I ‘met’ Dusty when I first started blogging. She gave me good advice – switch to wordpress.com – but I procrastinated and so lost everything on bewilderbeast.amagama.com. So then I finally switched to wordpress.com as Dusty had advised me earlier. Shoulda listened!
Luckily, I usually emailed my stuff to friends before posting it, so was able to reconstruct a lot of it.
Dusty now blogs at hakunamthatha.blogspot.com – go and check out her life in the Mthropolis of Mthatha.
My potted history of the two farms on opposite banks of the Umkomaas below the Hella Hella:
About fifty years ago when The Beatles were still The Quarrymen, a Pom family Wimbury hopped on to the mail ship in Pomerania to boldly go forth and do work in the colonies for the Great White Queen.
On board that ship was an 18yr old nubile South African on her way back from a gap year before they were called gap years, in Europe. Especially Italy where she learned some Italian, some Italian cooking, and did you know Lyn had a magnificent opera singing voice?
The Pom family and the Seffrican lass hit it off on board ship and soon the Wimbury family of England met the Payn family of Hella Hella on the banks of the mighty Mkomazi.
– the Payn homestead at Hella Hella –
Meantime elsewhere a Jo’burg architect called Porter was making a good living and buying farms as a hobby. One of them became the Harold Porter Nature Reserve in Betty’s Bay. He sent his son Barry off to PMB varsity to get a BSc agric and then bought him a farm on the right bank of the Mkomazi opposite the Payns. This magnificent 5000 acre farm had the imposing Hella Hella mountain on it.
They called it Game Valley Estates and stocked it with nyala, impala, zebra, wildebeest and blesbok to add to the bushbuck, duiker, warthog, reedbuck and oribi that were there. That was the only time they ever stocked it. ca 1970.
Well, Barry had a Landrover cabriolet and wore short pants and long socks, and Lyn wore dresses so it was inevitable. They spotted each other across the mighty Mkomazi, their eyes locked and the two families were united in a river dynasty, solving the problem of parts of Barry’s farm being cut off from him and him having to traverse the Payn land to get to ‘Ottos.’
– ‘Otto’s’ homestead nowadays –
Except not really, as Barry and the Payn parents had quite a prickly relationship, kinda like porcupines meeting and sniffing but not embracing. So the farms were never united, Barry would grumble about how they didn’t appreciate the value of game fencing; when Mrs Payn put the farm up for sale and Barry could have negotiated they never got round to discussing a price and Trevor English bought it for a good price and Barry STILL had the prickly feeling of having to traverse someone else’s land to get to the other half of his farm! And English didn’t appreciate the value of game fencing.
Barry the bachelor stayed at Otto’s, so his and Lyn’s eyes actually probly locked while he drove his Landie across their lawn, not trans-river. Once they got wedlocked they moved up to Highover.
– Barry & Lynne’s old Highover homestead from 1974 (Warren was a 1yr old!) –
Where they had a little porcupine – rescued when a Ford F150 did a caesarian section on its Mom at 65mph. It used to scurry around in the walls of their house between the corrugated iron and the rhino board inner walls. They also had Warren there. We bumped into him by chance visiting Hella Hella a couple years ago, and together we checked out the ruins of the house up on Highover where he was born forty years prior.
Later Barry and Lyn built a lovely new home at the foot of the Hella Hella, and the little Wimbury baby girl was growing shapelier and shapelier and she went nursing at Addington where the Weermag had sentenced a newly-knighted luitenant in the Medical Corps to hard labour: “You arre herreby sentenced to live in Doctorrs’ Quarrterrs and test eyeballs, including those of the 600 nurses ensconced in the Addington Nurses Res”.
What could I do? I obeyed. One of them was called Richenda Wimbury and she said you must come with me to a farm called Hella Hella. I took a peek at her legs and said OK. And so I met Lyn and Barry. It was 1980.
– Me, Barry, McDuff, Richenda, Warren and Lynne at Hella Hella –
Later Richenda did audiology and moved to Wentworth hospital where she met a cardiovascular perfusionist called Trish Humphrey in 1985, arranged a Sunday braai and introduced her new friend to me and my friend Bernie the Jet. That was Aitch and the rest of that part of this tale was history.
