The sun dropped closer to the horizon and cast a shadow of Lion’s Head stretching out over Cape Town. The shadow pointed to where the moon would soon be rising.

L'ombre de Lion's Head s'etend sur Cape Town, tout en indiquant l'endroit exact ou la lune se levera.

The day had been cloudy and the evening had been dramatic with winds, wisps of clouds blowing by and storm showers far out at sea. The sun peaked through the clouds before its final watery submersion.

Le journee etait venteuse et pluvieuse, mais a laisse apparaitre le soleil juste avant de avant que ce dernier ne soit submerge par l'horizon oceanique.

Folks were having a hard time deciding whether to watch the sunset or the moonrise.

Les gens n'arrivaient pas a se decider entre le coucher du soleil ou le lever de la lune.

A warm summer moon looks over a young couple in love. Some things never change.

Soon the families started to pack up and start the hour and a half trek back to their cars. The younger at heart remained. Drums and incense welcomed the moon, the summer and begged a gentle entry of the new millennium, which was soon approaching.

As the night grew longer, tribes continued to disperse. Soon only a hand full of hearty souls remained. Talk turned to spiritual matters: interconnectedness, the confluence of psychology and ecology, systems theory and Ken Wilbur.

Around 3 AM the entire ocean turned from inky black to puffy gray. Fog had formed a uniform 300-foot thick blanket that covered the ocean as far as the eye could see. The wind was blowing it straight into Lion’s Head. It backed up against the uplifted mountain and started washing around either side of us.

It soon stacked up enough to send wave after crashing wave of billowing fog right over the top of us. We could look miles out to sea and watch the waves of clouds forming. They would gather up, crash onto the mainland, race up the hill and then whoosh, we were in a cloudbank with fog all around us. A moment later it would pass and we could see far out to sea again at the other banks of clouds gathering into great waves.

Around 4 AM the Search and Rescue Team arrived looking for some German named Gunther who had been last seen partying on Lion’s Head. Well Gunther wasn’t here and these guys really wanted to rescue somebody. So, with a mixture of exaggerated foul weather forecasts and veiled threats of issuing some sort of ticket if we didn’t comply, they mustered us up and proceeded to march us down a foggy mountain in the dark, even though sun rise was just an hour or so away.

Very soon the folly was all too apparent. I fermented open revolt and finally severed my band from the goose stepping death march about half way down the mountain. We lolled about, chatted a bit more, and drank the last of our “Old Brown Sherry”. When the sun rose, all the world was still swathed in fog. We made our final descent in a rosy-pink mist.