Safari, Hluhluwe and Umfolozi, March 8-9th

Coming back from Mozambique we found accommodation as close to the park as possible. That way we could be at the gate when they opened up at six o’clock in the morning. The first day we saw some giraffes and some rhinos and lots of Impalas. We drove past a place where lions had been spotted, but the grass was just too bloody high for us to see anything. It was generally a good game-drive, and we got a feeling for some good spots in the park, but yet we didn’t have a really close encounter with any of the big guys. Until, right at the end when we were speeding like crazy to get to the gate, knowing that we were already too late. Then, suddenly two big rhinos decided to block the road very effectively. The female looked really nervous and agitated, running back and forth and throwing the head… and the horn around. I got the picture in my head of a matador pierced by the bull in the arenas in Spain… then we backed the car, thinking that we were the reason for this behaviour. Suddenly as we were sitting there looking and waiting for an opening I was aware of something in the side of my vision. A hyena was standing next to the car, only two metres away from me. It was looking at me, then the rhinos… walked a bit and all the time checking out the situation. Obviously this was the culprit, causing the distress. Just by the look of it I could feel the hair in the back of my neck was rising and we wound up the window… just enough so that the jaws of the beast couldn’t fit through the opening. With the powerful body and the dark big eyes it looked like pure evil… Even though it was a fraction of the size of the rhinos… I had no problem understanding the rhinos. Eventually we got out, and we had spent the entire day only in the Hluhluwe part. We had already decided we needed another day to cover Umfolozi as well.

The next morning we decided to just check out some of our favourite and most promising spots in Hluhluwe before we were gonna shoot down to Umfolozi. It turned out that we saw a hell of a lot of elephants, rhinos and water-buffalos in one place that we got so hooked up that we were still there at lunchtime… and far away from Umfolozi.

As we were driving towards the southern part of Hluhluwe the vegetation got less lush and more dry and open. We found it easier to spot the antelopes and the buck… hundreds all over the place… but we had the feeling that the really big guys preferred the thick bush where they could hide away. Further along, that theory had to be dumped when we saw herds of giraffes, rhinos and buffalos. Again we got hooked up and had to prioritize the really big ones only… in order to make it out before closing time. Still there was plenty of areas we did not cover in Umfolozi, and we could easily have spent one or two extra days there.

All in all, we saw masses of animals… but still not that feeling from other smaller parks that the park was so small that the animals were pretty much lined up for you. This was proper wilderness… and I’m sure for Oyvind it was a bit different from Elk-safari in Løten at home in Norway.

Punctuality, planning and closing gates, March 8th

Just a reflection. On the way from Durban to Ponta Do Ouro, we drove through Hluhluwe for a game-drive. We knew we had to be on the border at 15:00, for transfer… but missed it with 45minutes. Coming back to Hluhluwe, we also missed the closing of the gate with half an hour. The gate opens and closes at six o’clock. 12 hours we had, and still couldn’t make it. This was the northern gate (Memorial Gate), manned with quite a few people, and thank god some people there to open the gates for us. Today we had a beautiful plan. The two days we spent in the park before was only in the Hluhluwe part, which is only one half of the area. So today, we planned to just drop by a couple of “good spots” in Hluhluwe, and then head down to the southern Imfolozi part. We ended up spending far more time in “our spots” than intended, coz we saw a hell of a lot of Elephants, Rhinos and Buffalos. By the time we made it to Imfolozi we also realized it was a hell of a big area to cover in only half a day. To leave out a part was of course not an option, so we went on a speedy hazardous drive through the park… only stopping for the big guys, or blocking the road and such.. The fact that the park has got a gate on the southern side made it possible for us to conveniently drop the speed by 10km an hour. Still, when we reached the Cengeni Gate, it was 18:03. Three minutes past closing. Now this was no big gate, looking like a small headquarter or something, not at all! A plain prisonlike gate with chains and two heavy locks, and no people to see! This time I really thought we had to spend the night inside the park with lions and hyenas. We were shouting and screaming and hooting, and finally a black guy appeared from a small shack in the bush. “You are very late”, he said, and put on his gravest facial expression. As he locked the gate behind us I was instantly thinking… where the hell does this road go now???? The map gave the ruthless answer: through every little zulu village and all the small roads where you don’t want to be after sunset… And since we were staying at the opposite side of the park, we had to drive all the way around. 270km in total! Hell, that was a long drive through the black black black South Africa!!

