‘Cause this is Africa – Cape Town – [04/08/2013]

You’re a good solider
Choosin’ your battles
Pick yourself up and dust yourself off and back in the saddle

I went to Africa and it rained. A lot. At first. I sat in the temporary silence of the still-empty crew bus and listened to the patter of the rain on the windows. Not for the first time on this slightly waterlogged contract I find myself wishing I’d purchased a raincoat. You’d think by now I would have learned to pack for every weather possibility! Apparently not…also as an afterthought, I realized that I’d forgotten to change into my trusty tour shoes. I just had to hope that my slip-on work shoes could handle a tour. They’ll have to be replaced after this contract anyway, shoes don’t last long in this line of work. These have become too scuffed at the toes.

But a little rain doesn’t dampen our spirits. I think we were all just hoping it didn’t scare off the big cats (cats of any size don’t like water, this is a nature-wide fact).

It took a lot of effort on the part of our wizard of an HRM to snag the crew a safari tour. Most everything was all booked up by the various ships that were in port and the fact that it was the tail end of Easter holidays in the area. But what is Africa without a safari? So there were a lot of frantic phone calls and a lot of arranging and 28 of us found ourselves on the bus this morning.

As the bus rumbles to life (and this one is far from a rattle trap), the guide endears herself to us nearly instantly.

Good morning everyone. So, you have a nice relaxing day ahead of you with no passengers to worry about – I’m not even going to bore you with facts and figures. It’s early, if you want to go to sleep now, sweet dreams!

And about an hour or so later when we pulled into the rest stop:

Oh dear, looks like a passenger tour has stopped here too. Everyone be invisible!

That made us laugh rather a lot J

Once we arrived at the game reserve we were transferred into the capable hands of our safari driver who – after we had signed the requisite paperwork basically saying that if a lion decided to have us for lunch it wasn’t the game park’s fault – loaded us into open-sided, canvas roofed safari jeeps and provided us with warm and cozy blankets to wrap ourselves in. At first you wonder why you need those blankets, but once you get out into the game reserve there’s no shelter from the wind; and the jeep was moving very quickly (We only had two hours  and a half hours to see everything), so there was a considerable amount of wind to deal with. Those blankets came in handy!

The game reserve we were lucky enough to visit functions primarily as a cheetah breeding and rehabilitation centre and it was the cheetahs that we saw first. They are so perfectly camouflaged that we were nearly on top of them before we even were aware they were there. They seemed to simply melt out of the their surroundings like smoke.  Naturally built for speed and stealth, rather than brute aggression, these beautiful creatures are quickly falling victim to their larger more aggressive relatives. The veldt is shrinking and that means the animals’ territory is getting more crowded.

*Climbs onto soapbox*

I promise I’ll try and keep it short: it’s mostly because of us. Because of ‘humanity’. Because of our supposedly high intelligence and our ability to easily dominate the world around us ,we have come to somehow lack the instinctive sense of balance that every other creature in the world seems to possess. Lacking that and any real natural predator (other than ourselves), we so easily destroy what we should revere. We are robbing not only ourselves but future generations of so much. A lot of people giggle at the whole ‘cheesy’ circle of life thing – but life on this little marble of a planet would be much much better if we made a conscious effort to actually fit in and respect that circle.

Er…

*climbs down off soapbox and shoves it under the bed with one foot*

As you were…

Leaving the cheetahs behind us we traveled on to the slightly less intimidating creatures (the cheetahs are kept in their own enclosure). It’s difficult to really know where to begin in trying to describe everything. The zebras were the first thing we came across, and the ostriches – while I had seen ostriches before (there used to be an ostrich farm on the island), I never honestly thought I’d see a real wild zebra. I mean, it’s one of those things that you just don’t see yourself doing. Zebras are something that exist in the pages of national geographic and text books full of strange exotic things that you never get to see. But there it was: a herd of zebras no more than fifteen feet away from us.

