The fingers of dawn creep slowly and unevenly across the Serengeti – quickly across a patch of bare dust here, slowly over one of the many low Hook Thorn or Whistling Thorn bushes there, and even more slowly as their westward progress is barred by a Fever Tree or a tall Flat Topped Acacia tree, one that has neither been defoliated by grazing giraffes nor casually pushed over by a strong old bull elephant unaccustomed to such obstacles impeding his progress.

As night slowly turns to day, sleep turns to wakefulness across the vast and seemingly empty savanna. But it’s not empty, far from it. The great sea of grass, named by the Maasai as Siringet which means “land of endless space”, comes to life. Hyenas stretch and then snarl at their mates, the zebras standing in pairs nuzzle each other before recommending their seemingly endless quest for fresh grass, an old lion growls menacingly before cuffing one of the nearby playful cubs which hasn’t realised yet the respect it should be showing its elders.

And deep inside a tent in the pre-dawn darkness of the Nyegere campsite, not far from the almost dry Ngare-Nanyuki River, and about 10km from the Seronera airstrip, an irritatingly persistent noise grows in intensity as Lisa from Melbourne’s alarm begins to wake everyone within 100m – everyone, that is, except Lisa herself. Soon, however, all campers are awake and breakfasted, ready to embark on a dawn game drive…..all perhaps secretly hoping that yesterday’s sighting of four out of The Big Five will be complemented this morning by a glimpse of the fifth. Replete with yesterday’s photos of elephants, lions, buffalo – all just a matter of a metre or two away – and perhaps a little less than replete with evidence of the sighting of a black rhino in the Ngorongoro Crater thanks to the extremely sharp eyes of Copacabana, the Landcruiser driver – just a fairly general shot of the Crater area in which an otherwise unidentifiable black spot is assuredly a rhino – today is the day to spot a leopard.

Not that yesterday had been anything short of amazing – in addition to the sightings already mentioned, there had been closeup encounters with a huge variety of birds including black kites, fish eagles, weaver birds, bustards, vultures, buzzards, ostriches and flamingoes to name just a few; along with similarly close sightings of wildebeest, zebras, waterbuck, bushbuck, dikdik, Grant’s and Thomson’s gazelles, hippopotami, giraffes, impala, hyenas, topi, warthogs, jackals, baboons, and perhaps top of the second tier, a fantastic close approach by a cheetah. In the latter case, what started off as a very distant dot on the horizon that would need to be viewed only later when photos taken at the very limit of the zoom lens could be enlarged, gradually became better and better as the cheetah, like all the animals seemingly oblivious to a dozen or more vehicles each packed with camera wielding tourists, stalked majestically towards the cameras, closer and closer until finally it sauntered across the road between a bunch of the trucks and then slowly but surely receded again into the distance on the other side of the plain.

And perhaps that encounter was matched in a way by the closeup view of the annual migration of thousands of wildebeest and zebras. In fact, it’s not so much an annual migration – just annual to be in the Seronera area around May – but a continuous migration. There are approximately two million wildebeest (or white bearded gnus) and 300,000 or so zebras (plus a million or so other assorted beasts including any predator with half a brain), which migrate in a more or less clockwise fashion across Kenya and Tanzania for nearly 3,000km each year seeking out the rain ripened grasses. By May, the wildebeest with their young which are about 3 months old and the zebra with offspring around 4-5 months old have eaten much of the grass in the southeast that arrived after the southern rainy season, and they are heading to the north again, where March sees the heaviest rains and so the grasses are much more lush again there. So to be on the main Naabi Hill Gateway Road into the Serengeti National Park watching curiously orderly herds of fast moving wildebeest, often in kilometres-long single files, thundering across in front of you is a sight to behold, and to savour.

And so back to today’s expedition – we see more lions lazing in a tree, this time with a good number of cubs below; elephants and giraffes wander past the truck grazing contentedly as they go, there’s another cheetah just metres away, hippos, gazelles, boks, baboons….they are all there. But not that long after we set out, there they are – a hungry scavenging hyena gazing hopefully at a Mlegea (or Sausage) Tree in the distance and hoping for some crumbs at the table alerts us to two leopards in the middle branches of the tree. One keeping a watchful eye on things, the other gorging itself on what looks like a very large amount of red meat. The sight is magnificent, and our list of 5 is complete…..another item ticked off the list, and it has been such an experience. A large male lion yawning lazily just a metre or so away, a mother elephant and baby passing behind our truck and in front of the one following not too far behind, hundreds and hundreds of impala not even raising their heads as we come past, the encounters with the cheetahs, seeing leopards and lions up trees just off the path, hippos doing that crazy 360 degree ear-wiggle thing, witnessing the tenderness of zebras looking out for one another and next minute the full-on majesty of a thousand wildebeest on the move – in due course, the pictures will hopefully tell the story much better than I can with mere words.

