Naughty Wild Animals

26 February, Lower Sabie Camp Kruger NP

A troupe of baboons wandered along the perimeter fence this morning. It was almost as though the parents were taking the kids out to the 'people zoo'. Cute. But we are just about over it with the lower primates! Yesterday while we were down at the fence communing with a large solitary bull elephant (as you do), the camp's resident 'gang' of vervet (read varmint) monkeys raided our outdoor kitchen. Distracted by the pachyderm, we had neglected to close the grilled door over the fridge compartment. In seconds, the little grey monsters had opened the fridge, stolen a bread roll cracked an egg and gulped down half a carton of milk! Luckily for them they didn't get to the beer. That might have been terminal!

Lion and leopard still eluded us today. Well, we did see a lion, but from a great distance and hidden in long grass under a shady tree. If push comes to shove, we'll count it as a sighting, but for now we are still working on a much better sighting.

From the deck of our safari tent this afternoon, we have a fantastic view over the river to a sandy spit where we are expecting to see some late afternoon visitors. Hippos are growling up and down stream from us and the air is full of the sounds of hundreds of birds.

Around midday, the temperature 'on safari' is rather warm, probably near 30C, but it is a dry heat and quite comfortable compared to the tropical swelter that we left back home a week ago yesterday. By 4 pm the temperature drops rapidly to the low 20s C and the breeze cuts in. Extremely pleasant drinking weather!

We are becoming a little blasé about much of the wildlife. Herds of zebra and impala hardly warrant a pause now. We did have a spectacular sighting of water buffalo this morning, a large herd held us up for about 10 minutes as they meandered off across the road and onto the grassy plain beyond.

Safari driving has some interesting rules that we just don't get. Seems that the bigger your vehicle and the more expensive it is, the more entitled you are to plonk yourself in the middle of the track once you spot something. Pulling over to let those who have seen impala before and don't wish to study the back end of a BMW 4x4 for 15 minutes is not in the rule book apparently. Well we are just simple travellers and we'll learn the rules eventually!

Great excitement. Our hippos have just clambered out of the water on the opposite bank and are wandering off into the scrub!!!! Sadly, there is not enough light for our cameras to capture their departure, but in a way we are glad to see them go. The thought of that infernal growling all night was not filling us with glee.

On Safari

25 February, Satara Camp, Kruger NP (AM)

As corny as it might sound, South Africans really do talk about going 'on safari'. So, yesterday and today, we have been 'on safari'. Our Corolla hire car has had a bit of a workout on the dirt tracks, but we have managed to spot a lot of wild life. Our favourite was a stand-off between a lone bull elephant and a small group of zebra. As we arrived on the scene, the zebra were retreating from a futile attempt to storm past the old guy on what was obviously his chosen path across the plains. A glaring match ensued, involving flapping of ears and head shaking on the part of the elephant and bewildered pacing up and down by the zebra. In the end, discretion proved to be the greater part of valour and the small heard of zebra compromised and detoured around their far superior foe.

 

So impressive was our list of sightings that it is probably easier to say what we didn't see! Lion, cheetah and leopard are the main characters missing from our script, but we have another three full days of belting our poor Toyota along bush tracks to go, so we are confident of ticking off more of the 'Big Five'. Cameras ran hot all day yesterday but, with a recharge, we are off to 'shoot' more game today.

Accommodation in the two camps we have visited so far is good. Self-contained units with air-conditioning and a view of the bush go for just over $100. Not bad value. Orpen was new and modern, though small. But the Satara camp is showing its age a little.

25 February, Satara Camp (PM)

Tick the cheetah today and a couple of new sightings including kudu and waterbuck. Our cheetah sighting was the thrill of the day. There are only 225 cheetah in the park compared with 12,000 elephants, 3000 lions and 23,000 zebra (most of which we have seen!). The 130,000 impala are the most numerous animals. They are everywhere! Not only was the cheetah sighting fairly rare, but we saw a bit of action as well. We had been watching a herd of mixed impala, zebra and wildebeests drinking at a water hole, when the herd stampeded. Not long after, the cheetah strolled across the rocks and up the hill after the herd. By the time we had driven up the other bank, all we saw was a flash of yellow and dashing, jumping, panicked impala as the cheetah took off after them.

