Much Addo about Elephants

Sorry, folks, I can see my blog titles are getting more and more naff! But ... what a way to spend a Christmas Day! We went to the Addo Elephant National Park, about an hour's drive from Port Elizabeth, where we stayed from 23 to 26 December, and where we spent around 6 hours on another self-drive game-spotting trip. There, we saw see dozens and dozens of elephants - both the occasional lone male, as well as several different herds of mothers with their youngsters and babies. At one stage, we'd stopped in our car at a small waterhole for about 45 minutes watching such a herd, only about a hundred yards from us, amongst which was one single bull elephant. After a while, we noticed in the distance a lone bull elephant walking determinedly towards them, and, watching the changed behaviour of the herd, we were fairly confident that this newcomer was not at all welcome. The herd became suddenly still and stiff, and seemed to be bracing themselves for this intrusion. As the bull entered the waterhole, most of the herd stiffly made way for him, for maybe a full 5 minutes. Then, all of a sudden, there was an eyeball-to-eyeball stand-off between the existing bull and the newcomer and, almost before we could think of what to do, the two bulls reared up at each other, roaring loudly, and started the most terrifying fight, with the herd bull chasing off the newcomer - but heading straight to across the road towards our car! At this point, after me screaming at Andy to put his camera down, we reversed quickly down the road to allow the two bulls to chase right past us into the bush the other side of the road. Good grief - can elephants run quickly when aroused! Then, just as we we were breathing a sigh of relief that they'd not trampled over us, the whole herd of mothers and babies took fright and started to run in several directions at once. It was impossible for us to know which way to move the car! Fortunately, however, they all stopped just short of us, or moved around us, and we were able to move slowly up the dirt road, away from where the 'action' was still obviously taking place. Phew!

Only about an hour later - after spotting the largest tortoise we'd ever seen (about two-and-a-half feet long and maybe a foot wide and high)



- we had another reminder about the power and potential aggression of elephants - however friendly, cuddly and placid they may seem at times. We'd stopped at the Rooidam waterhole in the park, where around 50 females and babies had gathered to enjoy some larking about in the water as late afternoon approached. We were absolutely mesmerised! Soon, however, we were joined by a number of other visitors in cars and trucks, and, once again, the behaviour of the elephants changed immediately. Though there were no bulls present, slowly and ploddingly all of the adult females came out of the water and stood in a kind of 'stockade' formation, facing all the cars, and keeping the very young elephants in between their legs, whilst allowing the 'teenagers' to continue to romp around in the dam waters. These females stood just like this for at least 20 minutes - occasionally looking as though they might break out into something a little more aggressive - when we decided it was time to leave them alone to enjoy themselves. But, as I've said, what a way to spend a Christmas Day!



 

We'd journeyed to Port Elizabeth (or PE, as it's commonly called), after a few days in a wonderfully laid-back and beautiful backpackers lodge in Southbroom - a very pretty, if rather middle-class and 'manicured' town, but with a lovely, unspoilt, rugged rocks and sandy beach, with a lovely Trattoria serving delicious food right on the beach.   Our accommodation in Southbroom was in a lovely house with a swimming pool, owned by our very laid-back host, Neville.   Every evening, Neville would be visited by about a dozen vervet monkeys (the male of the species having very proudly-displayed bright-blue testicles!), who sat on the wrought-iron bars a few inches outside the kitchen window, rested their feet on the glass, and proceeded to watch those of us inside the house very closely for maybe the next hour or so, following all our movements as we prepared our evening meal, or occasionally turning their attention to the cricket on the TV!   Think we really now know what it is like to be in a zoo!



