No Stopping for Lions

by Joanne Glynn

  Regardless of what’s on the horizon there’s still a lot for us to discover over the next month or so. Places of history and nostalgia for Neil, and one of the most well-known national parks in the world just a stone’s throw away. It’s weeks since we’ve been in a wildlife park and the prospect of visiting Kruger National Park makes us eager to get moving. Neither of us has been to this park before and our expectations are high, for not only does it have a reputation for exceptional game viewing, but it will enable us to recapture the thrill of the wild that we’ve become addicted to.

  Kruger, South Africa’s largest game reserve, sits in the far northwest of the country, bordered by Zimbabwe to the north and Mozambique to the east. It’s huge, nearly 2 million hectares, and is home to large populations of game as well as an impressive diversity of flora and ecozones. It has a reputation for responsible park management and is a leading participant in the world of endangered species protection and breeding. Kruger is now part of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, a peace park that links Kruger with the Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe and the Limpopo National Park in Mozambique. Combined, they will all form a truly monumental park once Zimbabwe’s present woes are overcome and the depletion of Mozambique’s game during the civil wars can be addressed.

  Our plan is to enter Kruger roughly halfway up its western border, travel to the north then sweep down to the bottom in a big S. We’ve booked chalet accommodation in seven of the park’s rest camps and bush camps, as Neil is convinced that rainy patches will prohibit camping. In truth we abandoned the idea of camping long ago, but we feel obliged to justify our extravagance with a token excuse every so often.

  The road, which runs parallel to the western boundary of the park passes through townships, farmland and private reserves. The drive is uneventful until we hit a swarm of bees. Splat! Suddenly the windscreen is totally covered with yellow fatty bombs making visibility nonexistent. Luckily Neil knows what has hit us and straight away uses the windscreen wipers and water spray before the stuff sets hard. Other drivers aren’t so quick off the mark and we see them swerving to a halt wondering what the heck has hit them.

  Each day in the park brings something special and unexpected. Like parking by a riverbed at dusk to watch two fish eagles hunt using daringly executed teamwork. They launch themselves from a tree overhanging the river, trapeze artists calling to each other in their high, haunting language, swooping and dipping right over our heads. With one long shrill call the first one swoops down low and fast over a crocodile. As the croc snaps the air in annoyance, the second bird drops from the sky and whisks up a fish from right in front of the croc’s jaws.

  One morning we come upon two young bull elephants, sparring, practising for more serious times ahead. One uses a branch held in his trunk while the other repeatedly whacks his opponent over the head and shoulders with a trunkful of grass. He doesn’t look as though he means real harm, more like a transvestite wielding a handbag in a backstreet brawl.

  Overall though, our visit to Kruger has been a little flat. Try as we might, we can’t shift that pesky feeling that we’re in a large, wild but ultimately controlled environment. We try not to compare it with the raw excitement of parks such as Katavi but there is no ignoring the mass of visitors (6000 available beds at any one time), the tarred roads, and the atmosphere of a well-run metropolis that the main camps exude. In retrospect we’ve been a bit too ambitious in the distance covered, and it’s been too much driving for Neil when you add morning and evening game drives. He’s a bit gamed out at present, and even the sighting of three male lions gazing out over a waterhole from a thorn thicket so all-concealing that the cars before us have failed to see them receives just an ‘Oh yes, good spotting’, and a brief pause for photos before we’re gone.

  On our last day we’re driving out of the park, having just left the night’s camp, when we come upon cars pulled over, binoculars and cameras trained on the river below the road. ‘Look, look at the crocs!’ comes from the nearest vehicle. ‘Oh yes, lovely,’ replies Neil, then he rolls the Troopy past, intent on continuing on. ‘No, the hippo!’ insists our friend. We get the binoculars out to see what all the fuss is about: in the middle of the river are dozens of crocs feeding on the body of a hippo while 40 or 50 more are fanned out in formation, waiting for an opportunity to sidle in. I have just enough time to attach the telephoto lens and take a photo when I feel the Troopy moving off. ‘But what about the lions?’ our obliging neighbour whispers, pointing into the bush beside the road. A group of adult females has apparently just crossed the road in front of his car, heading for the river. ‘Great, let’s sit here and wait for them to move into that clearing,’ I whisper to Neil, while I hurry to now remove the telephoto lens, but the Troopy is already slowly rolling away, heading for our next destination. I didn’t think I’d see the day when there’d be no stopping for lions.

