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  St. Lucia, South Africa
Tuesday, September 19, 2006

First off, apologies for the broadcast of the prior slap-dash entry.

Arriving in Johannesburg from our overnight flight, we headed to east toward Kruger National Park. En route we took in hazy views of the Blyde River Canyon, a dramatic series of escarpments that, to Dana's eye, was like driving through half a Grand Canyon. By days end we reached Kruger, a game reserve the size of Connecticut.

Driving the first hour or so at the 25 miles per hour speed limit we saw several groups of reebok antelope. Very nice, but we began to wonder how hard we would have to look to see a bit more. Then, as if the park said to us, "OK, you asked for it!" we rounded a bend and strolling across the road was a huge bull elephant, behind him a giraffe munching away. During the next hour, we saw zebra, hippos, baboons, wildebeest and waterbuck. All of this on our way to our camp and we had another day and a half to wander about. It was now clear why this section of the park was known as "the zoo".

The park consists largely of grasses and scrub with some larger trees. Since it was the end of the winter, the dry season here, straw predominated, with early spring greening seen on some trees, a few of which were flowering. A good bit of the park is fairly flat, but there are also times when we climbed an escarpment and could only see the park stretching to the horizon on both sides of us. At that point, Kruger's immensity really struck us.

Let's get the animal list out of the way. During our time in Kruger we completed the "Big 5" list with sightings of cape buffalo, rhinoceros, leopard and lion. Just why these animals, plus elephant, are on this list seems a bit arbitrary, but I will look into it when I'm not on the meter. To be completely honest, we saw the lions at about 300 yards and never would have known they were there were it not for the remarkable skill of the clearly seasoned Afrikaner who flagged us down and pointed them out. Rounding out the list are vervet monkeys, warthogs and more birds than I care to go on about. Making the greatest impression was the hyena who wandered onto the road as we were passing. With it snarling and drooling while looking at us with hungry eyes, we decided to quickly close the car windows.

For me, I'd say the highlight was watching a group of elephants in a pool, two of which engaged in what seemed like affectionate play; nuzzling, head butting and gently ducking one another.

I'd like to say more about visiting Kruger, but I feel I must go on. On to Swaziland and Mlilwane Park. At the Sondzela Backpacker we stayed in a charming rondavel with a view overlooking the park with farmland and hills beyond. There we saw many of the same animals, but on foot as they do not have anything more dangerous than hippos or crocodiles, each of which I believe kill or maim more people here than the big cats, but one is less likely to be surprised by them on land and as long as you stay out of the water and not near the water's edge, you are likely to be just fine.

Swaziland is one of Africa's last kingdoms, a small mountainous country completely surrounded by South Africa. Its hills are mostly grassland, though in the north are large stands of farmed trees. This is a country with an economy based upon agriculture, a bit of food processing and tourism. The country is poor and, like South Africa, badly affected by HIV. But, poor as most people are, as Africa goes, this is a relatively prosperous place.

Returning to South Africa, we underestimated how far we had to go that day and stopped short at Mkuze Park, relatively remote and located along the river of the same name in Zululand. With its significant wetlands and hides we decided to arise very early to see the birds. Although we just missed the flurry of activity at dawn, we did see spoonbills, a pelican, storks and herons, though I can not remember the species just now. Then our attention was drawn to the movement amidst the rocks in the middle of the pan, which turned out to be a bunch of sleeping hippos asleep leaning upon each other in the golden early morning light. We were on our way to rare surviving fig grove walk when we ran into a downed tree blocking the road. Having already stopped at several places where we were invited to step away from our car, but warned to keep an eye out for dangerous animals, we thought we would be OK walking down the road the short distance to the fig grove walk. After a bit a car coming the other way stopped. The driver was a Canadian woman who was working as a volunteer helping to track the wild dogs they had recently released into the park. She told us that we should definitely not be walking on the road without an armed ranger and that the fig grove walk we saw marked on our map as "self-guided" required an armed guide. She also said that the dogs were now in the fig grove. Re-examining the map we had purchased in the park, we had previously noted that a word had been manually crossed out in the description of the fig grove walk, though we could not understand why. The crossed out word was just above the words "self-guided". The headline flashed across my minds-eye, "American Couple Mauled by Wild Dogs Due to KZN Wildlife Clerical Error".

We are now in St. Lucia, a wetland park and coastal recreation area that has no lions or wild dogs, but our lodge hostess tipped that there are a number of venomous snakes and lots of crocodiles; also, hippos occasionally roam the streets. Most fearsome is the malaria carrying anopheles mosquito which is a significant problem in this part of the country. During our stroll this afternoon we saw what seemed like a strange industrial ritual. It turned out to be a large group of malaria control trainees learning how to properly spray walls with insecticide to kill the mosquitoes. We are doing all we can to protect ourselves, but we ran into a fellow traveler at Mlilwane who had recently gone through a bout of it despite using prophylactic medication. We are taking the risk seriously and wearing insecticidal Buzz-Off clothing and using dreaded DEET as well as taking a daily dose of doxycycline for the duration of our trip and through until Christmas.

Tomorrow we will head a short distance north to Cape Vidal (here it rhymes with Midol), where we will spend two nights in a cabin and wander the sand dunes. If it warms up enough, perhaps we will do a bit of snorkeling too.

I hope to write next from Pietermartizburg following our visit to Hluhluwe Park.

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