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“Did you miss the boomslangers and puff adders, they are most risky, except for the poisonous spiders of course” said the trainee wildlife guide. I knew that Chris should not have explored the canyon below our overnight hut in the wilds of South Africa. Sitting on a rock above the cliff had been so romantic with a sundowner drink in the hand, and below us on an outcrop were some nests with herons chattering and the narrow river a hundred feet below. Being inquisitive and naive we had decided to descend and explore the gully and thought nothing of the huge spiders webs that we had to push aside. I did stamp my feet as loudly as possible to frighten the snakes away (oh yeah !) and eventually persuade my wife that life would be easier and last longer if we retraced our steps back up the gully wall.
I suppose I wasn’t too sensible because this canyon led down to the Indian Ocean and later that day after visiting the local wildlife area I apparently continued the risk of the innocent abroad. We had been told that the sea can be rough with undertows and the huge expanse of deserted beach in 30 degree heat invited a swim, being a windsurfer I realised that being swept out to sea was risky and there were sharks out there. So when I noticed a river at the end of the beautiful beach, I was tempted, because the river ended in a sand bar and didn’t actually enter the sea at low tide so there was a freshwater pool about 50m wide and cool looking. Safe, I thought, so skinny dipping on a deserted beach was heaven. It was later that day when reciting my piece of heaven story that the host said that a hippo had been seen in the area and they kill more locals than … oops! They may be vegetarian but they are notoriously bad tempered.
We were not even supposed to be in South Africa, according to the lady at the insurance claim office. The flights from Heathrow were booked and paid for and the holiday insurance paid, and we allowed 10 hours to get from Cumbria to Heathrow, no problem … except for the January storm that blew the overhead cables off the railway so trains from Carlisle were cancelled then one eventually came and crawled to Lancaster where it stopped and the announcement said the line to the south was blocked – no more information. So many people were phoning that the airwaves were congested and we were going to miss our flight – what to do if I cannot find out if the insurance would pay for another flight – our friends wedding was the day after tomorrow and they had come from SA to ours, so we had to be at theirs! I borrowed someone’s phone that was getting through and the Lloyds insurance lady said that the insurance didn’t cover me until I was on the flight! Peter was now in high indignation mode and looking to sort something out!
The doors of the train were open, at the tiny platform office the stationmaster said if I could tell him what was going on then please do. “How far to the Lloyds Bank?” I asked, it was a few hundred yards away, so off I pounded, with full-on sorting out mode. Red faced and furious I walked into the bank and saw a queue and thought “accelerate the situation” so I just shouted as loud as I could “This is an emergency, there is a train stuck on the line and hundreds of people are suffering, most importantly, me!! And Lloyds insurance is not going to save us from an impending disaster” (or words to those effects). You could see them reaching for their panic buttons, but fortunately a lady asked what I wanted so I said “My wife and I are on the way to South Africa to a wedding and this storm has stopped the train and I have been told that my insurance is invalid and I need to know that the insurance will pay for another flight so I need a phone, your insurance number and a cup of tea to calm down” Honestly I did say that, and the lady God bless her gave me everything, tea included.
When I got through to the head office it was actually sited in Holland and they confirmed that the insurance would pay for a flight the next day and the chap said it was as well that I phoned now because they were going to evacuate the office, why, I asked, because it is a temporary office made of two container type boxes stacked on top of each other and the storm is in Holland and the top box I am in is shaking and is about to get blown over!
Phew, panic over for us, I thought. I’ll just saunter back to Lancaster train station and give ladyship the good news – oops oh dear there is no train at the station, it has gone with her and our luggage and my phone isn’t working at the moment and … “Don’t worry sir” said the stationmaster, “the whole network had ground to a halt and the train behind you didn’t even have electricity to open the toilet doors until it was somehow got into Lancaster station, take that one as it goes to Preston and you should find your wife, the whole network is closed south of Preston.