Jo'burg to Kruger

21 February, Johannesburg

Spent most of the day today at a large complex called The Cradle of Humankind, an extremely well presented attraction centred on the discovery of fossils that may provide the 'missing link' in Darwin's evolutionary theory. The highly interactive museum at Maropeng would easily be the best of this type of museum that we have ever visited, incorporating a boat ride through a simulation of the early geological history of the earth and a trip into the Black Hole. The second part of the complex at Sterkfontein Caves had a smaller, but still well-presented, museum and a tour of the cave system where the original fossils were discovered. While the caves were a little less than spectacular, it was interesting to see where the 'dig' to extract one of the main finds was in progress. Archaeologists have been working in the caves for 14 years to remove the almost complete skeleton of a Hominid called 'Little Foot' - the best evidence, to date, of the so-called 'missing link'.

Picked up our car later in the day in preparation for the start of our 'road trip' through South Africa. Tomorrow we are off on a full day tour of the sprawling township/city of Soweto.

22 February, Soweto

South West Township

Most South African towns and cities have their 'townships', settlements where poor Africans have congregated (or been sent to) for many decades. South West Township, Soweto, is the largest of the townships and, historically, the most significant. Over 2 million people live here today in conditions ranging from abject poverty to almost palatial comfort. The worst conditions are in the squatter settlements, shanty towns within what was once only a shanty town itself.

We were surprised at just how developed much of the city was. Housing at the poorer end of the scale was simply horrible - tin roofs, plastic sheeting walls, open drains and portable communal toilets. One bonus was that there was electricity to most areas and clean water available from taps set at intervals through the squatter camps. Other housing in the city, while better than the shanties, was often very basic. At the top end, there were large homes, surrounded by high walls and the almost obligatory razor wire and electric fences Given the obvious overcrowding all over the city, however, the general state of the streets was excellent.

Nelson Mandela's house would once have been in a street of very simple, three room brick houses. Today, large homes that would not be out of place in the most high class neighbourhoods of western cities, lined the street.

Soweto's place in South African and, indeed, world history, rests on the campaigns of civil disobedience that had their roots here. Often ending in violence and brutal suppression, these protests reached a crescendo in the mid 1970s. In June 1976, school students from Soweto marched out of their schools, protesting against the mandatory use of the Afrikaans language in their schools. What started as relatively peaceful protest, turned violent when a student was killed as police opened fire on the crowd. Within a year, more than 700 people had been killed. For the next 14 years, South Africa experienced almost constant conflict as the apartheid regime fought to retain power in the face of violence at home and condemnation abroad. The break through came in 1990 with the release from prison of Nelson Mandela. After much political wrangling, elections were held in 1994 and the modern Republic of South Africa, the rainbow nation, was born.

The details of this turbulent period in South Africa's history are presented in enormous detail in the Apartheid Museum on the outskirts of Soweto.

23 February, Orpen Camp, Kruger NP

Australia's World Invasion

From the back streets of Athens, right through the Mediterranean, South-Western USA and southern Africa, the Eucalyptus reigns supreme. Mile after mile of our drive today was through forests of gums. While this makes us feel at home, the gum tree is becoming a significant international pest!

Australian pestilence aside, our drive today gave us our first real view of the African landscape. The openness is the first thing to hit you. Rolling hills, distant ranges and, just at the moment, a very green, green land!

Bushbuckridge is a small spot on the map of this rolling country, but its 'suburbs' go on forever. It was about 3:30pm as we wove our way through trucks and 'bakkies' (utes) of the fairly small town centre, then, as we crested the ridge on the edge of town, we saw thousands of small brick houses, scattered over the valley below, stretching as far as the eye could see. School was out and hundreds of well-dressed school children joined the many hundreds of others walking along both sides of the road to Kruger National Park. At first we thought this was an unusual sort of settlement, until it hit us that this was just like western suburbs, but without the road networks and services. Dirt roads and tracks led off the main road to simple but adequate houses with small plots of land, some of which had small vegetable gardens. This walking along the road is a fairly consistent theme in developing countries. Here, mini buses ply the roads, acting as multi-hire taxis, dropping off and picking up wherever demand dictates, Where all these people find work is a mystery, but some are doing fairly well, with new houses going up here and there that are a vast improvement on their fairly humble neighbours.