  The tiny kingdom of Swaziland is a few hours’ drive south from Kruger, bordered on three sides by South Africa and by Mozambique on most of its eastern front. It is a mountainous land, with bare rolling peaks interspersed with large-scale agriculture. Ruled by a unique system of dual monarchy, its king, the world’s last absolute monarch, shares the balance of power with the queen mother. This is one of the places I’ve wanted to visit from the start, as I’ve always had in the back of my mind a newspaper photo of the colourful ceremony in 1968 when Britain granted autonomy to Swaziland.

  What was I expecting? Intricately woven beehive huts and warriors in exotic costumes like the ones shown in the newspaper? Instead, what I see are people dressed no differently to those around them in South Africa, poor villages and a wealthy, Westernised capital. To the casual eye, it’s a clone of South Africa, but here’s a nation that’s always been a kingdom and never had apartheid. It has its problems, though. It seems that the natives are restless, that the pro-democracy movement is alive and sometimes subversive and that there is dissatisfaction with the extravagant spending and lifestyle of the king, but he does have an expensive responsibility to bear. He must take many wives from across the kingdom in an ongoing quest to bring new blood into the royal family and to ensure national unity. Maintaining the hierarchical lineage while avoiding inbreeding has been managed through a brilliant but simply executed plan, but I still can’t see how everyone isn’t related to the royal family by now. And sadly, the king’s subjects could be emulating his approach, as I see in a recent paper that Swaziland recently overtook Botswana as the country with the world’s highest rate of HIV/AIDS. This might also explain the announcement in the same paper for the Swaziland International Trade Fair, proudly sponsored not by Telkom or Mercedes-Benz but by Trust Condoms.

  There are many new and expensive cars on the streets of the capital Mbabane, and sophisticated men dressed in designer casuals frequent the bars of clubs and hotels. The traditional dress is nowhere to be seen except in photos of the king looking paternally down on his subjects from every hotel lobby and shop wall. In one or two of these he’s draped in a colourful but decidedly unregal cloth and has cut-out red feathers on his head, a proud secretary bird trying to attract a mate.

  By now Neil has had two more positive responses from prospective Troopy purchasers. The others have declined or moved on, so Neil becomes absorbed in reeling in one of the three interested parties. At this early stage he’s still buoyant, sure of a sale and hopeful that it’ll be at the price we’re after. He’s adopted the salesman’s focus that I saw in him during campaigns at his work, and he’s forever scheming, constantly looking at alternative ways of baiting the hook. He’s in his element.

  We stay overnight at a place called Nisela Safari Lodge, recommended by a local, and which turns out to be a hunting game farm. A game drive over its acreage is somewhat unique when the guide points to a handsome antelope and says, ‘Kudu, 15 000 rand,’ then at a female impala, ‘500 rand’. It doesn’t take us long to work out that these figures are the cost of shooting the unfortunate animals, but the accommodation
is good and very cheap, subsidised by the hunting season, I suppose. We’re given the Impala Honeymoon chalet and it’s terrific. Large, with a dressing room, a big bathroom decorated to give the impression that we’re in the forest, and a wide, shady verandah where in the evenings we sit and watch the wildlife wander past. Incongruously, two donkeys graze nearby and the next morning the guide informs us matter-of-factly that the donkeys are purchased locally to feed to the lions. Yes, the lions. Unfortunately, there are only two males left because the females have recently been sold off. I tell myself that this is to avoid inbreeding, but deep down I know that they went to hunting lodges. We’re taken to see the males and as our vehicle approaches their enclosure the guide whistles loudly and beeps a little tune with the car’s horn. Time to perform. But this is Sunday, and on Saturdays the lions are given a quarter of a donkey so all we see is one magnificent mane in the long grass in the distance, a contented nod the only recognition of the paying public.