Inspired now, since we were driving through the heart of Zululand, I had to pour out some of my knowledge about the Zulu culture for Oyvind. Among other things about the Zulu’s respect for great warriors and their custom to slit the great warrior’s tummy open as a respectful and honourable gesture. Oyvind wasn’t too impressed or happy… and all doors in the car were quickly closed from the inside.

The place of the beautiful killing

Bulawayo, or originally GuBulawayo by the Matabele/Ndebele. The name meaning, the place of the (beautiful) killing! It was historically a battle between the local Matabele and the white man… No need to tell how that went – beautiful as it was! Bloody story!! This was I believe under chief Lobengulas rule! Great respect for that man!!

Makes me think about one of the Voortrekker groups that moved into the North West… wonder if that wasn’t Matabeleland also? This particular group was led by a guy called Van Rensburg. Ok, according to the map it was not the Matabeleland, but in what is now part of Mocambique (just north of Inhambane). Van Rensburg made a route along the Limpopo river, but the trek ended abruptly in 1838 when all of them were killed. This is where assumptions supersede the facts… and my imagination takes over. But who knows, history is some times a lot juicier than imagination, fantasy and fiction altogether. The guys that Van Rensburg ran into was probably potent killers like the Matabele as well… and I just wonder what name they put on this battlefield… or place of slaughter if you may. I’d die to know the name of that place… graphic and descriptive… If forgotten it deserves a proper name..

And even better still. Lobengula and his men had great respect for great warriors, even enemy ones! A great enemy warrior would be killed and molested like the rest of the bunch… but as a salute they would slit open the guys belly so all the intestines could fall out and attract scavengers. Intestines can reach quite impressive lengths I understand, coz in battlefields you would some times find intestines still attached to the body… but quite far away from it! I knew there was a reason I never chose a military career.

Superstitions

Tokoloshe: (South African voodoo)
The Tokoloshe is a small “man or humanlike figure” the size of approximately 25cm, a figure that is said to haunt people. If you’re in a conflict with somebody, you can go to a Sangoma and get him to send a Tokoloshe to “sort them out”. The Tokoloshe can conveniently only be seen by the person that it is supposed to haunt. A typical thing that a Tokoloshe would do to you is set your bed or the curtains on fire. Another example was a young and terribly overweight schoolkid in rural India… on his way to the outdoor toilet late at night he was kicked up in the air landing on the roof of the toilet, presumably by the Tokoloshe, and could not get down. He was found the next morning on the roof and had to be helped down. However, a Tokoloshe is not invincible. If you manage to fight it and get a hair straw from its head, you’re supposed to have power and control over the Tokoloshe, and thus you must take very good care of it!!

The witchdoctors that have the ability to send a Tokoloshe are powerful and extremely rich people. Exactly how they do their tricks are secret of course, and an incredible amount of mumbo jumbo quackery (well, I must admit that that is just one of my assumptions again, so beware). In true researcher terms… this subject should be more thoroughly researched and documented. Probably only to find lizard tongues, frogslime and snake venom and the works.

Another typical Tokoloshe defence measure is to put bricks under the bedposts so that it elevates the bed... Maybe the Tokoloshe can't reach up or something... so dangerous but small enough to be outmanouvered like that?! Yeah right!!

Hedgehogs are becoming scarce in South Africa I've heard. People are hunting them down to put the skin on the front door. The pins will apparently hurt and injure the Tokoloshe when it knocks on your door. Such a scary little guy, but polite enough to knock on the door before he starts his business? As if that's not enough, he/she is stupid enough to knock on the Hedgehog pins?! Blind also?? Sorry, I'm loosing all respect for Tokoloshe's.


