Newsletters 2021

Latest News - April 2021

Greetings from South Africa! The weather is perfect at this time of the year - warm days and cool nights, and just the occasional thunderstorm to break the monotony. It is starting to get a bit colder (we have already had our first snowfall on the Drakensberg Mountains), but it really is the best time of the year to be out and about in the wild blue yonder!

It is now exactly 12 months since the first lockdown restrictions were imposed in South Africa because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it feels much longer than that. It is has been a year of extreme ups and downs, drama, heartache and hardship, but most of us ...

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Latest News - March 2021

Greetings once again from South Africa. It has been a very strange summer so far in this part of the world, in that we have experienced very few of the hot and humid days which often occur during February. This is mostly because of the massive amounts of rain which were dumped on the country by a succession of tropical cyclones coming in from the Indian Ocean. The weather, at the moment, is perfect – long warm days, very little rain except for some afternoon thundershowers, and cool nights. March, April and May are always the best months of the year from a weather point of view.

Close Encounters is a family owned-and-operated company, and once again, just six months after the loss of our mother Helena, myself, Alan and Janice were devastated by the passing of our father, Vernon, on February 10. Our sincere thanks go out to the hundreds of you that sent us messages of sympathy and condolences, but we can also take comfort in the knowledge that he has gone on to be reunited with his beloved partner of 66 years. He was a devoted and loving husband, father, and grandfather, an inspiring member of his church community ...

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Latest News - February 2021

Greetings from a very wet South Africa! The country is normally not affected by tropical cyclones (or hurricanes as they are called in the Northern Hemisphere), but Cyclone Eloise, which smashed into the Mozambican coastline about 10 days ago, continued inland and dumped lashings of rain on the north-eastern regions. This came on top of an already bumper rainy season, so many ...

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Latest News - January 2021

Best wishes for 2021, from all of us at Close Encounters. Make sure that every single day of this new year counts for something. We hope that all of your days ahead are full of fun, adventure, and all of the other things that make life worth living!

As always at this time of the year, most of us take the time to reflect on the previous twelve months and, at the same time, mentally reset and recharge ourselves for the year ahead. 2020 cannot be viewed as anything other than a disaster for so many ...

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