
Sweet Service Award goes to Maison J; Sour Service Award goes to Telkom!
Vivian and I went to Caprice for tea, but the service was so slack that we left and went to Maison J.
It’s hard to summarize the drama of the five-year journey of getting my former Hermanus guest house sold. It was sold on an auction to a person who turned out to live in my house without paying occupational rent, who used my property to store furniture and other belongings from another house, stole the geysers, aircons, safes etc so that he could reduce the purchase price, didn’t once provide guarantees for the balance of the payment due, took us to court when we tried to sell the company owning the property to another person, and had himself registered as the only person allowed to buy the property, but never paying for it in the five years, finally buying a house elsewhere, and out of some bizarre spite still hung on to my sale until we threatened him with court action. A horrid notorious Hermanus man. 🥵🥵🥵🥵
And then by luck or was it meant to be, I didn’t just gain a Tourist Guide qualification as a result of the course I took, but I also met the lovely and kind Johan Prins, who heard my Hermanus tragedy, connected me to a property developer there, and the rest is history! ❤️❤️❤️❤️
Today was the three year anniversary of starting a dental journey with my dentist Dr Wim de Beer in the Waterfront, having implants done, and recently the crown after a root canal. I also had to have a tooth extracted today, a tough job to get the molar out with all sorts of ‘pliers’, but finally it was out. I needed to take a pain killer when I got home and buy a course of antibiotics. 
Kfm, Dave Talbot, Tidal Pool, camps bay, sea Point, There were some service issues with the receptionist which I fed back to the dentist, and he promised that he is addressing them. So I gained a brand new tooth today, and lost an old unnecessary one.
The Red Bus started operating again today, only doing so on weekends initially. So sad to see a Bo-Kaap landmark Batavia Café announce its closure on Instagram.
Loved my long chat with Jenny Stephens this evening ❤️❤️❤️.
SA Corona Status: 545476cases 9909 deaths 😷😢
FitBit 15000 steps 11 km 👣
Lovemylife❤️
The Corona Virus Lockdown (Level 5), announced by our President Cyril Ramaphosa earlier to commence on 27 March and to continue until 16 April, subsequently extended to 30 April, lowered to Level 4 from 1 May, and lowered to Level 3 from 1 June, is an unprecedented event in my lifetime. I am posting my daily Facebook post to journal this Corona Lockdown Journey, perhaps to serve as material for a future Book.
Chris von Ulmenstein, WhaleTales Blog: www.chrisvonulmenstein.com/blog Tel +27 082 55 11 323 Twitter:@Ulmenstein Facebook: Chris von Ulmenstein Instagram: @Chrissy_Ulmenstein
Last week I invited my friends Clint and Llewellyn Lambert (GM of the Franschhoek Boutique Hotel, and influential blogger at Hospitality Hedonist) to join me for dinner at Le Petit Manoir in Franschhoek, which opened in July. Having had more than enough time to settle in, it was a severely (and costly) experience, of a completely dysfunctional restaurant. I apologise for the longer than average Review, summarizing my experiences with Chef Kevin Grobler’s cooking since 2015. Continue reading →
Grant Dodd, Australia-based partner and CEO of Haskell Vineyards in Stellenbosch, hosted a #DombeyaDay on Thursday, a vertical tasting of five vintages each of their Dombeya Chardonnay and Shiraz, proving that their inexpensive wines can be cellared.
Haskell Vineyards belongs to Preston Haskell, who bought Dombeya, which makes wines under the Dombeya and Haskell labels, its winemaker being the highly regarded Rainie Strydom, who celebrates her tenth year with the wine farm this year. The farm was named after the Dombeya pear tree which grows on the farm, and originally produced angora wool.
Dodd related the conversation between Haskell and himself ten years ago, when Haskell bought the farm, about the Dombeya brand name. Dodd suggested its Continue reading →
Tourism, Food, and Wine news headlines
* The International Air Transport Association (IATA) is encouraging its members to use IT to improve the customer experience, saying that airlines ‘fly people and cargo, not planes‘. Consistency of customer experience is not yet satisfactory for airlines, with little differentiation. Customers would like to use IT to check in online, tag luggage themselves, board themselves, and collect bags themselves, an IATA survey found last year. IATA’s goal is that 80% of passengers have a ‘self-service suite based on industry standards‘ available to them by 2020.
* PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is not known as a Tourism consultancy, so its prediction about our country’s tourism future is a surprise. Its report presents growth of 4% in international tourists 2013, far lower than the 10% growth in 2012. Growth is said to be solid and good, but ‘not fantastic growth‘. Almost three quarters of international visitors to our country are from Africa, the report confirms. Nigeria would become the leading source market for our country, the PwC study predicts. The Guest House category is the fastest growing in respect of room availability. South Africa’s strength is that it attracts leisure as well as business travelers.
* France must be feeling the tourism pinch, having announced plans to become more welcoming to tourists, English speaking ones in particular. The country hopes to increase tourist numbers to 100 million, Continue reading →
Malcolm Gooding’s name has been synonymous with radio since the ‘Seventies, and he has a most beautiful face for radio! At the Franschhoek Literary Festival, Gooding performed his autobiographical play ‘Going Gooding: A Play on Radio‘ last night, which was also the name of his show on the English programme of the SABC. In one hour the audience was transported back to an era of radio personalities and cigarette advertising. It is a shame that there were so few attendees.