The journey from Southbroom to PE was, however, something of an ordeal. We'd made a conscious decision, for a number of reasons, to travel right across theTranskei region  from Southbroom to PE in one go, which we knew would be something of a marathon 8 hours of driving. What we hadn't anticipated, however, was the dreadful weather, the number of potholes on what we had anticipated (wrongly) to be a motorway standard road, and the numerous townships we'd go through en route. As a result, the journey took us a full 12 hours! For most of the way, we were shrowded in thick mists/fog and rain - often only being able to see maybe 50 metres in front of us, and so nothing at all of the Transkei landscape we'd hoped to enjoy. Added to that, it seemed that every time we came to a town had to go right through the middle of it (despite being on the N2 motorway) , rather than by-pass it, and where most were holding their weekly market day, on the day before Christmas Eve! It sometimes took us an hour (at Mthatha nearly two hours!) to get through the people, cattle, over-crowded mini-buses, over-loaded, under-powered, rust-buckets of pick-up trucks and lorries carrying people, chickens, goats, vegetables, etc. criss-crossing each other in every direction, including diagonally, only inches away from each other, and with absolutely no concept of 'lane discipline'! This happened particularly, but not only, at Bizane (where Nelson Mandela married Winnie Mxxxx), at Mathatha (the airport town nearest to Mandela's burial place in Qunu) and another town shrouded in the thickest fog, called Butterworth. By the time we reached PE, we were pretty exhausted!

PE itself is a large but fairly pleasant city (though, once again, with a huge, litter-strewn, dilapidated shanty township on its outskirts at Motherwell, which the road towards Addo Elephant Park traverses). In the city itself, there are several long and beautiful beaches, which we'd strolled along on Christmas Eve, and a number of newly-built hotel resorts and shopping malls. Very near to our accommodation, there was a game butcher's shop, and so we were able to buy some ostrich and wildebeest steaks which we cooked on the braai on our return from Addo on Christmas evening.

Next stop: Knysna, which we're told is one of the 'jewels' of the Garden Route. More anon.

　

　

Quathlamba - or should that be Dragon Mountains?

After leaving the Pilanesburg Game Reserve, we drove down the toll-roads by-passing Pretoria and Johannesburg, to the Drakensburg Mountains. The term means Dragon in Afrikaans, though the Zulu originally named it Quathlamba, meaning 'Battlement of Spears' - a pretty accurate description of the sheer and dramatic escarpment we've now seen, although the Afrikaans name does capture something of the 'other-wordly' atmosphere around here too.

Again thanks to the Airbnb website (will we be getting commission if we mention it often enough...?), we're staying just on the eastern edge of the mountain range in a very lovely, delightfully old-fashioned, thatched house (thatched in the English, rather than African, way). The estate is called Glenroy, and has a large, almost quintessentially English-country-estate garden, complete with well-rolled lawns (brushed daily (yes, really ) by an elderly, bent-double, black woman - one of the small army of black Africans who work in and around the estate - using a short-handled, twig besom. 'Our' garden overlooked the beautiful view of Wagensdrift Dam lake in the valley below, where many of the campers and caravanners on the beautifully-kept nature reserve there sailed, canoed, or jet-skied (silently, from our distance!) around the otherwise calm waters . Our 4-bedroomed, 2-bathroomed house (which we two had entirely to ourselves!) is the former main house in this family farm/estate, where a number of family members, children and grandchildren, of our host , Wendy, are either living in, or staying for Christmas in, some of the other homes within the grounds. They would sometimes stop and chat with us, or simply wave to us as we sat outside eating our meals and they crossed the lawns from one part of the grounds to another: a very friendly, family-oriented place indeed.

For our first two days here, (14/15 Dec), we had lovely warm sunshine, with just the occasional cloud, and we decided to have some chill-out time, sitting and sunbathing, cooking 'braai', and eating our meals in the beautiful garden. Disappointingly, though, the weather pressure system since then deteriorated for the next few days. Although we always knew that this would be the 'wet' summer season in the mountains, we had expected perhaps some short, sharp downpours complete with dramatic thunder and lightening. Instead, it gradually became more and more drizzly, misty, cloudy - and cold! On Wednesday, (18 Dec), by late morning it was only 13-degrees C(!) AND we were forced to turn back from our attempt to visit the Giant's Castle, a prominent peak and 4-kilometres long ridge which, at 3,314 metres is the 5th highest in the Drakensburgs. For the previous two days, however, before the weather really closed in, we had managed a couple of visits, and a guided walk, around Cathedral Peak and the Didima Special Conservation Area - where we also visited an interesting exhibition and video-show explaining all about the amazing San rock art all around this area, some of which we managed to visit.