Sure enough at Preston there were trains and people and pandemonium, and fortunately there was Chris who had taken the two cases of luggage and rucksacks of the train to add to the islands of luggage and lots of people milling about wondering what to do. It became obvious that we either had to get on the road or get a hotel so I shouted out “Anyone want to share a minibus or taxi to London” and a crowd gathered and phones and enquiries and … the motorway and minor roads are blocked with snow and storm stuff so no go. Next is hotel or sleep in station so our little group suddenly went non cooperative until each found rooms in hotels, then came together as a smaller group to share a taxi where in the chatty “where are you going” I found I was bumping knees with a High Court Judge – my first but not my last meeting with a Lordship eight years later.
Eventually we arrived at Port Elizabeth on the east coast 24 hours late in zombie mode without sleep at the morning of the wedding and it was all wonderful and very jolly as the photos show. Eventually the wonderful convivial time ended and Dick and Karen went to an unknown honeymoon place, they wouldn’t even tell us which country they were going to, but hey ho it’s their pleasure and we cannot interfere or disturb their privacy.
We were due to fly back from Durban so wanted to take the coastal route in a hire car but we were told horror stories of the wild country on route where locals would see it was a hire car, throw a bag of blood at the car then bring out a previously injured child and claim insurance from the tourist’s insurance or take money in lieu of insurance. So we made up our own inland route which surely could not have resulted in that ultimate coincidence (see later).
We love the uncertainty of being travellers and not knowing where we will stay or be the next night so we headed north to Port Alfred and found The Residency which had been the British Resident’s abode with wooden veranda and, see the pics. It was while we were there for four days that I decided to swim in the river that might have had a stray hippo nearby. But why be fazed by a hippo when we can have an adventure with a rhino? Chris once owned a leg of a horse, with three others sharing the remainder, so Chris knows how to ride and thus I must also macho the riding thing. So we were in single file in this huge wildlife park with zebras and various things totally ignoring us because to them, we were just a four legged horse with a hump on its back, the hump being yours truly trying to sway like you see on the cowboy movies. The guide even said I looked loose but I was really half a trot from wobbling off.
It was great being ignored by the wildlife, until we got to that gully, oh dear. The scrub and trees hid the bottom of the gully where there was water and shade for the wildlife and we were told that there may be a buffalo down there and they are a big bad tempered bully and kill horses, and people. So the guide stops us and goes down the steep path to check it is all clear, then comes back to us and we follow down in a crocodile, sorry, single file (why do we say that?) So down we go to the bottom and suddenly the guide does some telepathy thing to all the horses and they accelerate uphill so fast I am nearly thrown off the back end. We get to the top and the guide’s assistant at the back tells us “That was a close one” it appears that one of the buffalo was hiding in the bottom – was it waiting to ambush the punters? Eventually we got onto open land and hawk eyes guide pointed out a mother rhino and baby a hundred metres away, looking this way but cannot see us, so sshh.
What a day! Where next? The signpost clearly points to either Committees Drift (don’t they just) or Doble Drift or Krans Drift. So we drifted off until we saw a B&B sign for Fish River reserve with giraffe with an oxpecker bird pecking his pecker (see the pic!) and a mega tortoise. It was at this b&b that we wandered, sorry, Chris wandered and I went to pick up the pieces, down to the gorge gully thing with the spider and boomslanger and … I still have nightmares.
And then onward and upward towards some hills and Chris navigating by her wonderful “It’s getting late, we need somewhere to stay, there’s a long track off the road and a hotel sign, I think, on the map, let’s go” Yes dear, and another adventure starts.
Rosie, the housekeeper, says we are blessed because we brought the rain, yeah alright for you Rosie but look at that heap of mud with wheels that was our hire car! The 15 kilometre of rain softened muddy dirt track to the shooting lodge was a rally driver’s challenge, the wheels dug in, we slid sideways but kept going like it was a Monte Carlo rally – Chris was certainly not going to get out and push if we got stuck!
