South Africa is currently going through issues with it’s power infrastructure. The national power company Eskom has implementing load shedding around the country. Load Shedding is where they shut down entire areas for an allotted amount of time to do repair work or support demands elsewhere. This has been going on for the past several months and we had our first experiences with it last week while in Stellenbosch.

We were eating dinner seated outside at a coal fired pizza joint in Stellenbosch when all of the lights went out. This caught Kara and I a little off-guard, but the other restaurant patrons all continued eating and talking as if nothing happened. We accessed the situation and carried on as well, finishing our wine ( a Graham Beck Pinotage) and dessert. Luckily all of the portable credit card machines worked on battery power, otherwise we would have been washing dishes. When we returned to our AirBnB our hosts were hanging out with candles drinking some wine and we happily joined them and learned about the load shedding hand how it is effecting life in South Africa. On the whole, it seems that everyone has adapted in some way or another to accommodate this inconvenience, and usually citizens are given a time allotment of when the shedding will occur.

To prepare ourselves for this we brought a Solar kit so we could charge our devices if we needed to. So far it has worked great and we always keep our battery pack charged. It will give 2 full charges to our GoPro batteries or phone batteries.

The real pain about Load shedding is using restaurant toilets. They now require a flashlight, which I found out after walking into the ladies dark bathroom. Whoops! Other than that is seems to just be a way of life around here and more of a problem for businesses. It appears that someone from Eskom forgot to look at capital depreciation when they were doing their finances.

Load Shedding Update Feb 9th

Traffic downtown gets really bad when all the traffic lights stop working. We tried checking into our backpackers in downtown Cape Town, but with no power neither the doorbell nor the code pad worked for the exterior gate. We had to wait until another guest came by and yelled up the corridor so the office attendant could hear, this was how we had to get into our backpackers.