jgrussell – my world

Full full day! Game drive this morning, Zulu Village Cultural Show this afternoon, game drive again this evening. Hard to keep track of what happened when with no time to sit and think!

daybreak

The day started with a nyala outside the door and the does just to the side. The breakfast buffet was excellent, then on the morning game drive we saw impala, warthogs, nyala, a hippo, giraffes and the second of our Big Five: the cape buffalo.

warthog	nyala doe
impala doe	giraffe
Cape buffalo	hippo

Broad-tailed whydah

We also saw a bird with a tail so long it flew only in dips. (Turns out it’s a broad-tailed whydah.) The long tail is part of its summer dress; it loses the tail in winter, so we were fortunate to see it in its summer plumage.

Quick lunch and off to the Zulu cultural display. It was interesting even if clearly created for tourists. (The Zulu dancers all wore skin tight shorts under their skins — some were so discreet that you couldn’t really see them, others were bright red or with side stripes. I mentioned them to one dancer; he just smiled and said admitted simply: “NOT Zulu…”) Evan wanted his picture taken with the medicine man; when I took it, he motioned me over as if to look at the digital picture and then chanted “money, money, money” under his breath.

Zulu fighters

Medicine men

In our second game drive we got to see another of the Big Five — the rhino. Not out in the open so no real photos, but still very large and very intimidating! More giraffe, some wildebeest but too far away for photos. However, we got great views of some zebras just before the sun was setting.

zebra

zebra

We tried to set the schedule tonight for the rest of the week but the weather is very unsettled so I’m not sure we’ll get in all of our entire ambitious schedule. We’ll see. The guide is making serious efforts to steer our schedule choices (based as much on his interests as on ours, I suspect…) but he is generally knowledgeable and besides he is also cute. He and Evan spent much of the evening trying to negotiate a swap of impala horns for good binoculars. (The guide is absolutely green with jealousy that Evan lives near a Cabela’s store.) Gina went down to the tennis court to see the stars (no lights there so no light pollution) and was scared by a bunch of nyala (“there were a LOT of them!”).

Tomorrow, weather permitting, it’s a game drive in the morning at the Cheetah Rehabilitation Center in the afternoon. For now, it’s off to bed — 6 a.m. comes VERY early!

Despite my concern with the issue of the name on the ticket, I had no problems with the flight to Richards Bay. When the ticket agent was confused by the mismatch of name on passport and ticket, I simply waved the email from the one SA Airways Express agent who said it would be fine as long as I had my birth and marriage certificates and the documents themselves, and she shrugged and handed me the boarding pass. After that, nobody cared: all that was needed was the boarding pass, not the passport. And nobody on South Africa Airways Express weighed carry-on luggage so no problem there either. (For that matter, they didn’t weigh the checked baggage either: they had all four of us put our luggage up at the same time and then asked us if we’d weighed the bags.)

deHavilland Dash 8

The flight — on an old deHavilland — was interesting. Evan and I had to change seats and sit in the exit row since the people sitting there originally didn’t speak English. We got a more thorough than usual lecture about being able to guide people out to safety AND blocking the exit with our bodies if the exit was NOT safe. It was also interesting that we flew over thousands and thousands of acres of what were obviously tree farms. Turned out they’re eucalyptus trees originally imported for use for mine props and now used for building construction.

Richards Bay airport

The airport is small and there was a whole troop of some kind of apes (either vervet monkeys or chacma baboons) along the runway! When I say the airport is small, it may be easier to imagine when I say that the luggage from the flight is loaded into a van that makes multiple trips between plane-side and the terminal where it’s unloaded by pushing the bags through a rubber-strip curtain.

Nyala stag

We were able to see game even on the drive into the Zulu Nyala property, but did have a bit of a problem when we arrived at the Zulu Nyala Heritage Lodge, where Gina said we were staying: they had no record of the reservation! Fortunately, it was only because we were actually staying at the Zulu Nyala Game Lodge, which frankly is gorgeous — a glitch that, we all concluded, was in our favor.