Here at Orpen Camp, as the thunder of an early evening storm cracks about us, we are settled into a nice little cabin with all the mod-cons including air-conditioning. No animal sightings yet, but we did see some extremely large piles of animal droppings on the way in. Only an elephant could deposit something that big!

Apparently, there is a honey badger roaming the camp at night, so we will be locked up early! These little blighters are about the size of a large cat but some say they have no natural predators in Africa. Even the King of Beasts fears the honey badger. If a lion is courageous enough to take a badger's young, the badger hunts the individual lion down and savagely attacks it - generally in the area of the the unfortunate lion's private parts. That's good enough for us – good night!

Into Africa

20 February, Johannesburg

Two days into the South African leg of our trip is a little early for too many insightful comments on this complex and intriguing country. Much of our time since arrival has been expertly managed by our gracious hosts, Jeanette and Les. A thought-provoking tour of Constitution Hill and a visit to the De Wildt Cheetah Park covered the touristy things. And the good company of Les, Jenny and some of their friends over a few beers and several bottles of excellent South African wine exposed us to

some of the complexities of South African culture.

Looming high over central Johannesburg, Constitution Hill is the new home of the SA Constitutional Court and the site of the once notorious Old Fort Prison, where thousands of ordinary citizens were brutally punished before the dawn of the new Republic in 1994. Political activists including Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi were detained here. Much of the treatment dished out here was not unusual in prisons in the latter part of the 19^th Century. The frightening thing about this prison and others like it, is that it was not until the final years of the 20^th century that this sort of treatment ceased in South Africa. The symbolism embodied in the adjacent Constitutional Court building captures the aspirations of the new constitution and the direction South Africa wishes to go in the post-apartheid era. Bricks from the partly demolished prison have been incorporated in the new building, along with features representing the the trees under which traditional justice was administered in African village culture.

Endangered cheetahs and African wild dogs are the focus of the De Wildt Cheetah Park on the outskirts of Pretoria. The breeding programs conducted here have produced more than 800 cheetah cubs for release in the wild. Perhaps more important than the numbers of animals produced, is the broadening of the blood lines in the wild cheetah population afforded by the release of animals from this carefully managed breeding program.

We had been alerted by South African friends to the vast differences between the developed and underdeveloped parts of SA. Driving back from a pleasant lunch in the food court of a very flash Pretoria Mall, it was impossible to miss the vast gap between the well-heeled, almost exclusively white, patrons of the mall cafes and the Africans living in squatter settlements along the highway.

Travelling about Gauteng province the past couple of days has given us a good guide for dealing with the safety and security concerns that we, in common with many other travellers to SA, harboured prior to our arrival. The level of security needed to protect individual homes would be a bit of a shock to most Australians. Razorwire-topped , electrified fences are universal in most parts of Johannesburg and Pretoria. Driving about and accessing normal services such as shopping centres and restaurants is reasonably easy. As long as normal precautions and a good dose of common sense are applied, all should be well.

Off at Last

18 February. Sydney

Anticipation and planning are a big part of the excitement of travelling. The final few days, however, can be excruciating. Last night, we over-nighted with Paul's brother and sister-in-law in Sydney. To ease the pain of waiting, we were treated to a night with Michael Buble. Well - us and 16,000 other punters. A back stage pass and 'refreshments' prepared us for a fantastic show. Sadly, a planned 'meet and greet' with young Michael never eventuated. The 'girls' were devastated!

So, somewhat sleep deprived, we are waiting around for our flight to KL, where we'll have a few hours in a transit hotel before the long haul to Johannesburg and the start of our trip through South Africa, the UK and Ireland and a short flit through Japan on the way home.