Highway Sheila:
Sheila was knocked down and killed on the road by a car. She did not want to leave this world yet, so she decided to stay in a ghostlike form I assume. I can imagine she was pretty pissed (although not alive) about being ploughed down on the road like that, and that this is the reason she sticks around. Sheila is now patrolling the roads in the area where she was knocked down (and that happens to be on the coastline not too far from where my parents in law live), so that she can haunt the drivers on the same stretch. Maybe she gets some feeling of revenge from it. When she was killed or for how long she will continue haunting people nobody knows. Personally I must have passed the place plenty of times driving back and forth, but not had the pleasure of meeting Sheila. Indren, my bru in law however, claims he once saw a woman’s face in the side window late at night. He believes it was Highway Sheila, and it obviously gave him the creeps. I support him of course… and I’m today a true believer in Sheila!

Sterkfontein Caves, Feb 27th

Went to the Sterkfontein Caves today… which is also called the cradle of human kind. It’s a natural cave with once a lot of stalactites and stalagmites is now cleaned out.. and opened up with dynamite to make it a tourist attraction for people like me and Øyvind. So what is left there when they have cleaned everything out?? Well, it’s most of all a juicy history about mankind.

The cave had no big nice entrance like today, only holes several meters up in the roof and totally impossible to reach to get back out. From the outside, the holes are well covered in bush and perfect traps for animals, hominids and homos and whatever. The missing link, also called Mrs Ples, was found in this cave, and it’s the oldest monkeyman found in the world and in a very good condition. Mrs Ples is believed to be one of many an evidens that the modern day man originated in this area. Mrs Ples was an earlier link than another more evolved monkeyman… that was found in all the worlds continents after pangea was split (The one supercontinent before they split into two, and then later five continents). Since 1997 they have been digging out another “link” called Littlefoot, and in another 3-4 years he might be free from the rocks. In addition to these two “links” they have found lots of human(like) bones in the same cave, as well as hyenas, cheetahs and other wild animals!

Common for all these creatures was that they fell in…. maybe (I’d estimate) a drop between 7 and 12 meters landing on rough rocks. Best case they were seriously injured down there… and had no chance to get out. Or maybe best case if they fell in and got properly pierced by a needle-sharp stalagmite… Stephen King could probably not have made a scarier nightmare-situation than what these creatures went through. But no use comforting them now…

As you are reading this now, you probably feel quite far removed in both time and situation. For me however, it was quite a lot easier to identify myself with the situation. Not just because I was in the cave… but because I was limping around in the cave like a crippled hominid looking up at the only ways out… up there in the roof… and so out of reach. You’ll find water in the cave, crystal clear and drinkable water. So they had all the water to drink in the world, but very little else to add to the diet. Just prolonging the pain and misery..

Actually the water inside the cave is the ground-water level as well… inside the caves in the area it is said to make out an underwater lake stretching 1km. In 1983 a group of 3 divers went in there to do a cavedive to explore. Two of the divers came back up as planned, whilst the last guy lost the rope, got disoriented about the directions and was left inside the cave. This I can also easily identify myself with, as I am myself a diver and had a “stuck in the cave” experience. Luckily I didn’t end up like a tourist attraction though. But this diver did actually not drown in the water as you would expect… No, he actually made it out of the water. But his chummies had left long time ago, probably with all the rock-climbing equipment to get out. So he was left there to wander around in the cave. 3 weeks later he was found… starved to death, estimating that he probably lived a bit longer than a week from drinking just water.


Littlefoot and Mrs Ples probably went through a similarly horrible experience… only a million years ago. Some time after they were long dead, the cave must have been flooded with mud rocks and water… that over time encapsulated and fossilized all the tragic destinies. Only for us to make this morbid gravechamber a museum and call them missing links… maybe they weren’t evolved enough to understand and be offended… for their case I hope so.