Eventually we reached dry ground where a beautiful old farmhouse appeared with Sean, the owner, waiting to see who had struggled to Carnaervon Estate. He was dressed in a khaki bush jacket with big deep pockets and as we made our introductions I noticed one of his pockets move, then wriggle, then out popped a meerkat and ran up to sit on his shoulder to gaze around to check for danger. This required us to be checked so it scampered down Sean and sniffed our feet with great intensity and eventually having approved us it scrambled back to Sean’s pocket.
Everything was so casual, the guest lodge is another mile up the track with all rooms unlocked, select one, an honesty bar so help yourself, Rosie the cook will serve you later and do you want to go on a safari tomorrow – you bet! After a sundowner we sat outside and soaked in the surroundings, cicada’s chirping the gun dogs gone with Sean, the hurriedly prepared last minute light dinner prepared by Rosie and eventually meeting the only other guest, a Bavarian lady who had resigned from the finance sector to learn how to be a wildlife guide and having spent some time in the bush sleeping under the stars was here to investigate the relationship between vegetation and stock levels of wildlife. This required her to know all the plants, their nutritional value and seasonality and establish how many of which animal could survive here. This was becoming an essential type of work because so many areas were being fenced and too many wild animals within it were becoming under nourished or starving, and landowners need to be responsible for all animals in their area, both the cattle in the low pasture and the wildlife in the hill ground.
Sean and our Bavarian friend were the perfect guides the next morning when the open topped Landrover appeared and set off to the hills – sorry, I mean up the hills, no actually up the rocky outcrop that would have us on our hands and knees! Great fun with various pics and videos that do not do justice to the excitement. It was like a Scottish glen but driy with rolling rounded hills of swaying grass, herds of beef mixing with indigenous antelope and imported roe deer. The soft rain of the previous day has stimulated the flowers and the eucalyptus menthol wafted over us as we drove towards the hills.
We learn to appreciate birds without needing to guess their name but Sean and ? pointed out Drongos, sunbirds and Cape Sparrows. It was 5am and worth the early start when we saw eland antelope, barbary sheep, rare mountain zebra which have a brown stripe next to the black one so the stripe effect is blurred. Many animals have a “follow me” sign on their bum, a white patch when the tail flicks over it looks like an indicator flashing, or a white bit on the back of an ear that flicks and winks, or the Eland with a hoof with an ill fitting bone so that when they walk it makes a click. Did you know that a hyena has two penises (peni?) or was the wildlife guide mixing teasing with knowledge?
Morning has broken, announced by the conversations of strange unknown birds that we want to know. Is this like needing to know the name of a person you communicate with? So we bought a bird book in Bathurst in a second hand bookshop but you need to guess what group of birds it belongs to and everything is so unfamiliar; is it a Drongo or Sunbird or … occasionally we recognise a sparrow which brings a familiarity.
The “Swinging Kettle” café at Bleak House lady gave us an education about mouse birds and weaver birds but her tales about people stealing wild plants was alarming. I remember 12 years ago when we first visited, the SA Times said a huge challenge facing the country was to face up to their cultural avoidance of ignoring the law which had become the norm because everyone had to find a way around the anti apartheid embargos and the between fiddling the system by whites and the subsistence morality of the blacks there was no automatic respect for and obedience of the law.
Sean, our host at Carnarvon Estate, pointed out the obscene discrepancies in wealth between white and black. We saw fantasy vulgarly designed rich houses behind sand dunes at Canon Rock and on the lagoon islands of Port Alfred and on steep hillsides above any river, inlet or place with a good view.
The indigenous Xhosa blacks speak with a “tk” “ggy” clicks and ticks made from clicking the tongue on the top of the mouth, a strange way of communicating that was later copied into speech of some indigenous aliens in a Star Wars film. They farmed but when whites made large efficient garms and game reserves the locals were not needed for labour and became displaced, living in townships which vary from tin roofed huts to single brick rooms to recently built multi roomed bungalows with a small allotment and their own running water and electricity.