Both the Giant's Castle (which we finally got to see on Thursday of the same week, when the sun was shining and the temperature got into the low 20s) and the Cathedral Peak range, are formed by high corridors of basalt, eroded over millions and millions of years, which jut out from the main escarpment; in both cases, the scenery was truly dramatic: indeed the Cathedral Peak range was so dramatic and vast that it was almost intimidating! The drive up to the Peak from our accommodation in Glenroy, just west of the town of Estcourt, close to the township of Wembezi, also took us through some beautiful, more gently-undulating pastoral / agricultural / farming countryside, dotted with typically African homes - rickety-rackety rondavels or rectangular thatched houses made of mud, mud-and-clay bricks, breeze-blocks, or even sheets of corrugated-iron and cardboard. But in amongst these were some obviously more sophisticated residences which were either mud-houses 'tarted up' with brightly-coloured paint or even, for the wealthier of the farming families here presumably, brick-built homes with red-tiled roofs like you might see in many southern European countries. Unlike some of the townships we'd seen in other parts of Africa, these farming communities were remarkably well-spaced-out, litter-free, and with lots of well-tended small-holding plots in and around the houses. As we drove by on our first trip through these villages (hmmm - just realised I'm not really sure when a village is a town, or a town a township) it must have been quite obvious that we were tourists, and there were many times, whenever we dared to slow down or stop to take a photograph, when young children and teenagers (currently on school holidays) suddenly appeared as if from nowhere, pleading with us for sweets or money.



 



By the end of the week, and our departure from Glenroy, the sun was shining, the temperature had climbed back up to the low-mid-20s, and the sky was as blue as could be. We decided to take Wendy's advice about stopping off on the R103 near Howich, part of the 'Midlands Meander' route in the Drakensburgs, to see the Mandela Capture Memorial site. This is an otherwise ordinary piece of road which took on profound consequence on 5 August 1952 when armed Apartheid police flagged down a car in which Mandela was pretending to be the chauffeur. Mandela had just paid a clandestine visit to ANC President Chief Albert Luthulie, to request support in calling for an armed struggle  - where Mandela was captured as he was travelling through to Johannesburg on the occasion of his arrest and eventual sentencing to life imprisonment. It was in this unassuming spot where Mandela was finally captured, and proceded to disappear from public view for the following 27 years. What a good decision that was to stop there - the sculpture there is a real phenomenon, which some of you, unlike us, may already have known about.
The sculpture, by artist Marco Cianfanelli, comprises 50 steel column constructions, each between 6.5 and 9.5 metres tall. It is only as you walk towards these steel columns down a 'long walk to freedom' pathway, that, at a distance of around 35 metres, a portrait of Mandela comes into focus, the 50 linear vertical units lining up to create the illusion of a flat image. that the columns form a portrait of Mandela. As one critic puts it, the sculpture is appropriately monumental, and yet fittingly transient and delicate, and structurally suggestive of his incarceration. Though we didn't stay long enough to experience this, the sculpture apparently visually shifts throughout the day, being affectred by the changing light and atmosphere behind and around it. An amazing conception, and brilliantly executed!

 

Well, as we head into the 'festive' season, we'll be heading for the coast and, hopefully, even warmer and more reliable weather. Since this is possibly the last posting before Christmas, we'll take the opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy and Peaceful New Year.



Pilanesburg Game Reserve (pictures)

 

 

All self-explanatory, I think, but readers may wish to put names to the different birds.