And on that note, I need to end this Blog post with an apology for absence – absence of photos, that is. We’ve now been on this trip for a day or so over 2 months, and have enjoyed pretty good (and free!) access to fast Wi-Fi Internet almost everywhere we’ve been, until now. But in Kenya and Tanzania, including Zanzibar, the service has been excruciatingly slow at best, non-existent at worst….and all this at a time when we so much want to share photos of us swimming with sharks in South Africa, jumping off cliffs in Zimbabwe, or being amongst the most amazing wildlife in the Serengeti.
But until we re-enter the 21st Century (technologically speaking) you will have to put up with the word pictures instead….however, as soon as there are photos to be shared, we’ll let you all know via the Blog 😊

1. Not everything is black or white here
2. Most sign writers in Tanzania can’t spell “stationery”
3. Rain from the ground up can be wetter than from the sky down
4. Table Mountain isn’t flat (and it isn’t a table either)
5. If you multiply the circumference of an elephant’s front foot by 2.5, you get its height at shoulder level
6. David Livingstone’s heart is buried under a tree in Zambia, but the rest of him is buried in Westminster Abbey (the first part being as he wanted it to be, not sure about the second)
7. When you land at Johannesburg’s O R Tambo International Airport, the in-flight info screen still reads 1710m (ASL)
8. Female elephants pee just in front of their poo, males pee right on top of the steaming pile
9. Feeling sick in the Serengeti is no fun, plus you miss out on tea
10. Rhinoceros are very hard to spot
11. Lions are inherently lazy creatures, and they are usually covered in little black flies
12. Most of the world’s supply of red paint has been used in advertising for Coca-Cola in Africa – coating anything that doesn’t move like shops, houses, trees etc
13. The 2010 Môreson Pinotage, direct from the winery near Franschoek in South Africa, is quite possibly the nicest red wine we have ever tasted
14. Hawkers on the beach at Zanzibar are extremely annoying, but so are those on the bridge at Victoria Falls, those at the gate into the Serengeti National Park, those at the snake farm near Arusha – in fact, anywhere else on the continent.
15. Apartheid was bad
16. Nando’s Chicken started in South Africa
17. Sharks aren’t scary, as long as you’re behind bars
18. Herds of wildebeest DO thunder majestically across the plain (thanks Basil Fawlty) but, in reality, do so mostly in single file
19. Maasai people don’t like white people attending their cattle sales
20. Queues on a normal day at the Post Office in Pretoria move even more slowly than those on Christmas Eve at the Moray Place Post Office in Dunedin
21. Copper bangles cause power cuts (South Africans will understand this one)
22. To go on a game drive in the Ngorongoro Crater in the morning, and then on another on the Serengeti Plain in the afternoon, is a rare and treasured privilege which we shall never forget, nor shall we forget seeing so many different varieties of animals and birds
23. For the most part, the people of Africa are happy, funny, contented, hospitable souls, and we have enjoyed their company immensely
24. Some say Africa gets under your skin, others say it gets into your heart – both statements are true. (It also gets under your fingernails)
25. It’s not over yet – Morocco is still to be revealed to us

Hello everyone….it’s been a while since the last blog post but as many of you know, we’ve been in the Internet-less wilds of Africa for a few days. But now we have several “rest days” in Dar Es Salaam and then Zanzibar (on the beach) so we can catch you up on happenings over the last couple of weeks. So it’s travelogue time again – starting with our action-packed 48 hours in Victoria Falls. Our brief time in Zimbabwe and (even more briefly in Zambia) went something like this….