Gooding opened a guest house outside Franschhoek recently, but appears to spend most of his time in Johannesburg, still doing voice-overs and documentaries. The play tells the story of Gooding’s career in radio, which started close to fifty years ago. A chance invitation by a friend to attend an audition as radio presenter opened the door which remains open for Gooding. He described himself as a ‘voice prostitute’, having been called the ‘Golden Voice‘ of radio. He demonstrated his diversity as a voice artist, doing at least 24 voices in his one-hour play. He started off with an advertorial skit, of which he does many now, for ‘Blomail’, a play on words for Glomail, which uses Gooding for such infomercials! He reminisced about his colleagues on radio, who have passed away, including Robin Alexander, Nigel Kane, Bill Flynn, Paddy O’Byrne, Bea Reed, and many more. He did a hilarious piece on Patricia Kerr doing ‘Forces
Favourites’, reading a letter in her very poor Afrikaans.
It was an era of radio dramas on Springbok Radio, the best known being ‘Squad Cars’, which exceeded 800 episodes. Gooding did an episode for us, in which he played every voice, including the narrator, an Indian and an Afrikaans policeman, a Dutch crime victim, and an Irish crime perpetrator. Gooding described the very popular program as ‘SA police propaganda’. Other popular radio dramas included ‘Taxi’, and ‘Consider your Verdict‘. Radio advertisements for Chevrolet (‘Sunny skies and Chevrolet‘), Continue reading →
It was the interview with a Cape Argus reporter on Friday that made me reflect on how far not only our country, but also I personally and my business have come in the 20 years since we voted on 27 April 1994. The Argus interview was focused on the progress over the past 20 years I have seen personally, business-wise, and politically.
My very first feedback to reporter Dylan was that 1994 was the first and only time that I was allowed to vote, having a German passport. I do not recall how it was possible for all foreigners (by passport) to be allowed to vote, when it has never been allowed before nor since then. I loved standing in a queue somewhere in Sea Point, being part of the exciting day that would change our country forever, and how much goodwill there was amongst South Africans whilst waiting patiently in the queues. Little did we know that the rest of the world waited anxiously for the outcome of the election, fully expecting a revolution to take place, unbeknown to us residents, with thanks to the SABC in ‘protecting’ us from this world scenario.
I moved to Cape Town in 1990, and transferred my marketing research consultancy Relationship Marketing from Johannesburg, changing its emphasis to Public Relations for food clients such as Baker Street Snacks, Bonnita (now Parmalat), Aylesbury, and more. The late John Harrison was a favourite client when he was GM of the Table Mountain Aerial Cableway. Even Mark Shuttleworth was a client, before he became famous for selling his Continue reading →
I couldn’t have wished for a better birthday yesterday, having been invited to join a media sail from the Royal Cape Yacht Club, to generate publicity for the Cape2Rio 2014 Yacht Race, which starts in Cape Town on 4 January. The 14th 3000 mile Cape2Rio Yacht Race is the ‘PR opportunity of the Year’ for Cape Town, and links to the 2014 Soccer World Cup taking place in Brazil, each of the 36 yachts taking a soccer ball.
Despite my uncertainty as to whether my guest house duties would allow me to participate, my staff gave me off, and the day could not have been more perfect for a sail, with no wind, and the temperature around 30°C. I had been invited by Wesgro’s Chief Marketing Officer Judy Lain, and she was waiting for me with a bunch of flowers! I thanked her for choosing such a perfect day and date for the sail! A number of media representatives were invited, and we gathered in the ‘galley‘ at the yacht club to hear more details about the race and its participants from the Race Marketer Toni Mainprize. The pioneering spirit and human struggle in making a yacht crossing was saluted, and it was said that Cape Town seems to have turned its back on the sea, despite it surrounding us. I personally had not sailed in years, having been a regular weekend sailor twenty years ago. We were encouraged to come to the Yacht Club on a Wednesday afternoon, and volunteer to crew on the yachts going out to sea. Teams from Angola, the UK, Australia, Italy, and Germany have entered the Race.
A number of representatives of the participating boats were present, and the idea was that we interview them on the water, the owners of Isla having made
their catamaran available for the media outing. The response had been so great that Judy and other PR executives stayed on land, as the Hendersons, owners of Isla, were very strict about the total number of persons allowed on the yacht.
The 14,8 m catamaran Isla was built by its owner Ian Henderson, and sleeps eight. He will be putting his business interests on hold for the next year, taking his wife Elskeand their two daughters of 4 and 7 years with them on the race, and they plan to travel along the east coast of South and North America thereafter. 
Elske told me that they rarely get seasick now, regularly doing outings along the coast, and sleeping on the boat when they do trips away. Elske said she volunteers to helm, as it makes her less likely to become sea sick. She laughed, saying she is quick to delegate the food preparation when she feels queasy. She has found homeopathic medication to counter the sea Continue reading →
The Sweet Service Award goes to Pick ‘n Pay for its super Gift Card service, which offers a 2,5% discount for purchases of Gift Cards to the value of R20000, a service most Pick ‘n Pay clients do not know about. It does not replace the Smart Shopper card, which will be swiped for grocery purchases too. Intended as a corporate product for companies to use in rewarding their staff, it can also be bought by anyone else spending large sums of money at the retailer, as we do to pay our municipal accounts and guest house groceries, monies we would have to spend anyway but had paid by cheque via Easy Pay in the past. The process is simple: one requests an invoice from Pick ‘n Pay’s head office, pays the R20000 into their bank account, and then four cards are loaded with R5000 each, and the R500 discount Continue reading →