Soccer 2010 fans-get 15-20% discount on accomodation

Sports fans will soon be searching for accommodation for the 2010 World Cup soccer tournament, as well as the IPL (Indian Premier League) tournament which has recently been awarded to South Africa. The first of 59 matches will commence on 18 April 2009.

In addition to this, The British Lions Rugby tour takes place between 30 May 2009 and 4 July 2009 while the England cricket team tours South Africa from 10 November 2009 to 18 January 2010.

If you are interested in any of these events (or simply looking for holiday or business accommodation), then choose from the almost 5000 properties on our website - www.wheretostay.co.za.

Remember that, with Where to Stay you book directly with the owners and won't have agent's commissions added to the price.

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2) "The Honey Guide" is a new discount package which is linked to the Where to Stay website. Members of The Honey Guide will enjoy between 15% and 50% discount from almost 1000 specific properties listed on Where to Stay.

To find out more about becoming a member of The Honey Guide and to get your discounts (click here).

Once again, thank you for using our website.

Kind regards

The Where to Stay Team

Save The Penguins In South Africa

Nesting in the sparkling sand, preening on the rocks and darting through the waters, the penguins on the southern tip of Africa are the ultimate crowd-pleaser. But crisis looms.
Short of food, exposed to predators and the African sun, their numbers are plummeting. But salvation may rest in a simple manmade solution — housing for penguins.
Dotting the shore of this penguin colony near the Cape of Good Hope are 200 nesting boxes, each big enough to house a happy family of parents, eggs and chicks. The experiment has already worked well on a more distant penguin island in South African waters, and wildlife rangers are eager to see whether the boxes recently installed on Boulders Beach, where tourists can watch the birds up close, will prove equally attractive.
"You look at the penguins and think they have a lovely time in sunny South Africa, but it's a struggle," says Monique Ruthenberg, a ranger with the Table Mountain National Park in Cape Town, where summer temperatures recently hit 40 degrees (104 Fahrenheit).
Park authorities installed the boxes — made of a fiberglass mix, shaped like a burrow and dug into the sand to mimic the real nests — at Boulders Beach as part of desperate efforts to protect the dwindling populations of African penguins.
It has been a losing struggle. Numbers of the cute, curious creatures have plummeted from around 3 million in the 1930s to just 120,000 because of overfishing and pollution. Some experts fear the species will die out in as little as a decade, and are particularly alarmed at the prospect of global warming increasing the number of scorching days, raising water temperatures and altering fish migration patterns.
The Boulders Beach colony has fallen 30 percent from a peak of 3,900 birds in 2005 to 2,600 and some of the island colonies have suffered calamitous declines of 50 percent.
The African penguin, also called the jackass because of its bray, is the only one to inhabit the African continent. It has shorter feathers than the Antarctic birds because it doesn't face such cold and is just 50 centimeters (20 inches) tall.
The Boulders Colony began in 1985 when a couple of penguins moved from a nearby island onto the beach in the naval base of Simon's Town, decided they liked it and stayed. So many followed that authorities had to build fences to prevent them invading people's gardens. But the tourists poured in.
About 600,000 a year now visit Boulders Beach, which boasts that it is the only place in the world where people can swim with penguins. The real life "Happy Feet" are unfazed by all the attention and, apart from a few who were killed while snoozing under visitors' cars, don't seem to have suffered from their contact with humans.
There is a constant risk from pollution. The last big oil spill was in 2000, when 20,000 penguins were trucked about 470 miles from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth to allow workers time to clean up oil from a wrecked tanker while the birds swam home.
But even in years with no big accidents, the South African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds has to rescue and rehabilitate hundreds of birds whose feathers are covered in oil illegally dumped at sea and washed ashore.
The population fall continues, especially on the more remote Dyer Island where numbers have plummeted from 23,000 breeding pairs in the early 1970s to just 1,500 pairs. Penguins normally mate for life.
"It's horrible," Wilfred Chivell, chairman of the Dyer Island Conservation Trust, who blames bad fishing management for a dwindling supply of sardines and pilchards, the penguins' main food.
Such is the competition for fish that Ruthenberg says young seals attack penguins to rip the fish from their bellies.
Gulls prey on the eggs and young chicks, often working as a team; the nesting penguins leave their eggs to chase away the invaders, while another gull sneaks in behind, she says.
Eggs lie abandoned in the sand because the parents have taken to the water to escape the heat. Once a nesting pair abandons its eggs, other penguins often follow suit.
So volunteers calling themselves the iKapa Honorary Rangers asked the public to sponsor nesting boxes for $20 each. They initially planned 100 boxes but this was doubled thanks to a $2,000 donation from the Species Survival Plan — a cooperation program linking members of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums in the U.S.
The nesting boxes are meant to give the penguins an edge — shelter from the heat and a better defense against egg-stealing gulls — and the 1,000 boxes on the more remote Dyer Island have proven popular, with 80 percent occupancy.
Now Ruthenberg hopes the Boulders Beach penguins that have lost eggs and chicks will learn the lesson and take to the newly installed boxes in time to lay a second batch before the laying season ends in April.

Art in Mind Symposium 2009-South Africa

NELSON MANDELA BAY PRESENTS
“ART IN MIND” SYMPOSIUM 2009
Three days of events for your enrichment and enjoyment that will draw attention to the contemporary debates and opinions that surround design, art and craft issues.

WHEN? : 25, 26, 27 March 2009
WHERE? : Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, 1 Park Drive, Port Elizabeth
TELEPHONE: 041 5062000
E-MAIL: artmuseum@mandelametro.gov.za
EMPTY VESSELS?

