Greater St. Lucia Wetland Park
Trip Start
Jun 08, 2008
1
18
28
Trip End
Aug 15, 2008
St. Lucia,
South Africa
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
22 July - Greater St. Lucia Wetland Park on the Indian Ocean
Up at 6:00 for a 6:45 breakfast and a 7:30 departure for St. Lucia, back in South Africa. Basically an uninteresting drive, at least in comparison to the gorgeous landscapes that we have been seeing lately in Swaziland.
Arrived at our camp at about 14:00 and had lunch before being bundled off for a boat tour of the bay. The only good thing that I can say about the tour was that it lasted an hour less than we were told it would. It seemed more like something intended to occupy our time - kind of like sending the kids away for summer camp. We saw a few "pods" of hippos and a few crocodiles. The excursion would have been a total loss if I hadn't met and had an interesting conversation with a Thai woman traveling with her half Thai, half German son. This woman married a German man some twenty years ago and she was now with her husband and son on vacation in South Africa, where the husband is working temporarily. The woman was from Isaan but met her husband while she was working in Phuket, which is pretty much all of the story one needs to know to get the picture. Anyway, the son, even though he looked half Thai, was as German as could be in his character and manner. It was interesting that I could speak to his mother in Thai without him understanding a word of what we were talking about. Furthermore, his only way of communicating with his own mother was in German - his fluent/native German and her pidgin German. It is unusual in the world for a mother and child not to have a common native language.
After the boat tour I was feeling exhausted to the point of almost feeling sick, so I had a rest for an hour before joining the group for dinner. At dinner we were informed that we would have to wake up at 5:00 tomorrow morning for a game drive. Our guide said it is worth getting up for, so I will do my best to make it. No promises, though.
After dinner I went for my first internet session since joining this tour nearly a week ago. I had a backlog of 60 unread e-mails and I was able to read through them all and to answer the ones that needed answering in an hour. I didn't update my blog since I didn't have the computer capability to shrink my pictures for uploading. I'll probably do the rest of the updates for this trip after I get back home in three weeks. Internet in southern Africa, at least in the places I've been so far, has been prohibitively expensive.
A couple of other things: Last night I finished the second round of anti-biotics that I was taking for my respiratory infection, and I feel like that matter is laid to rest. I'm feeling completely cured.
The other thing is that for some reason, the blue-tooth keyboard that I bought/brought for writing my blog on my PDA is working particularly well lately. When I was in Zanzibar, it used to take me fifteen minutes to get it fired up and connected to the PDA. Now it almost connects by itself. Don't ask me why.