Tuesday
1pm – arrival at Victoria Falls Airport from Johannesburg, and landing some 15 minutes after we could first see the “Smoke (or the Cloud) That Thunders” which is the name the tribes long ago gave to the falls on account of the spray that rises high into the air from the Gorge….it must have been at least 50km away when we saw it first.
1.45pm – we get our ride to our hotel on the second attempt after having sat where we were told to by one ‘greeter’ who was not our driver, and who didn’t actually tell our driver we were there! So off the first van went without us, but no problem, as being on Africa Time means such things don’t matter….
2.15pm – arrival at The Kingdom Resort which is a very nice hotel indeed, with pools, a huge restaurant, a casino which we didn’t visit, and a greeting from a native warrior who threw down a cowhide for us to step onto like some kind of Zimbabwean red carpet. And all this just 500m or so from the Falls themselves, and about 200m from the early 20th century Victoria Falls Hotel where warthogs and baboons occupied the lawns and our tour guide who arranged our activities occupied the foyer.
3.45pm – pickup from the hotel and travel to the nearby helipad, where we boarded a Bell Long Ranger along with 4 German tourists for a 15 minute flight including 3 circuits above the Falls. What a sight, 70-110m high and 1.7km wide, and with of 1,000,000 cubic metres of water per second tipping off the edge (it is high water season at present) – it is VERY impressive…
4.15pm – back to the hotel for a swim, a drink, and dinner before a reasonably early night (we had had to get up at 3.30am in Cape Town that morning in order to meet our flight connections)

Wednesday
9.00am – breakfast before getting picked up for our next adventure
9.30am – arrival at the sheer cliff edge of the Zambezi River Gorge about 100m or so directly above the river and about 1.5km downstream from the Falls and the road/rail bridge. First activity: a flying fox across the gorge at cliff top level, right to the other side, diving off the edge face down with plenty of belts and buckles attached to your back. Second activity: a tandem Zip-trek ride at about 100km/h down to about 30m above the water (despite the rumours, there are no crocs as the water in the Gorge is too swift – they all live in the wider, placid waters above the Falls). Third activity, with the assistance of belts and braces man Sam (and there were plenty of belts and braces believe me!): the Gorge Swing. Or as the Activity List back at the hotel would have you believe, the George Swing! This one consisted of a step or leap off a cliff top platform, a 70m sheer free-fall drop before easing into a huge swing right out across the river, even closer to the water than the Zip-trek. It was truly brilliant, but just a tad scary as you fell straight down for a second or three, during which time gravity was in charge and the ropes and harnesses were just ornaments. Would we do it again? Too right!!
11.00am – time to walk to another country, so down to the Zimbabwean border post, around 500m or so from the middle of the bridge, fill in a form, and we were officially passport-stamped out of the country. Walk the 500m, and out onto the bridge, and soon enough you are at the middle, just near the bungy jump, and you can stand with one foot in Zimbabwe and one foot in Zambia. Speaking of the middle of the bridge, when it was built in 1905, it was one of the world’s highest bridges and was by all accounts quite an impressive engineering feat for its day. But the story goes that when it was nearly complete and the two sides were to be bolted together, no matter how hard they tried, they just would not line up and the project appeared to be a failure. So much so that the designer, distraught at what he thought were his mistakes having led to the whole thing becoming two useless piles of scrap metal, jumped from the structure to his death over 100m below in the river. Not too much later, a clever person on the construction team suggested that they should try the joining again at dawn before the heat of the day made the metal of the two halves expand and warp out of alignment, and guess what? It fitted perfectly, and is still in use as a major road and rail bridge today, 107 years later!
Noon – after walking the next 500m or so, we avoid the baboons in the car park, fill out more forms, hand over US$30 each and get passport-stamped into Zambia (country #9 so far this trip) and head for the National Park gate which leads to the walkway to the lip of the Falls. Another US$20 each there and we can enter the park and wander along the various walkways past the statue of David Livingstone who was the first white man to see the Falls back in 1856 (at the base of his statue is his quotation where he described the Falls as being like nothing any Englishman could ever hope to have seen – he was Scottish though – and something that “only angels in their flight” could haves seen); past the World War One war memorial; and past the man hiring out raincoats for the walk ahead. We had our own coats and we certainly needed them because we got VERY wet despite it being a 30degree day – the spray rising from the falls has to be seen (and felt) to be believed. There are occasional lulls in intensity but basically all the time we were on the point of land where the water drops into the gorge and then bends around towards the bridge, it was like being in a very heavy rainstorm. It’s no light misty spray, it is a full-on cloudburst! We went across the Knife’s Edge Bridge and got as wet as possible, and went very close to the edges in many places – apart from a few token guard rails, Zambia has no concept of any sort of safety regulations!
1pm – after a quick walk around to the river above the falls (where you can get as close as you like and people are allowed to walk – at their own risk – across the lip of the Falls), we reversed our journey through Zambian Immigration, across the bridge and past all the touts, and back through Zimbabwean Immigration, then back to the Hotel for the next pick-up. By the way, despite being soaked right though, we were 100% dry within minutes of starting back.
3.30pm – off for our Sunset Cruise on the Zambezi River which was a lot of fun….we met Germans, South Africans, Italians, and a Scottish lady who had been to Greenock two days before (that will only mean something to one person – you know who you are!)….and we saw hippos, and crocodiles, and gazelles, and all sorts of birds. We also saw, about 6pm, a very spectacular African sunset over the river, a view that was well worth the effort of going on the cruise.
7.30pm – dinner at the Kingdom Hotel, including the local fare of choumoulier and worms