And then there were giraffes. Giraffes ambled across the trail directly in front of us without any warning and stood there munching on trees without even acknowledging our presence at all. There is something extremely beautiful about the way giraffes move. I mean, you would think that such awkward looking odd creatures would be equally awkward in motion, especially if they’re running, but they aren’t. Instead they canter with a kind of fluid grace that I had never seen in another animal, it’s as if they are naturally moving in slow motion. It takes your breath away.

Of course, you can’t really have a safari without at least attempting to see the biggest cats of all. In this case, the lions were kept in a separate enclosure, far away from the creatures that would normally be their prey. This is because these were actually rescue cats; rescued from cruel rich people who poached them from their families as cubs and kept them as living trophies. As a result they cannot hunt since they had no pride to teach them how; the killing instinct that is present in all predators is there, but there is no way for them to know how to use it. Apparently there is a very specific way that a lion is able to bring down animals so much larger than itself, and it actually involves them having a specific kind of stranglehold on their prey, that’s not instinctive, it’s taught. Anyway, since these cats can’t hunt, they would never survive in a fully integrated wilderness. They’re kept on the game reserve so that they may live out the rest of their lives in a relatively natural environment and in some kind of comfort rather than face a slow death by starvation. Since they can’t hunt themselves they would be unable to teach their young how, so they are not able to reproduce either.

“Vulnerable” or not a lion is a lion, and while they were too far away for my camera lens to capture my eyes could see them just fine and I was mostly happy to have them at such a distance. That kind of power is something to be admired and respected from a distance, not approached or tethered.

Finished with the lions, and with everyone still safely in one piece on board, we headed back to the rest of the reserve. Passing where we’d first seen the giraffes, the guide suddenly but very quickly eased on the brakes and told us to look to our left, quietly. Partly hidden by the thick shrubbery, but definitely still visible to the naked eye, were a massive pair of rhinos. These are definitely animals you don’t want to provoke as they have a massive amount of speed for something so lumbering looking. If one of them were to decide to charge the jeep it would be on top of us before we could get the wheels turning. Fortunately, these two didn’t seem in the mood, though I’m certain they knew we were there. The guide went on to tell us – and there were also signs detailing this at every entrance – that rhinos were dwindling in number due to poaching. Moronic people are after the horns you see, claiming that it has some kind of priceless medicinal quality (nothing that is worth an animal’s life, that can’t be duplicated by more conventional modern medicine). As a result of this every game reserve injects the horn of every rhino in their care with colour (that only shows when it is sliced open, not like the rhinos are walking around with glowing horns or anything), and a specific kind of poison that only effects humans who attempt to ingest the horn. The process also renders the horn X-ray detectable.

Sad that such measures have to be taken. See previous soap box rant.

We backed slowly away from the rhinos – according to the guide even driving the jeep directly in front of them was too potentially dangerous – and continued on our way. Along the way we stopped to get snapshots of springboks (one of which was so close to the jeep that zoom lenses weren’t even necessary), and two different kinds of antelope until finally we arrived at our last stop: the elephants.

There is something incredibly wise about elephants. I have no idea how smart they actually are, but they’ve always seemed like they should be wise. Something about their eyes. Perhaps it’s because one of my favourite books as a child featured a very intelligent elephant, I’m not sure – but it’s an illusion I’ve always held. The game reserve had two elephants, both bulls – and it was truly amazing to see them so close up. I’ve never seen anything so BIG! Even the little one was bigger than anything I’d seen! He simply looked at us somewhat smugly, proceeded to have a dust shower, and then they made their slow ambling way away from us. We all simply sat there, staring, somehow afraid to let out a breath in case it all vanished. Or maybe that was just me.

Bidding farewell to the animals – though I doubt they noticed our departure – we grabbed a quick but delicious lunch and a very brief round of souvenir shopping (which had me cursing my missing bank card, because there was at least one thing I absolutely would have gone home with and my mother absolutely would have had a “where are you going to put THAT???” reaction so it’s probably for the best).

Days like this? Days like this are why I still do this job…