  I’m not against farming wild animals and I can see the argument for breeding some species for the hunting industry, but it still irks me to know that there are people out there who get a kick out of shooting an animal that doesn’t run away or that is confined in a cage. It’s cowardly and unsportsmanlike and wealthy people do it just because they can afford to. Perhaps our stay at Nisela follows on too closely to footage shown on South African TV of the shooting in a hunting concession of a lioness, just separated from her cubs and put in an enclosure no bigger than the average Sydney backyard. Some big brave hunter shot her but couldn’t even execute a clean kill with one shot. The force of his overpowerful gun threw the lioness into the air more than once before she mercifully died. Her cubs watched on through the fence. The scenes were so horrible that it forced the South African government to phase in legislation banning what’s known as canned hunting. Then there are the hunters who can’t afford a lion and just want to shoot something, so they’ll kill a zebra or a hippo, both of which are hardly moving targets and present no sport whatsoever. The letters to the editor pages of hunting magazines I flip through are overflowing with explanations from shooters trying to justify their bent, and some of the reasons are so ridiculously philosophical that they inadvertently reveal the true nature of the writer.

  Back in South Africa, we head for the Weavers Nature Park near Hluhluwe. It’s advertised as being a secluded private reserve and the cottage I particularly like the look of is called The Canopy, another honeymoon suite as it turns out. The pictures on the website make it look comfortable and classy all at once, and the kitchen looks to be large and very well equipped. Neil isn’t so keen and is unimpressed by the photos, the location and the isolation. He wants to be near an Internet café where he can keep his finger on the pulse of the Troopy’s sale. We arrive at the managers’ house and as we pull up a back tyre slowly hisses to a flat. We’re parked in loose sand and at a slight angle, which presents a bit of a problem for changing tyres, so when we finally arrive at our little love nest Neil just wants to sit down with a beer and have a cool shower. I open the front door to a room dominated by a massive and over-dressed king-sized bed. ‘Where’s the chairs?’ grumbles Neil. We look in the bathroom, which has a giant spa, twin basins and a whole wallful of storage space, but no shower. This is too much for Neil, particularly after the manageress wouldn’t come to the party when he asked politely for stand-by rates. Luckily, I find a light switch and pull open the heavy curtains to reveal a wonderful lounge area with big comfortable-looking sofas on the verandah, and in a few minutes we discover an outdoor shower on the back deck. From then on it only gets better and we wander the reserve in the early mornings and late evenings, and are visited by monkeys, buck and bush pigs throughout the day. The seclusion is addictive and in a couple of days Neil stops talking about offers and counter-offers and can be found on the verandah dozing, an old copy of the Economist flopped open but face down on his chest.

  We motor to St Lucia on the coast via Hluhluwe Umfolozi Park. This park is made up of two distinct game reserves and is managed not by SANP arks but by the local provincial authority, Ezemvelo KwaZulu–Natal Wildlife. Although the park is said to have the Big Five (lion, leopard, elephant, rhino and buffalo) and to be well stocked with game, we catch only glimpses of small herds and lone animals so decide not to stay overnight.

  St Lucia is a different matter, a town wedged between river and shoreline, where crocs sleep on the banks of the estuary and hippos wade in the swamp below our apartment window. It’s a service town really, once just a base for rough and hardy fishermen but now the centre of tourism and the management hub for the surrounding iSimangaliso Wetland Park, a World Heritage site. The residential parts of town are green and neat but the main street has already outgrown itself with many accommodation options, and tourists busy with arrangements for estuary cruises, whale watching, deep-sea diving and game drives.

  On our second day in town we drive into the park and are unprepared for this wonderful place. Very unprepared, as we’ve left cameras, binoculars and guidebook behind. After immediately spotting a glossy grazing hippo we turn a corner to see three whopping great white rhinos in a grassy field on our right. They wander around with massive heads to the ground, nibbling, kicking a sod, staring with little dumb eyes at the wildflowers for minutes on end. ‘Would make a good photo,’ we keep muttering to each other.

