We are going to run all the payments and financials through the Ker & Downey office in Houston.

A few expressed concerns about sending credit cards to South Africa so we are now able to work with the USA office.

The only problem is they are sticklers for their forms and of course these are different from the ones K&D Cape Town uses. So I will send you all new forms for the credit card authorization and terms and conditions (almost identical). Fortunately they use the same client profiles, the long forms you filled out. K&D Houston also has a liability form.

If you want to just sign and fax me the credit card authorization form I will fill in all the blanks from the orignal form you sent me.

I hope to get these all out to you tonight or tomorrow.

Talking to them today once we have all the final pricing in probably April to May 2007 we can have a choice to "lock in" or float. I will post the lock in price at that time and then you decide on what you want to do.

Ngaire, so now we are to become expert "money changers?" Nice to know you run a democratic ship! I just hope only the experts will vote. Let's see, how many currency experts are on this board who wish to stick their neck out for the rest of us?

Ngaire, looks like ROAR 2 is going to be even greater than ROAR 1! While I will miss the train in many ways, I think those two nights are better spent with more safari time!

Olivia, I hope that we all get to make our own decision on when to make final payment and lock. Not only do I not want others making the decision for me, I don't want to feel "liable" for being deciding vote (we are all deciding votes if it is close).

Mark, that post was made in jest. I hope no one took it seriously.

Olivia, I know. I just think the original post is a little ambiguous and might lead others to be confused. Ngaire, you might want to change the word "vote" to "decide."

Sorry, Marc when it is a large group like this the whole group must decide to do the same thing. It would be a nightmare of confusion with some locked in and some floating. Lets not worry about this until April/May 2007 it is a long time away. Last time it was not a close poll when we posted the poll choice on LCT and most on ROAR decided to lock in which ultimately was the right decision. I have found most people prefer to lock in so they KNOW what to budget for and expect.

Neither the South African rand nor the South African stock market are amongst the "A" list of tradeable stock or currency markets. I sure wouldn't volunteer to predict the future direction or value of the currency.

http://www.jse.co.za/ is the home page for the South African stock market The front page gives a snapshot of business news, the value of the Rand in US$, the price of gold in US$ and the value of their stock market. This has been a good way for me to learn a little about the currency and economy.

Cheers, Anne

Recently, I had occasion to examine foreign exchange rates, and a colleague pointed me to a very neat Web site, so I'm passing it along. Foreign Exchange Rates

It is from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Board. What is so nice about it is that for most foreign currencies, you can look up the exchange rate and specify time periods and see the volatility over short periods of time or over several years. It immediately graphs the results.

When you first open the link, go down to the country of interest, and you have a choice of daily (D) information or monthly (M) information. Then below the graph, you can customize the time period for which you want to examine the rates. In this link Rand Example , you see the South African rand against the dollar from September 9, 2005 to the present. (It will show some exact values also, as you see below the graph.) It is fairly striking how volatile the rand/dollar exchange rate has been.

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Eugene