Sean explained that when his ancestors built up the huge Carnarvon Estate they built a small village for the workers with a school where they paid the teacher but the emancipation of the blacks meant that they would rather move to the overcrowded towns and there was a problem getting local labour. He said that there was a risk that if a tribe could show that the land at Carnarvon Estate had once been inhabited by ancestors then the indigenous tribe could claim the land with all its improvements and its reservoir and he and his family could be ejected. I think in 2020 the website indicates that this might have happened.
The Xhosa ceremony of entering manhood was explained to us by our hosts at the Nature’s View where we had the herons below us and the canyon with potential boomslangers and spiders in our wandering. The Xhosa coming of age ceremony requires the male youths to build a thatched hut, live in it, get circumcised, burn it, (the hut) as a symbolic farewell to youth, then find the nearest wench to display their newly recognised manhood rights to. Meanwhile the hut sets fire to the fynbos (scrubland) and blacks ignore it and the local whites go and put the fire out, not calling for the fire brigade because they would get a bill from the firemen – for saving someone else’s land and property. A fire next to Nature’s View cost a million rand, burned the house, nearly killed the occupants, but their insurance was less than the cost of paying the fire people and rebuilding the property. We had heard a similar story about deliberate arson in Portugal where part time firemen only got paid if there was a fire so some started fires so they could be paid. We had heard something similar in Spain and USA though stories are only that, stories, until proven.
Nature’s View was the brick built pele tower rough and ready b&b of a 50 hectare rough bush farmstead that we discovered after quenching our thirst at a farm stall roadside café and asking for info for a place to stay. He had 5 cattle which really needed their leather skin to plough through the thorn and scrub to forage for rough grazing. They live on the edge of the municipal game reserve on top of a huge cliff looking down on Fish River. Rock Dassis play on the outcrops and a heron colony nests below the overhanging sundowner rock. A Fish Eagle is refusing to move off the dead tree while black and white ravens mock it. A Hamerkop bird sits below it, occasionally swooping down to the river. Flocks of swallows twitter in their aerobatic shows at dawn and dusk. There should have been sightings of a comet, but too much cloud and our visual sponge has soaked up enough of special experiences for one day.
Morning has brought bed bugs and breakfast but the views made up for anything.
We drove slowly back towards Port Albert then Bathurst, a quaint memory of settler days when British farmers thought they would get a farm but got 100 acres, a packet of seed and a realisation that they were being used as a buffer between the warring Xhosa and the British settlements. The region is called the Frontier Country. Perhaps the warnings that we had been given at the wedding were appropriate, do not take peace and love for granted.
On to Grahamstown (who was he?), best known for its petrol stations (when you need one in the wilds it is the most important place in your little world), also goats and cattle casually crossing the busy road, but most importantly, a good road out of town with a full tank. Then Fort Beaufort, one of a line of forts built to keep the marauding Xhosa out of white settlement areas (were they serious with the name French for beautiful fort or was it the wind or …) A Rotarian explained that there had once been a stone Martello tower of naval design which nobody understood why it was there until it was pointed out that there is a Port Beaufort in South Africa and someone had a name, misread the map and got the addresses mixed up.
Next stop is Queenstown which is ugh in concrete so enough said. 60 km later we made the mud slide in our hire car up the 15km dirt track to Carnarvon Estate and Staggers Inn, and here we are!
Last night we ate Bambi’s bum, more usually known as a haunch of Roe deer from the estate, succulent and as much as the three of us could eat – what a challenge! Sean was entertaining us in the honesty bar with tales of his wife Anne’s ancestors flying from UK in an ancient contraption with fumes, fatigue, in an air race to or from somewhere and crash landed. Prop damaged, replacement tied under the wing of a biplane, fitted, prop falls off into the Nile, local bring it to the local District Commissioner who gets it portered to the awaiting plane where it is bolted on and carries on with the race! I’m sure he wasn’t regaling us with Chitty Chitty.