Thursday
Pretty boring really – just a sleep in, breakfast, and then the shuttle back to the airport for a flight bak to Johannesburg

I’ll try and put some photos here but the Internet is so slow this attempt may fail. However, if they’re not there at first, keep trying, as I will eventually succeed!
Victoria Falls

Dear John

It’s nearly 31 years since you and I had a “conversation” outside the Southern Cross Hotel in Dunedin – you possibly don’t remember me though as I was just one of the thousands of New Zealanders who talked to you in 1981 during the Springbok Tour, and 99% of us probably weren’t very complimentary. Now, all these years later, it’s time to put this right. If it’s good enough for South Africa to acknowledge the errors of its ways during the rather nasty Apartheid Era, then it’s good enough for me. You see, back in 1981 all I wanted was for the All Blacks and the provincial sides to be able to play rugby against the touring Springboks, without a bunch of lunatic weirdos (yourself included) interfering at every turn. Yes, sure, we had an idea that there were a few black people who didn’t get treated that well back home in South Africa, but the Boks were here to play sport man, and that was the key thing. And I’d been to South Africa the previous year (at the time, you’d never been) so I was right and you were wrong!

But in the last week or so, I’ve been back in South Africa, and what a transformation there has been in three decades. That’s the first thing – the country is completely different, and the difference is for the better overall. For the most part that is – there are some exceptions which I’ll explain shortly. The second thing is this: the South Africans have faced their country’s evil past and, with the clear assistance of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, have been able to move forward in a positive, equal and generally inclusive way. In fact, New Zealanders no longer have any grounds to look sideways at South Africans when it comes to race relations because in many cases, we have some way to go yet.

And apart from the obvious manifestations of the change – for example no more “Whites/Non-Whites” toilets, beaches, public transport, footpaths, entrances to sportsgrounds; the previously unthinkable sight of black and white couples together in public places; poor white people/rich black people; to name just a few – we have had the opportunity in this last week to visit some places where the message was well and truly rammed home….the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, the Hector Pieterson Museum in Soweto, and Soweto itself. Soweto – “South West Township” – is no longer a township, it is a large city in its own right, with over 4 million inhabitants!

Within Soweto is one of the first exceptions – when we first drove in we travelled along very modern streets, with Audis and BMWs parked in the driveways of lovely homes surrounded by ‘normal South African’ security fencing amidst green manicured lawns….surely we had taken a wrong turn because this wasn’t the Soweto that we were expecting. But that’s because most of the city’s residents DO live in similar surroundings – for them, life since the 70s has improved a million fold. But within minutes, we had left the nicer part of town and were in more expected territory – the informal housing (read: “corrugated iron shacks, one tap per street, dusty alleyways, barbed wire fences”) which is still home to thousands upon thousands of black people who are on the list for a real house. Essentially illegal housing but a situation that is tolerated by the authorities because they have no magic wand to wave in order to solve the problem, not any time soon any way. So not everyone has made it yet….but in their own way, their shack is their home and they are very house proud, with as clean and tidy an environment as they can possible manage under the circumstances. And make it, eventually, they will – the government is building homes (with co-operation from the likes of the Nelson Mandela Foundation) as fast as possible, and when the people get to the top of the list they get their house free – no purchase price, no rent – as long as the house stays within the tenant’s family and is never sold. Even if the original tenant dies, the house remains free to the family.

