I am Coming Back to South Africa, and Here's Why: (Part Two)

Previously on Jeff’s Spendictacular Semester at Sea Extravaganza, I had just boarded my kulula.com flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg and left you with the foreboding concluding line of “And then, all of a sudden…” I did that because I needed a cliffhanger for the end of that post because these two are in ‘To Be Continued’ form, and ending it without a cliffhanger just seemed wrong. So, to repeat, nothing happened suddenly – well, at least not really. The armrest falling off was actually quite terrifying. It was then I realized that we were flying in a giant green tin can. Yes, that’s what I should do: And then, all of a sudden, I realized that I was flying in a giant green tin can. How’s that?

There was something incredibly disconcerting about the flight. The pilots joked frequently. You would think that would put you at ease, but this is what they told us shortly before take off: “In front of your seat, you will find information regarding the crash position you should assume if we encounter trouble in the air. After assuming this position, place the card back in the seat pocket in front of you and prepare to kiss your assets goodbye.” I don’t want to hear that before taking off in an airplane! No less one resembling a green tin can! I was going nuts after they said that, and they just kept right on going with the jokes, making jokes about not knowing how to fly the plane or that they’re going to land us in Mozambique, or really anything that I don’t want to hear on an airplane. I didn’t like it, but what do you want from a discount airline named kulula.com?

I think this was my first experience flying on an old airplane. And I really wasn’t too thrilled that that experience came in Africa. Some of the areas we flew over were uber-desolate and largely flat. My hands were sweaty for the flight, and my face was hot again, just like it was the night before. It was warm on the plane, but when I took off my sweatshirt, it didn’t really help much. It was at this point that I began to believe that something was wrong. If my face was warm, then I might have a temperature, a fever, like my roommate just had before I left. Maybe I got it from him. I’m a mild hypochondriac (it’s hereditary) so this is what I do.

Compared to the five flights that I took in Brazil, this flight to Johannesburg was better. The amount of turbulence was much decreased. Maybe it’s the old green tin cans that makes the plane more stable. I don’t know, and don’t think that I want to. Once we arrive in Johannesburg (from here on out, I’m going to abbreviate it as Joburg, which is what the locals do) and we get into the airport, I find it to be mildly architecturally interesting. The best so far, which doesn’t say much. And it was only one small portion, too, so I’m not saying that it’s the way it is for the remainder of the airport.

They told us that we had to walk to the bus, because apparently the bus can’t drive to the terminal entrance. As we go outside, they’re doing construction, and I chalk it up to that. At this point, I’m still waiting to really see what I think Africa is. And I’m pretty sure that in order to do that, we need to leave the airport.

Once we reach the air-conditioned coach bus, we drive out of the airport – and directly by the doors that we exited about ten minutes earlier. I’m not complaining that I had to walk, I just struggle to find the logic in the actions of the bus people.

Ever since we departed the ship, we had a guide from a tour company with us, and he also took the flight with us. Now he’s on the bus with us cracking jokes. We’ve only been in South Africa for three days, and that’s insufficient time to pick up the nuances of the humor of a country. That’s why we weren’t laughing at any of his jokes and thought he was serious with everything he said. He told us stuff like the lodge just called and cancelled us, or that there’s no animals in the park we’re going to and we’ve been scammed of all our money and they’re going to leave us in the middle of the African bush with nothing but seven bottles of water and a pistol with four bullets.

But as soon as we started to pick up on what the jokes were, he moved right on to the safety precautions, and we all still thought those were jokes because the first thing he told us about was the Mozambique snake. This snake rears up and shoots venom into your eye. If you don’t thoroughly wash it out within minutes, you will be permanently blind, and these snakes are common at the lodge and park. That’s not a joke and it took us a while to figure that he moved from the jokes to the serious stuff. It was not a smooth transition.

