Well so I promised a write up on my trip so here’s the first part. I’ll break it into two or three parts just to make it easier.
My plane left from Washington DC on Nov 29th. I decided to drive my car up there and leave it at my sister’s place. That meant that I had transportation back home without having to pay for a bus or cab, but I did need to depend on my sister to get from the airport to my car. My parents followed me so they could help me get from my sister’s place to the airport and plus they wanted to say goodbye as well.
The airport was boring. I didn’t having much to do, just my Sansa player. I only had a couple hours before my flight so it wasn’t terrible. There were a ton of South Africans waiting around too. Easy to tell by their accent.
The plane was empty. I haven’t flown all that much but the planes I’ve been on have been packed. This was definitely the off season. I wasn’t given a window seat but got one anyways. I mean who was taking care of the seats because there were at least three rows behind me that had no one in them. People just sat where ever they wanted to. This wasn’t a jumbo so I just had one extra seat. It helps but three seats to lie out on would have been much better, or 4 like some of the people in the middle had. At some point during the flight I got sick. I thought it was a head ache at first but it just got worse. There was a decent selection of movies and two cams mounted to the outside of the plane. One on the nose and another on the tail facing forward. You can’t use them to see anything at night but landing was rather cool.
We landed an hour early, I picked up my bags and waited for my next flight. A short hop from Johannesburg to Durban. At Durban I waited around for no reason because I didn’t get the memo on who was picking me up. I must have walked by the guy holding the sign 5 times. Phil = Fail. I figured it out soon enough, or should I say the guy that was picking me up did. Otherwise I’d have walked around even longer.
From the airport I was passed off to my cousins on a bridge in the rain. The next four hours was spent talking and driving. The destination Mkuse game park. Bronwen, my cousin, has a boyfriend that works there as a section ranger, we stayed with him. Dennis’s place isn’t the typical game park lodge, which usually are quite luxurious. No this is a bare bones kinda place. The generator only runs for a few hours a day. There’s little water because it’s a drought, and not enough pressure to make the gas water heater turn on. Did I mention there’s no shower head either. It’s a trickle of cold water to wet yourself, turn off, soap up, and then a trickle of cold water to rinse at the end. Other than that it’s a regular South African house. Brick and no air con. Mkuse was dry and hot and one of the nights we stayed there it was almost murder. I’m a hardy guy so the lack of fancy amenities wasn’t a problem. I would have been fine with primitive camping, you know if we weren’t sleeping in an area with wild predators that can rip your face off before you wake up.
My head cold got worse over the next couple days but I pumped myself with medicine and beer and things were fine. The first day we went tiger fishing. Didn’t catch anything. Drank a lot of beer though. About that beer. It amazed me how cheap we got the beer for. We stopped off at downtown Mkuse. Hehe. We are talking dirt roads here. There was a Spar, a bank, a furniture store, bottle store, and a few other little shops. Most of them were quite well built with shiny floors and lights and things. There were two guards in camo uniforms at the Spar front door. Spar is a supermarket. Basically on the same size as the old Be-lows. Maybe a little bigger. There was a ton of people milling around. A super long line outside of the bank. (It was pay day) Women sitting on the ground in front of the supermarket, children running around. It basically looked like a scene from a movie. A bit of a culture shock. Not terrible I can take those in stride, but I would love to have seen the faces on several of my friends if they had been suddenly whisked away to this town. It goes without saying that three other whites in the whole town were the people I had rode in with.
The bottle store was a very interesting place. Think run down pawn shop, only for bottles. The entrance was just a garage door. One half of the store was devoted to buying back glass bottles. Everything comes in glass bottles. Beer, soda, even 1.5 liter bottles are in glass. The coke bottles are the old fashion glass bottles too. Which is cool, even though I don’t drink coke. So anyways we got a lot of beer, and the bill came to like 220-240 rand. Which is 22-24 dollars. I don’t remember everything that we got but there were at least six 6 packs, plus a couple 6 packs of a girly drink. Maybe a bottle of something too. The important thing to take away here is that beer is cheap in SA. The boat was also very cheap for all of us for a day of fishing it was like 150 bucks. Not each, all of us. Something that would easily cost twice that for a half day trip. A shame we didn’t catch anything though.
After the boat trip we went out to a bar and had more alcohol. Apparently I missed out on a good portion of the night. I remember the first half of the night but the last thing I remember was downing the 7th Jaeger bomb. The “last” Jaeger bomb they said, though in fact there were maybe 4 more and then tequila. After finishing a good deal of the bar’s stock we headed out to have burgers at Wimpy. I have no memory of this event. None, not even a little. But there were burger wrappers in the car so they didn’t lie to me. I wasn’t passed out either. I somehow managed to, while possibly more drunk then I have ever been in my life, eat a burger in public without making a fool of myself. Then after getting home change out of all of my cloths, put my camera bag away and put myself to bed.
The next day was just a relax and recover day. I got some sun, swam a little, and went on a game drive. Saw the animals. Good times. I got to see some wild dogs hunting. That was cool but it would have been better in winter. The place is a little overgrown in the sumer and it was hard to see them. Those wild dogs are crazy, just a few can take down things as big as a water buffalo. They almost got an impala but it some how got away. I thought for sure that it was done for seeing how close the dog was.
I also saw some black rhino. We saw them on foot. Which is not something that you normally get to do. You have to stay in the car. But you get to bend the rules if you’re with a section ranger. There were five black rhinos bathing in a water hole. A very rare sight in the area. We didn’t get to stay all that long because a mother and her calf started to wander over to us. Black rhinos are rather temperamental, you never want to get too close, esp if there’s a calf. So we left. The white rhinos aren’t too bad and I’ve actually been quite close to one before. The last time I was in South Africa we went to a game park where they put food down to bring the animals close to the lodge. A rhino came up and I sat down next to the fence to watch it. I had a sweatshirt on with the hood up. I fell asleep and must have looked like a rock because the rhino came right up to the fence in front of me. Both of us got the crap scared out of us when I woke up. When waking up the first thing you do not want to see is a rhino less than 5 feet away, doubly so when the rhino is jumping backwards because it didn’t know you were alive.
I think this is long enough for the first post.