While we are on exceptions, another thing that still needs improvement is the crime rate….overall I don’t think the problem is as drastic as it was in the bad old days but maybe that’s only partly because the need for crime to survive has lessened and maybe it’s partly because almost everyone now has full-on security at their homes in the form of alarms, electric gates, security fences, infra-red sensors, armed response call outs etc. But despite that, on our first night with Remo and Angeline at their fantastic home and stables on a lifestyle block halfway between Johannesburg and Pretoria, the power was cut at 2.30am because thieves stole about 3m of the copper wire from the power pole on the road outside the house (at no small risk to their own lives of course); and then two days later, Remo had his laptop stolen from the back seat of his car either whilst he was at traffic lights on his way to pick us up or shortly afterwards whilst we were in a shop (always physically check your remote locking has worked, because enterprising thieves in South Africa have worked out that to hold a button down on an ordinary TV-type remote while a car owner locks their car, cancels the “lock” command and actually leaves the car free to loot). And then, today, we discovered that some light fingered South African Airways baggage handler at either Victoria Falls or Johannesburg airports had helped themselves to two iPad/iPhone chargers from our bag when we flew back from Zimbabwe yesterday! The funny thing is that both plugs are NZ ones so now they need to nick an adapter as well – serves them right! But no wonder there’s still some paranoia about security!

Back to the main point though – visits to the two Museums certainly were sobering experiences. Firstly the Apartheid Museum in Jo’burg along with its current special exhibition “Mandela” was quite disturbing. In a nutshell, apartheid just was plain wrong and so unfair – it was something happening on another planet as far as most Kiwis were concerned, and we should have been more concerned. For people like me who hadn’t developed any kind of meaningful social conscience by 1981, we didn’t listen hard enough to you John and for that, I apologise. The way in which non-whites were treated was just appalling and should never have been allowed, not just from 1948 onwards when apartheid became official government policy, but neither from 1902 when the government then began its policies of segregation which is just apartheid by another name.

The list of injustices is way too long to detail here but why, in 1955, did the ANC and its allies feel it necessary to draw up a Freedom Charter (commemorated today in Freedom Square in the suburb of Kliptown in Soweto) with demands such as “All people shall be equal before the law”, “Living wages and shorter hours of work”, “Free and compulsory education, irrespective of colour, race or nationality”, “All national groups shall have equal rights” and so on. The driving force wasn’t so much to give blacks and coloureds better rights specifically, but in actual fact to give ALL South Africans EQUAL rights, regardless of colour. The irony is that the government of the day signed the charter in a patronising display of dishonesty and then of course promptly ignored every single clause, but some 40 years later, with the ANC in power and Nelson Mandela as President, many of the original Freedom Charter demands formed the basic clauses of the new South African constitution. How the wheels turn….

Lastly in this long winded epistle, a few words on Hector Pieterson who, when I met you in 1981 John, I must admit I’d never heard of. But whilst I guess we’d all heard of the 1976 Soweto Uprising (where school students at the time peacefully protested about a Government edict that all significant subjects would henceforth be taught in the relatively unfamiliar – and disliked in black circles – Afrikaans language rather than the English they were used to), I don’t think I recall having any great concern at the time that over 200 of the students and other innocent hangers-on, some as young as 7 years old, were killed by police gunfire on or shortly after 16 June 1976. Nor do I recall knowing that the killing of Hector, only 13 years old, became the symbol of the uprising which in its own right became the turning point of the anti-apartheid struggle (a point from which the white government’s hold on the people became less and less secure, leading eventually to the abandonment of apartheid some 15 or so years later). But Hector Pieterson DID make that difference, and his unwitting posthumous contribution to change in South Africa is now very appropriately commemorated in ‘his’ museum in Soweto, just a block down the street from where he was shot. It’s a place that we’re glad we’ve been to, although it could hardly be called a pleasant place, it’s a place where we learned an awful lot, and it’s a place that all pro-Tour people back in 1981 should now visit.

So, that’s it John Minto….31 years down the track I’m big enough to realise that I got it wrong way back then…..hopefully you’re big enough to accept my apology!

Cheers

Andrew Moffat

P.S. there’s a few photos of South Africa to be found here, as always, more to be added later