Voyage of the genes, Feb 25th

I asked a question today that can be perceived as very stupid and naïve and yet not so stupid and naïve at the same time… but I drew some conclusions from the discussions that followed that I am very “chaffed” (satisfied) with, and that I assume (haha) can be nothing but 100% true. We were having lunch with Sammy (worked and lived many years in Switzerland) and another Indian couple. We discussed how my wife was perceived in the Norwegian workplace and in Norway in general, and automatically how the stereotypical Norwegian and Swiss person is compared to a South African (Indian South African first and foremost). They are quiet, shy and “blond”! Another view was that all the Indians in India were much quieter than the South African Indians. So my question was thus: “… is that a general thing for Indians in South Africa, are they more loud, aggressive and outspoken”?

Dangerous topic when you’re sitting among the presumably aggressive ones… but once in a while you just have to take a chance, right? Anyway, the Norwegians and the Swiss (cold parts of Europe) were already labelled shy and quiet, and the Indians in India more so than the South African Indians. So I easily derived… the Indians her in SA are descendants of the Indians that was brought by the colonial Brit’s from India to SA to grow sugarcane (indentured laborours). That’s a fact, no question about that! None of the Indians were forced to go though. And that’s a very important point. They had a choice! The Brit’s offered them to grow sugarcane in SA for five years with pay. After the five years of duty they could go back home (shipped for free), or they could get their own piece of land, where they could grow their own stuff to mix their masalas.

For a lot of people change is a scary thing. Crossing borders and oceans to get to an unknown and unexplored country definitely so! For those people SA was never considered. But a lot of people lived a very hard life in India… imagine starving and having to feed the cow first?! That’s when some people got fed up and weighed the opportunity heavier than the “alternative”. So they took the plunge, and went! Thousands of Indians went in the 1860’s (will try to find an approximate number in the history books). Out of the Indian population, these were of course the crazy ones, the brave, the adventurous, the loud and the aggressive ones from the lot. They jumped off the ship in Port Natal (Now Etekwini, changed from Durban) on the South African Coast and started breeding more of the same kind. Mixing brave with aggressive and a dash of lunacy to let the strong genes carry the new generations. The shy and quiet ones stayed behind and carried on with the inbreeding and mixing shy with scared and careful. It’s a simple explanation, really!
And then the ultimate example of course to confirm this theory… my own (but probably washed out Viking genes). Pretty much at the same time, people emigrated from Scandinavia to the promise land in America. What was most probably left of the aggressive Viking gene, all went “over there”. Now they are shouting and bellowing over there, pillaging and bossing around with other countries and making everybody scared and hate them to cause jihad and other funny things.

Sir Jonny of Africa

It’s like the manager of the crocodile farm in Tongaat, who went to Norway some time in the late sixties and found it totally surreal to sit in a car together with a black man that was not the driver… imagine! He was a big white Boer guy with all the apartheid attitudes intact. But the worst thing of all for our “crocodile friend” was watching the road workers up there in the north… coz they were white like him!! Must have been a depressing place to go for him.

Flip the coin… and now Jonny comes to South Africa! Everywhere I go, I’m Sir??!!! Suddenly Jonny Stensby, from a farm in Vang the size that wouldn’t even make half a livelihood, is put in the same league as Paul McCartney, Richard Branson and other important guys that did something great?! In the shop, at the parking lot, from your own maid… everywhere! Flattering, weird, polite… or maybe just “polite” without meaning it? But that would be sarcasm, right?

Wherever or whoever it comes from, there is one common denominator though – it all comes from blacks or coloureds.. or the people from the bottom of the extinct apartheid pyramid. They seem to have the world’s biggest inferiority complex… even now, 10 years after Nelson Mandela was released together with millions of blacks to mingle freely with whites.

In the beginning I found it very weird to be called Sir! I even told our maid on several occasions that she could just call me Jonny, or dude or give me a Zulu nickname or something. The answer would always be: “yes Sir”. Some times it can be a bit cool to be called Sir, but afterwards I feel almost guilty for even feeling that. I realize that it’s because I’m from the ass end of the world (my wife’s favourite expression about Norway), with my rude Viking genes, that I can’t deal with politeness and flattery like that.

Still – guilty! It would be cool if Sindi (our maid) was in a position to issue an official paper stating that I am hereby to be called Sir Jonny! Who is in charge of giving out titles like that anyway? If Sindi were in such a position… I guess that would make her… not a maid. Damn!