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)…