  After that we come across a dazzling array of animals — large herds and an even larger variety of species — all scattered around, grazing the grasslands and wandering the vegetated dunes. One thing I had read in a Ezemvelo KwaZulu–Natal Wildlife pamphlet beforehand was that the driving force behind the ecology of these wetlands is the continual comings and goings of the hippos, estimated at over a thousand, as they move through the waterways onto dry land to graze. The pamphlet went on to say that park management has embarked on a huge program to rid the park of non-indigenous flora and the evidence of this is all around, with hundreds of acres of planted forests cleared to reveal coastal plains and river systems.

  On the return road we call in at Mission Rocks, and apart from dodging little antelope, the shy red duiker, continually sneaking across our path, the highlight is a sign by the walking track to the beach from the car park:

  Beware of Animals.

  Hippos, Buffalos, Black Rhinos, Crocodiles and Leopards

  Inhabit This Area.

  What, no lions?

  Neil’s Aunt Elizabeth lives in Umhlanga Rocks, a resort town on the KwaZulu–Natal coast 20 kilometres or so north of Durban, the province’s major city. It’s a small-town Surfers Paradise with high-rise apartment blocks crowding the beach and large securityfenced residences in suburbs on surrounding hills. Most of the faces in the street are white, and there’s a bright holiday feel to the place that must be a breath of fresh air to weekending Durbanites and Jo’burgers. When we arrive the town is jumping and it looks for a time as if we won’t get accommodation. At the twelfth hour we book a unit in a big time-share beachfront property. It’s okay but we want more, so after three days we move into an apartment on the thirteenth floor of a swanky place where we live like kings. Each day we collect Elizabeth and the three of us sit up in our eyrie, drinking tea, watching the sea and taking many photographs of ourselves and the coastline running all the way to Durban. Neil and I tell ourselves that the enjoyment she’s getting from experiencing her town from a different perspective is worth the additional outlay.

  The Troopy’s sales campaign is stalling. One buyer has dropped out, one really wants it but can’t afford it, and the third can afford it but is acting cool. Neil spends time each morning in an Internet café in an attempt to keep the dream alive, but negotiations are at that stage when it could easily become a nightmare. Although Neil is still optimistic, he’s progressing the option of shipping the Troopy back home and makes a tentative booking on a vessel that departs Cape Town six weeks before we’re due to leave. Not ideal, but the only berth available within our timeframe for a Troopy-sized
container.

  Elizabeth, tactful as ever, doesn’t comment one day after Neil and I have a hairdressing session. Neil appears with a slightly patchy number three after I dropped the clippers, and I emerge as a brunette, although I was hoping for more of a Paris Hilton look. One of the things that I insisted on packing in the Troopy before it left Sydney was a year’s supply of my hair colour, but my calculations were out and the stockpile dried up somewhere in Kenya. Subsequently I’ve been reliant on local supplies, but I’ve discovered that what’s in the box seems to bear no relationship to what the box says is in there. I’ve had colours that are totally different to the description (as in Umhlanga), colours that don’t colour at all, and factory-sealed boxes that are missing one of the components. I strongly believe that manufacturers treat Africa like the Third World continent it is and, like drug companies, off-load expired and inferior stock here. Sick of my rantings on this subject, Neil suggests that I should take it up with the local MP, or the World Health Organization. They’re sure to give it priority.

  THiS iS THE LiFE

  Port Edward is not a big port, it’s not even a port at all but a green and leafy enclave for weekend Durbanites tucked away on the KwaZulu–Natal South Coast. We spend three nights at The Estuary Country Hotel, an estate built on grassy slopes around an old Cape Dutch manor house. It’s very calming and pretty, with long views down the estuary to the beach and white Cape Dutch-ish cottages and palm trees reflected in the water. The beach is small but a good one for walking, and we are content to go down there in the mornings and afternoons then drive around the region on little excursions in between. Sometimes we have surprise visitors because the hotel has started on a refurbishment program and our room is the first to be completed. Staff, workmen and other guests are curious to see the glamorous new furnishings, so we get used to a light tap on the door, a head around the corner followed by, ‘Oh hello, just looking.’ Rather than being annoying it’s kind of nice and friendly — we just have to remember to be appropriately dressed at all times.