Hunting is a strange activity made more strange by the rituals that sometimes accompany it. Christiana explains that in Germany it can take 30 months to be a legal hunter and one method of “hunting” is to sit high up in a wooden tower, something like a fire observer’s tower, with your gun and peer into the forest for a wild boar then shoot it. Another oddity is that when they kill it they break a twig in two, put half in the mouth of the beast and put the other half in the ground and say something like take your last meal beast and with this half have life – huh, maybe the ambience and amber liquid was making the tale told by an … Sean said that at the end of a hunt in SA the Germans line each carcase up and a bugler played the last rights, each animal having a different tune.
Talking of dead animals, our big fear is a deer jumping into the road. A roe deer did that in UK and I reshaped the old Astra. Here the animals can be bigger and some fight back. When we turned off the smooth N6 to the R76 there was a township with a few people around a dead pig in the road so we drove on and later we saw a car on its side, maybe drinking and driving, it is normal here and rarely stopped and there is no law to confiscate a licence. The roads we have driven are very quiet, quieter than Scottish highlands and roadkill of wildlife seems infrequent.
Perhaps there is no such thing as coincidence; if you take a path that seems right then things just “happen”. I’ve heard that accidents can be viewed like that, the driver who is regularly distracted will eventually crash but say that it was an accident, not the inevitability of not paying attention. I am trying to rationalise a Serendipity moment which occurred when we finally arrived at our destination of the Drakensburg Mountains in the final days of our wanderings.
Remember that we nearly never made it to South Africa because of the storm in UK, remember that we wanted to go the coast route and were warned off it so we travelled inland? The channel of fate had not finished with us yet. It was late in the day, we were exhausted and needed anywhere to stay in this steep sided valley. Chris had stayed at a luxurious resort at the head of the valley and that was our destination, no booked place but everything had worked out so far by knocking on a door and … oh no we arrived at the gated reserve entrance at 5:30pm where Chris had stayed with Emma and Simon 20 years ago but it is about to close, room available but fortunately I asked if meals were available and found it was self catering only, no food and if we had gone in then the gate would be locked and no food and … , oh dear, it’s getting dark, what next? The guard directs us to another place. Sean at Carnarvon had suggested Alpine Meadows so we returned down the valley on the rough road on the other side of the valley, to find that Alpine Meadow was full ! Oh no, dream turning to nightmare, where next, anywhere, never mind the cost we need a bed and food and are in the middle of nowhere!
Next place along the valley was a sign for “Montusi Exclusive Superior Residences” oops, upmarket, up-priced but at this time of night just rely on Visa!
So here we are, the most expensive place we would not have normally chosen in a detached thatched bungalow all to ourselves in extensive grounds with a large hotel with dining facility – food at last! We are in the Royal Natal area of Drakensburg, a fitting way to end our wonderful adventurous wanderings of discovery, discovering places, experiences, people and our own selves. We went for a sundowner and meal, time for reflection, toast our marriage that Dick and Karen came to and toast the reason we came to South Africa, for Dick and Karen’s marriage, and then fly home soon.
BUT
As we walked to the bar through the foyer, hawk eyes Chris noticed the book on the desk that guests wrote their names in it if they wanted a guided tour in the morning. And guess the name she saw:
GILLANDER
The surname of our newly married friends Karen and Dick Gillander who we had flown from the UK to be at their wedding and who had gone on honeymoon to an unknown destination in an unspecified country or, we had heard, honeymoon and the Blue Train. It couldn’t be, must be another couple …
So we sneaked in quietly, and there they were, on honeymoon, having dinner with their backs turned away from us as we approached. Well you can imagine the look on their faces and the craik after in the bar where it became even more entertaining when joined so we had an Englishman, an N-Irishman and a Scotsman (who helicoptered to the Kola Peninsula Archaengel n Russia for salmon fishing) and … so on …
Oh dear, time to go, so goodbye to Meerkat and Christiana the ex 25 year IT expert who spent 6 months crewing a catamaran now with 5 other non SAs learning how to be a wildlife guide, needing to be proficient in guns, Latin (proper names), names of different grasses and their nutritional value for game, identification and behaviour of everything that moves, ability to sleep on the ground in lion country under the stars, but whose only snake bite was in Germany.