LECTURE SERIES
25 March 9:00 – 13:00
9:00 – 10:00
Feet of clay: Melanie Hillebrand – Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum
10:00 – 10:30 - Tea
10:30 – 11:30
Design – Craft – Art: Crafty Designer Art: Bruce Cadle, Head of Applied Design at NMMU 11:30 – 12:15
The art of Business - the business of the Arts: Anthony Harris - Anthony Harris is a professional artist and past owner of three art galleries.
12:15 - 13:00
Business & Arts SA - Promoting mutually beneficial & sustainable Business/Arts partnerships: Melanie Manson - Business and Arts South Africa Regional Representative – Eastern Cape.

“ART IN ACTION”
Public Demonstrations:
25 March 14:00 – 16:30
26 and 27 March 9:00 – 13:00 and 14:00 – 16:30

Interpret - Design - Develop
Therina Pienaar and a team of three skilled artists and crafters will work through the process of interpreting, designing and developing a beautiful object which is uniquely South African and can be produced for the tourist market.

Clay Feats
Artists in Residence: Charmaine Haines, Vulisango Ndwandwa and Delphine Niez. Potters/ceramic artists are designers who work with clay in their own particular way. The artists will demonstrate their ability to transform clay into exquisite art objects.

Workshops
26 and 27 March 09:00 – 12:00
Interpret - Design - Develop (10 participants with artistic flair and a penchant for design)
The design process: Crackerjack’s designers will inspire and guide participants through a series of creative processes to develop an idea/concept from natural or manufactured form and design a bag, a piece of jewelry or furniture.
Clay Feat: (15 participants) Well-known ceramic artist Nicci Stewart will make and provide each workshop participant with a leather hard vessel and guide them through the creative process of transforming the vessel into a work of art. She will demonstrate a number of techniques that can be used to change the face of an “empty vessel” to give it meaning.

FEES
Demonstrations: Free Entry
Morning Lectures and presentations: R20.00
Practical Workshops:
• Interpret - Design – Develop: R100.00
• Clay Feat: R130.00

Places are limited and early booking is advised. Bursaries are available for deserving applicants.

Bookings: Telephone 041 5062000
Bursary applications: To be made in writing to The Director and faxed to 041 5863234 or e-mail artmuseum@mandelametro.gov.za

For more detailed information on the lectures provided please visit
Art In Mind Symposium 2009

Road Toll Fees To Increase In Mpumalanga Province

The road toll fees are due to increase from 1 March 2009.This is directly going to impact on the pricing of our African Crafts products which we sell from the Mpumalanga Crafts Market.We normally drive there to pick up items which we have sold and the toll fees are already high.We are not going to increase our prices yet but will wait to see how much of an impact it has.We will instead try and keep more stock at our despatch area in Pretoria so we will pick up more items at one time and decrease the cost per item.This is also bad news for the many South Africans from the Gauteng area who spend a lot of their holidays in Mpumalanga as it is the closest scenic province to the Gautengers.This global recession is showing no signs of easing up.Wish we knew how much longer this is going to take..........

Make sure your African Art is Authentic

Read the below article on the mass produced African Craft items being made in China.

African art that's Made in China

African craft artists pump about $300 million into the economy. But the locals are finding it tougher to compete with factories in China making replicas of their crafts. Gretchen Wilson explores how this is a form of identity theft.
• Listen to this Story

TEXT OF STORY• Bill Radke: If you've done some travelling abroad, you may have bought some ethnic arts and crafts for your home. A mask from Mexico, a wood carving from Kenya. But are you sure they're authentic? Globalization means more and more African arts and crafts are being made in factories not in the countries they claim to be from. Gretchen Wilson reports from Johannesburg that real crafters are struggling to compete.
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• Gretchen Wilson: This sidewalk serves as a studio for South African artist Boas Manzvenga. He strings wires with tiny beads to make the distinctive sculptures this region's known for.
• Boas Manzvenga: This one is a small, small leopard. And this one is a lion.
• He's asking $35 for this lion, about the size of a house cat. It's these skills that put bread on the table for his wife and sons. And his extended family.
• Manzvenga: I think it's nearly 20 people. They depend on me. So I need to support them.
• Many of the 1 million traditional craft artists in South Africa might otherwise be unemployed. But they pump more than $300 million a year into the economy. It's tough for them to compete with Chinese manufacturers who flood the market with cheaper replicas.
• Manzvenga: They can buy things at cheaper price. Then they can go there and remake it and they make a profit out of us.
• And they do, at shopping malls like this one, in Johannesburg, where shelves are loaded with foreign-made baskets, beaded jewelry and wooden giraffes. All mass produced.
• Priscilla Nyoni is with Craft Yarona, a company that promotes local artists:
• Priscilla Nyoni: It's something that has been happening for years now, and our government hasn't been intervening.
• She says there's more at stake than just employment:
• Nyoni: That's African identity, and they're actually stealing it.
• Artists sometimes turn to copyrights and intellectual property laws to protect their work. But that's expensive. So African artists are easily exploited -- especially the rural poor.
• Anitra Nettleton is an art historian at Wits University:
• Anitra Nettleton: They don't have access to the kinds of legal ways of protecting their designs, and so anyone can use them. Because there is nothing to stop. And that's immoral.
• South Africa's artists are trying to innovate to keep one step ahead of look-a-like imports. And they say it's now up to consumers to make sure they're buying the real thing.
• In Johannesburg, I'm Gretchen Wilson for Marketplace.
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