As I’ve stated before, I’m on an Amazing Race pilgrimage. The goal for Joburg was to find the Fast Forward task from Race 7, Leg 5, which took place at the Orlando Power Station Cooling Towers, which have since been abandoned and covered head to toe in artistic graffiti. From what I’ve seen and researched, these things are near downtown Joburg, are quite large in size, and should be able to be seen from a large number of places around the city. I had my hopes high, but not too high, should I be overcome with failure and disappointment. From the moment that we got on the bus, to the moments after we were definitely beyond the city limits, I searched the horizon valiantly. And I did not locate the cooling towers. I was disappointed, but it didn’t take long for me to refocus on what I was doing – I was on my way to a safari. A safari! Who goes on safaris at my age? Nobody!

About halfway to the lodge, we pull over to a supermarket. We all look at each other which confused expressions and await a non-joking explanation from the jokey tour guide. He told us that if we want anything at the lodge that we will have to pay for it, including bottled water and snacks. So if we wanted to save a bundle of money, we’d be able to get those items here and now. I decided that I’d at least have a look around and if anything jumped out, then I’d get it.

As we were walking through, I still felt like I was looking for what I thought Africa really was. Don’t get me wrong, it was no Super Stop & Shop, but it was a supermarket with ten or twelve full aisles, as well as a very interesting deli counter. I’ve never seen meat look like that ever in my life, especially the stuff that was labeled pastrami. I’ve often wondered where pastrami comes from. I’ve even looked it up before, but I never seem to remember and it continues to be a mystery of the world to me every time I set foot in front of a deli counter.

I bought a five liter jug of fresh water and a pack of chocolate filled Oreos, which was more for kicks than anything else. Once we all loaded back on the bus, we completed the nearly three hour drive from Joburg to arrive at the Ivory Tree Game Lodge, situated just outside of the Pilanesberg Game Reserve. There’s always that awkward moment when you get off the bus with all the other wacky Americans and the staff is looking at us, and we don’t know where to go, or what to do for that matter. They told us to get everything off the bus, put it down, grab a glass of juice, and go into the lodge.

The lodge is entirely open. It looked like they had glass doors that they could swing around to enclose it, but it was very open. It’s a five star lodge, after all. I roughed it in the Amazon, I want to be pampered in a nice lodge. I sat down with my juice under a ceiling fan and waited for the cool air to remove some of the heat from my face. On the bus I had the aid of the air conditioning, but now that I was outside in the shade, I wasn’t feeling too great.

Before our first game drive (which is a phrase that never gets tired to say), we got to go to our rooms, and make sure that our backpacks made it there. The way the rooms are situated is that each room is in its own little building, about twelve feet by twenty feet. They’re small structures that only include a bedroom with two beds, and a bathroom. And there’s also a ceiling fan and a small interior air conditioning unit. I walked in, turned the fan on, turned the A/C up all the way, and lied down on the bed with a wet washcloth on my face.

It didn’t really help. But I can’t say that I didn’t try. Although, it was here that I began to figure things out and put two and two together. What did it for me was that, with as hot as I felt, I wasn’t sweating and removing the heat from me, most likely because I had no water to spare, leading me to the conclusion of dehydration. So I threw fever out the window and jumped on the dehydration bandwagon.

The first game drive (the evening game drive) rolled around at 4:30. There’s nine to a car, and just before we left, I started talking with a bunch of people and we decided to all pile in together. The nine of us were myself, McKenzie, Kim and John, Ian, Mary, Josh, Chad, and Ben. We all piled into a vehicle and drove off.

While we were all standing on the front steps of the lodge, we had difficulty finding one vehicle that was completely open, as they kept trying to have us fill one of the already partially filled cars up in front. But we eventually fought our way onto an empty vehicle. Our driver/guide was named Leon. Leon is a fun guy. Unlike other safaris that have a driver/guide and a tracker, a person who sits in the front and actually finds all the animals, we just have Leon. This was a fact that I learned after we got back and talked to the other people that went on safaris. They were shocked that we didn’t have a tracker because that’s how they found all their animals. I said we did the old-fashioned, traditional way (without the killing the game part), and they did it the new, cheating way. What fun is a safari if you find everything right away?