Hello to the long and winding road as it leads to long stretches over grassy veldt between rocky pinnacles, chiselled sandstone cliffs topped by lagered sandy hills, like the mesas in Arizona or Utah but without the desert. Speedily we got to Fouriesburg, a town or village forgotten in time with a hotel with a thatched roof and a welcome sundowner in their sitootery. It must have been built in the 1800s and the owner was proud to show us his wine cellar where we were asked to select our wine from racks extending all sides of this cool subterranean paradise. The coolness and conviviality below ground perhaps explain why there were wine magazines lying around dating from the 1950s – drink, read and sleep. This wonderful old capital of the Boers where time stood still cost 200SAR B&B £15 each.
Although we seemed to be in a time warp of quaintness we managed a mobile phone back home to family with ease. Apparently mobile communications are simpler than lots of wires cobwebbing the beautiful countryside so everyone has a phone, I think they were subsidised because they allowed simpler access to all public services than the tangle of telephone wires everywhere. This was a two edged advantage, the bank hole in the wall was connected over the huge airwave distances to some central point – great. However there was a problem with a corrupt new arrangement for transporting coal from the mines to the power stations which required trucks and the lucrative truck transport contract had been forcibly moved from whites to blacks but oops, the new power of equality had not checked if the new contractor had enough trucks so there were coal shortages and regular blackouts and losses of electricity supply.
Intermittent electricity supply caused a problem with the hole in the wall cash dispenser because apparently it could fail in mid transaction if the power went off and backup generators failed. Another problem with this new hole in the wall and new phone technology was explained to us, and demonstrated in potential criminal detail while we waited with hope and trepidation in a queue for our turn. The lady in front was having some difficulty accessing her social security payment which was credited to her online phone account which then required her to get the cash from the hole in the wall. A “helpful” man was lurking and “casually” asked if he could help her by taking her online access codes and getting the money for her – she said yes – I said hang on and did my usual save the lady bit. All was well and we both got our cash and sure enough, later on the power failed.
Where are we? Oh yes the Drakensburg world heritage site with yet another world class hotel complex with fantastic food and views to water the eyes with emotion. The iconic peak that I saw in the tourist guide in UK was Cathedral Peak, so why not stay at THE Cathedral Peak Hotel, thank you Visa!
Drakensburg means in Africaans “Dragons Teeth” and when it was too hot at the Matsumi Lodge Hotel I had gone outside to see the stars twinkling in the Milky Way so clearly that it looked like a flowing stream of milk, I have never seen it so clear. In the distance behind the mountain there was a constant flickering and flashing of lights, huge lights, the lightening of a distant storm making the jagged peaks silhouetted by the strange light. The storm was far away so the sound was too feint to hear but the light … The light was not always the bright white light but sometimes orange like a sunset and sometimes an ominous grey flash. This is the land of the Zulus and they call the mountain range “The Barrier of Spears” and they feared what lived beyond that distant barrier where flashing lights told of powerful things beyond The Barrier. For the Boers the Dragons Teeth hid the lair where fire and thunder barred their adventures.