First sight of elephant

Our first game drive was at 4 p.m. with a very young Afrikaaner guide and the same four young MBA graduates of Georgetown who had been on the flight with us to Richards Bay and who rode out to Zulu Nyala with us. Very nice folks all. We’re using an open-sided vehicle typical to South African game reserves. The drive itself was magical — we saw our first hippo, various antelope types (nyala, impala), a giraffe. We also saw our FIRST of the Big Five — a trio of elephants including a young one:

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They came close enough to the Land Rover to be actually scary (if we hadn’t been so much in awe and wonder that we forgot to be afraid)… (Dana did confess at one point that she was frightened when she was zooming in on one elephant until she realized the zoom made it look a LOT closer than it really was.)

One note: it is winter here. Days are relatively warm — light jacket weather — but early mornings and nights are cold. Coming back to the lodge in the open vehicle in the dark, it was VERY cold. It doesn’t help that the weather is a little dicey — not rainy but overcast. I suspect that “cold” will be a common word during this trip.

Back to the lodge in time to clean up for dinner. Meals are buffet style and very good. Impala stew is tasty (very lean, a little like beef and nothing at all like chicken)…

It is just before 5 a.m. SAST and I’ve been up for almost an hour — a combination of too much excitement and jet lag. It feels like it’s been at most 24 hours since we left the States, but with the time changes and all, it’s now two days later!

The looooong lens

No problems at JFK at all. The Chicagoans arrived without incident along with all their bags, we meandered over to the international terminal, checked in with South Africa Airways, got some food, waited around some more and finally boarded the plane.

SAA flight taking off from JFK

Last sight of US: Long Island NY

I grabbed a photo or two of the departure and we all settled down for the flight.

SAA serves excellent — and abundant — food. We had a nice dinner (Evan had salmon, I had beef), watched some videos, talked for a while, slept for a while and finally — some 4100 km after we left New York — saw the lights of the African coast. It was way too dark to see anything in Dakar but we were all intrigued by a kora — a gourd-bodied guitar-like instrument — that one of the new passengers brought on board. We had another meal (breakfast), more dozing, more chatting, another meal (lunch, with poor Dana trying to wake Gina up to make a choice between meat and fish).

Africa! Africa below!

Finally the light was good enough to see — Africa! Africa below us!! And then we were on the ground in Johannesburg.

The passport and customs check was thoroughly routine, but it really hit us in the arrivals hall at JNB: “we’re in AFRICA!” A group hug didn’t begin to express the joy and wonder of it all.

We were met by a driver from the property where we stayed overnight. Evan engaged him in current-affairs discussions and I have to confess to being frankly shocked by his xenophobic attitudes expressed so freely: I’ve never heard anyone defend genocide before nor complain that the police were stopping ordinary citizens from setting fire to illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe and Mozambique. We also saw homeless folks in the outskirts of the city burning fires for heat and cooking and are struck by the generally negative view of South Africans as to their future — there’s still a very serious black-white divide and the current black-against-black violence has not helped at all. And living behind gates and walls with barbed wire and/or electrified fences is not my idea of living.

But we put that all aside when we arrived at the hotel which is lovely and exotic (thatched roofs, African colors and appointments, and even some zebras on the property which Evan HAD to see — by flashlight!). Another meal (dinner) and finally to bed.

This morning I had one moment of absolute panic when it seemed that the portable storage unit I bought for photos wasn’t working. Turned out it was just a battery issue (the way I was carrying it appears to have turned the unit on and totally discharged the battery!) and it works fine now with it charged.

Walked around a little this morning — the grounds are lovely and there’s a large dog (the owners say it’s a wolf) who keeps trying to get into all the rooms. One more meal at 7 a.m. (breakfast!) and then the Fearless Foursome is off to the airport for Richards Bay.


Fountain at guesthouse

Dog at guesthouse

Fearsome foursome