Day 6 was fairly short — though we got to sleep in (yay!).
We headed out in misty-to-rainy weather for a bush walk. We drove out to the main grassland at the foot of the big butte and spent the morning learning the kind of safari facts that make you feel like you’re suddenly in Nature’s graduate seminar.
We learned about the Resurrection Plant — you can let it completely dry out, and then put it in water any time later, and it will spring back to life as if nothing happened.
We learned about aardvarks and termite mounds.
We learned that rhinos basically use one section of a field the way a cat uses a litter box: all poo in one place.
And that this is not just gross trivia — it’s information. If a new male comes into an area, he will search out that spot and “read” it: is there another male here? Is a female in estrus?
But similarly, if the old male smells a new male’s scent on the pile, he will search him down and kill him.
Nature is… not subtle.
Isaac broke off a branch from a tree that lions use to scent themselves so prey can’t smell them. It had a strong, herbal smell — a bit like a “cowboy cologne” plant from home.
We also made a toothbrush out of the inside of another branch. It even had a slightly numbing, acidic taste, which Isaac said was basically the toothpaste.
Unfortunately, we all discovered that the “rain ponchos” from the vehicle used the term rain in the most aspirational sense possible — as in, they looked like ponchos, but the rain came straight through and soaked you anyway.
I took some photos, and they will likely remind me what else happened, which I’ll update tomorrow.
At this moment, we’re back at the ANEW Hotel Pretoria, and we’ve met up with the rest of the group.
Abe treated us to a round of champagne for minor introductions (the main ones will happen tomorrow when we are in Zimbabwe, on a cruise on the Zambezi River).
Janice, Mary, Lynn, and I headed over to the attached mall to get some money at the ATM, and for Janice to pick up a few items she’d forgotten to pack.
We wandered around a bit, and finally found…
A Woolworth’s!
Mary mentioned she thought that brand had basically gone extinct a decade ago. Apparently not here.
Abe had told us that malls are booming in South Africa now that there is a rising Black middle class. Most people don’t buy online — it reminded me a bit of how integral malls were in the U.S. back in the 1960s. We got gelato (“Lotus” flavor for Mary and Janice), and headed back to the hotel.
My one regret so far is that on the drive back from Entabeni, I saw a monkey to the side of the road — a vervet monkey, grey with a black face and (yes) a blue bum.
As we passed it by, I looked up and saw there were at least twenty monkeys hanging all over the tree.
Abe was asleep in the passenger seat, but I was in the front row. What I should have done is tapped Andrew, the driver, on the sleeve and asked him to pull over.
(We were still on the dirt road.)
I just couldn’t think that fast.
A bit of regret. They were so cute.
A completely separate thought: “Wide Load” vehicles here are marked as “Abnormal.”
Shades of Young Frankenstein (“Abby Normal”)…
Ate at the buffet here at the hotel for dinner, and it was TERRIBLE. All the meat was dry and overcooked, there was sand in the spinach, etc.
The last straw was that the buffet cost far more than Lynn’s meal (chicken curry) — and a glass of wine! — ordered off the menu.
Ah well.
We have an early morning. Lynn and I have been weighing and packing and re-weighing and shifting and packing things.
We are really hoping Abe was right that we can have a “sling bag,” because my sling bag currently contains the full camera rig, all my tech, and now — in order to get the check-in bag under 44 pounds — the home-host present of two pounds of Ghirardelli chocolates.
Priorities.
Tomorrow: Zimbabwe, The Zambezi, and hopefully a buffet redemption arc