It is no coincidence that I was about to compare this place with The Land of Mordor in the Lord of The Rings because Tolkien himself was brought up in Bloemfontein and spent a lot of time here. The San people are the bushmen who were very small and had a culture that could not be dominated or integrated, they were harmless to other people but could not understand nor accept borders, land ownership, cattle ownership, so they took what they needed and were classed as thieves and vermin! Eventually they were persecuted to a genocidal state and none exist in South Africa now. There is a museum that we visited that commemorated those people and other indigenous tribes. So it is not hard to see Tolkien taking the San people and they become the Hobbits, Drakensburg becomes Mordor … it is a place to let the imagination run wild.
The museum of Didima Interpretation Centre near some cave paintings on a cliff is a world heritage centre building with amazing thatched sculptured roof and a clever tangle of tree trunks making the joists and supports, a clever and artistic work of the architects art.
The storms of Middle Earth had not finished with us as we drove from the Royal Natal part of Drakensburg towards Cathedral Peak, and the Land of Mordor earned its reputation. At night I had seen the fires of the forge. Today the dragon roared and flashed its flame as we tried to escape its evil influence. Its evil steaming breath surrounded us in a fog of fear. It spat out its tears at us and overwhelmed us with its fury – we could not see and blinded, waited for the crash of doom.
The reality is that we driving to our next big adventure, a helicopter ride to the mountain tops, but we were caught in the most dramatic storm we have ever witnessed with thunder lightening and rain so dense that we could not see a car’s length in front and this main road had lorries pounding along with no way to emergency stop on the road which was quickly becoming a skid pan. Thankfully I saw a dirt road to a farm and quickly drove off the main road and, thankful that the lorries would not hit us, we prayed that the lightning would not hit us. We waited until the storm abated. Phew!
Oh to soar with the eagles above this earthly dwell, cast free the yoke of trudgery and let thy feet be wings.
So we booked a helicopter flight! The jet engine conventional one at Cathedral Peak was clagged in with cloud so no flying from there, but we were directed to Champagne Peak 1 ½ hours away where we were told that an intrepid chap would provide Champagne at the top of the Champagne Peak – you can only do that once in you life so …
We found the “airfield” which was a huge field with grass so high that our car could only just make it to the hangar at the end. I know that a helicopter doesn’t need a runway but a track would be helpful. Inside was something that looked like it had come from the TV Mash and sure enough the pilot proudly explained that it was a Chevrolet V12 engine or some such thing and it was more fun than those jet things.
We wheeled it out, he checked for water in the petrol, poked about and in we got. The engine started and its power was demonstrated as it ticked over slowly while he did his checks. Now, you know when a car engine ticks over and it bounces from side to side slightly especially on old cars, well this engine had a lightweight helicopter to bounce from side to side which was a bit disconcerting but hey ho here we go. Eventually the beast roared, the blades spun and the vibrations of the machine (or was it Chris shaking with fear?) and off we ascend. Let the pictures and video do the describing, it was absolutely wow, especially the landing on the top of a hill, getting out and having a glass of Champagne on Champagne Peak – beat that with a holiday snap!
Short Eared owl emerging from the ground 5 feet away. High standard of accommodation for very reasonable prices. Great navigation by co-pilot in unknown lands, and good enough driving to miss the huge potholes in great Avis Toyota with aircon. Pet Meercat and the dogs at Carnarvon Estate. Wine cellar at Foriesburg. Thatched roofed roundavels and settler houses. Barbary sheep and mountain zebra. Riding with rhinos and giraffe. Municipal game park free, own safari spotting in Golden Gate. Black birds with impossibly long tails. HowdyHa birds making nisy dawn chorus. Natures Rest the closest we came to ordinary working Africaans. The jungle by the river, barbecues, heron colony, cliff views. The wedding and the serendipitous meeting. Helicopter, ostrich steaks, excesses of everything, Bambi’s bum. Christiana and her mission, Landrover safari. Residency & veranda. Drakensburg, storms, views, mouth organ, San bushmen centre.
Maureen Quin sculptures The Hunt
Montusi Lodge
Carnarvon Estate Staggers Inn
Thanks to Trailfinders for organising so much and sorting out the near cockup at the start of the adventure.