So we’re in the vehicles and all the other ones are around us, and the dynamic that the guides have is quite fun as well. Each vehicle has a radio and they’ll talk in Afrikaans or English, and we’ll try to pick up the English stuff, which is actually quite difficult. When you’re barreling down these roads at 50 kilometers an hour, the wind makes it difficult to hear anything. So, of the three rows of the vehicle, the back row can’t hear much of anything, and the front row’s job is to translate back as best as they can.

Having never been on a safari before, I rightly didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know how close the animals would get to us, or the rate at which we would find them, or how difficult it would be to find them, and supposedly those are things that differ from game drive to game drive. You can go out and see the Big Five in a half hour, or be out there for three hours and see absolutely nothing. For reference, the Big Five are elephant, lion, black rhino (not white rhino), leopard, and water buffalo. Those are the Big Five because when they used to be hunted on foot, those were the five most dangerous animals that you would encounter. See, this really is an educational learning experience.

A little over ten minutes into the drive, after all the vehicles have separated, we see off in the distance, literally a few kilometers away, a giraffe. I neglected to bring my glasses on the drive, but I smartly brought them on the trip with me, and resolved to have them with me for the rest of the drives. I think I saw what they thought was a giraffe. Binoculars would have been a good idea for this giraffe. Leon told us that we’d see some better ones and that we should move on.

Then, we found a giraffe that was only a few hundred meters away. I could make this giraffe out, but the zoom on my camera still captured it as a very small portion of the overall photo. We moved on, again with Leon telling us that we’d see more.

That’s when we started to find the zebras. They’re actually correctly pronounced zeb-ruh (rhymes with Debra), and not the American way of zeeb-ruh. But we all still used the American way, because that’s what we do. First we saw one zebra, then we saw a few more, and then we saw a whole dazzle of zebra, with dazzle being the term for a group of zebras. What I think is the coolest thing about zebras is the theory on why they have less flies around them than the average animal. Supposedly, the stripes create a vortex. Follow me on this one: because black absorbs heat, and white reflects it, the air moves towards the white because it’s cooler, and away from the black, which creates small convection cells all around the zebra, which also help it to cool off, and fend of flies. That’s what they say anyway. I hope it’s true, because then that would be very cool. If it’s not, then I’ll reject your reality and substitute it with my own.

What’s also fun about zebras is how the little ones find their mothers. If you pull up a picture of an average zebra that shows it from the side (go ahead, pull one up, I’ll wait for you…you got it yet?...OK, let’s move on), you’ll see that above the front legs, there’s a triangle where all the stripes converge. This pattern is different on all zebras, like a fingerprint, and is located directly at eye level of the young zebras, so that’s what they use to figure out which one is their mother.

Once we moved on from that dazzle, we found an even bigger dazzle of zebra. At this point, just about all of our photos are zebras, and we were starting to get tired of zebras. Imagine, we’re on safari in Africa for an hour, and we’re already getting tired of seeing zebras. Well, it happens.

What I was very thankful for on the drives was that as the wind blew, it helped to cool me off. I didn’t think about being hot for the entire drive, and that was a welcome relief. But, because we’re driving on dirt roads, along with the wind comes much dirt and bugs that tend to slam into your face. After three hours, you don’t look dirty, but you feel like it. It’s like having a nice, gentle sandblasting for a few hours, but it’s still worth it.

After we moved far away from the zebras, we found an elephant. I’ve seen elephants at the Bronx Zoo, and they’re impressive. When you see a wild elephant across a large stream, about fifty feet away, it’s an other worldly experience. Seeing an elephant out of a cage in its natural surroundings makes it seem much larger, and much more dangerous. Elephants can reach 24 to 30 mph when they want to get moving, but elephant attacks are less common for a couple reasons. Unlike some animals that will charge without much warning, elephants give sufficient warning. Their ears get big and they make loud sounds. If this happens, and you get out of there, the elephant will not attack. If you stick around and keep bothering it, you’re in trouble.

Leon told us one story about another vehicle that drove between a mother elephant and her child. You don’t get a warning when you do that, and mama got really angry, really quickly. Everyone escaped unscathed, but you’re supposed to know better. That vehicle was actually a private car. Because the park is open to the public (because the government wants to give the land back to the people and not have it be private), people drive through the park in their cars, like they’re going for a Sunday drive. And none of them know what they’re doing, so they really just end up being a nuisance more than anything else.

It’s always fun when we drive by the private cars and Leon mutters something dirty that I can’t type here. I would hesitate to call some of the language in the vehicle foul or dirty, and say that it was instead ‘colorful.’ But that’s all part of the experience. When you miss seeing an animal, there’s some inherence annoyance with that that needs to be expressed.

After we left the elephant, we went over to a fenced area where we could get out of the vehicle and into a structure to try to find hippos. We converged with a couple other vehicles here, too, and all the guides got out for a smoke. This would actually happen every time we took a break. And I found it infinitely fascinating.

Once we got back in the vehicles, it started to get dark, and that’s when we bring the searchlight out. This means that Leon is not only driving, but also looking for animals with a searchlight. This increases the level of difficulty tenfold, because us in the back of the vehicle have no idea what we’re doing yet.

We did see two white rhinos (not part of the Big Five) crossing the road in front of us, as well as another lonely elephant off in the distance, but that was it. It was really windy, so the sand was blowing around. Also, when we got in the vehicle, I laughed that there were blankets sitting on the seats. I didn’t need one, but I thought about it, and other people took advantage of them.

They say it doesn’t rain in the savannas of Africa. It did on our first game drive. It’s the dry season and it hasn’t rained in two weeks they say. I took care of that right quick. It’s like I’m some kind of realistic dowsing rod.

On the way back to the lodge, we found a plethora of white owls in trees. I didn’t know that owls were common in Africa, but in this part, they apparently are. Once we got back to the lodge, it was 8, and that means dinnertime. I don’t usually eat that late, I think that’s a combination of the European crowd that frequents the lodge, and the fact that the evening game drive gets back that late.

Still at this point, I’m fighting off the cold that has infiltrated itself in that had started with the sore throat. The nasal phase is starting and I’m doing what I can to fend that off. Because of our long day of travel and activity, I went to bed after dinner. I took some medicine for my cold, and put a washcloth on my face, because that had heated up again, and fell asleep rather quickly.

The morning game drives depart at 6, so our wake-up calls came at 5:30. When the bathroom has one door, two people getting ready in the morning takes longer than it should, so after I left the room, I walked down, grabbed a biscuit and a glass of juice and jumped onto the vehicle.

This morning, the throat and nose did not want to get up with me. I don’t know what kind of a monster of a cold I have, but this is like the Leviathan of colds. I’ve never had a sore throat like this in my life. I don’t understand this. Anyway, I medicated and brought a cough drop along for the ride, and just hoped that I don’t go over a bump and start choking on it.

At night it gets chilly. In the morning, just around when the sun comes up, it is downright cold, especially when we’re flying down the road at 50kmh. I didn’t use a blanket because I think I was trying to act like a tough guy. By the end of the morning drive, I think I was the only one without a blanket on, and there were five other guys in the vehicle. My first hint should have been when Leon came into the vehicle and had a heavy coat on. The guy that does this for a living would probably be the most accurate barometer.

Because our vehicle is the way it is, and don’t ask for details about that, each of the three rows rotates once from drive to drive. My row now moved to the front row, which means that we become the primary blockers of wind and dirt. Continuing the vendetta we still held from the previous day, we still didn’t want to see zebras, so we tried to avoid them as much as we could. But they were everywhere. It’s like there was one every few tens of feet. Or at least it seemed like that.

The coolest thing that we saw this game drive was the elephant crossing. We were about a hundred meters (I’m going metric) away from a pack of twenty or thirty elephants. It’s a veritable herd. A gigantic group of elephants. And you’re just going to have to wait to find out what happens from here.

TO BE CONTINUED