Barry now had two young girlfriends, and this latest one would botanise with him! They would spend hours with their bums in the air and their noses in the grass. He wrote a love letter to his Botanising Buddy:
Dear Trish , In memory of past pleasant hours spent botanising on Game Valley ; and in appreciation of your enthusiastic company and assistance on numerous trips up to Highover . I hope you enjoy the CD ROM , it’s unfortunate that my scanner can’t scan 35mm slides , I have a far larger collection of slides and many are of better quality than the photos used in this presentation . Just enjoy ! Some of the identifications may be a little off the mark so don’t let that worry you . Love , Barry
In 1988 Aitch and I got married at Hella Hella. We had been frequent guests and would continue to visit often for years to come. The farm meantime had been declared a Natural Heritage site. It was going to be the first marriage on the farm, but a Pee Aitch (professional hunter) and his chick got excited one night around the braai fire and suddenly got married. Technically, you could call theirs a shotgun marriage, right?
Here you can see their Natural Heritage Site plaque and certificate on the wall behind the bride-to-be:
– Ma Iona teaching Aitch how to sort a husband out –
KCC mate Andre Hawarden made our wedding invites, complete with named rapids on the Dusi, Umgeni and Umko in case any guest wanted a quick paddle on the way!
– that imposing Hella Hella behind us –
We started raising kids around 1998 and that led to less visits. Later Barry & Lyn sold the farm to a consortium who finally united the two Hella Hella farms into one logical unit, doing what I wished Barry could have done decades earlier. Of course it’s always easy with someone else’s money! Oscar Wilde said “Advice is wonderful stuff – in the giving.”
They bought a lovely unit in a complex in Umzumbe on the KZN South Coast, and Barry hit the trail, traveling far and wide on birding trips. Their son Warren was selling big trucks nearby; Barry’s brother’s Litchi Farm was close – outside Port Shepstone; McDuff, the younger son did heavy duty diving (oil rigs n stuff) all over the world; Lyn got busily involved in the local ‘Akward Society’ as we joked – orchids – and other affairs. Barry kept busy with birding, atlassing and other avian pursuits and committees.
After Aitch’s first chemo in 2007 we went to Hella Hella for the first time since those days, staying in the lovely new cottages next to The Approaches. We woke up one morning and there was a big furry creature on Aitch’s pillow. It was her hair!
Then in 2011 Lyn died of breast cancer, Barry got a leg infection and died, and Aitch died – also breast cancer. February, April and July. Annus horribilis.
Recently a vulture hide in Oribi Gorge was unveiled: Barry would be delighted that it’s not just called “Barry’s Hide”. It’s called
The Barry Porter Memorial Vulture Viewing Hide.
You’ll understand why he would have loved the full formal title when I tell you he made us a tool to dig up plants. It had a handle like a motorbike, footsteps to step on to dig deep and the blade was made of the high-tensile steel of a cultivator blade. A Plant-Digger you might think? No. It had a neat label on it:
Porter’s Powerful Patented Plant-Pincher.
He also made us an intricate bird feeder labeled:
Barry’s Bizarre Balancing Bird Bistro. I found a photo with a bit of the bird bistro in the background behind Kiza Cele holding Jessie in the garden at 7 River Drive Westville. Note the dead branch for photography so you didn’t get artificial metal in your pic; the platform for seed; the various arms had spikes for oranges, cradles for bananas and pawpaws and small holders for suet and nuts. A full-buffet Barry bistro indeed!
One of Aitch’s list of ‘things to do’ once we knew she had cancer, was to visit her twin sis in Botswana. Janet quickly mustered her network and arranged a trip to Hwange, Zimbabwe’s wonderful big national park. We’d been once before – also with Janet. Her friends Beks and Sarah Ndlovu of African Bush Camps own a concession and run a very special camp at Somalisa in the south-eastern area called Linkwasha.
Beks calls it his Hemingway-style camp. We called it bliss. Unpretentious tents from the outside, luxury inside.
The weather was amazing! Bright sunshine, then huge gathering clouds, then pouring rain and back to sunshine in a few hours. Repeated daily. Enough rain to bring out the bullfrogs – the first time I have seen them, not for lack of looking. They were out for their annual month of ribaldry: Bawdy songs, lewd & lascivious pixicephallic behaviour. Lie still honey, lemme love you! Also gluttony. Then hastily raise a bunch of different-looking kids, and it’s back underground for 11 months of regrets. I was a bit wild; I wonder if she’ll still respect me next season?
The rainstorms were spectacular!
We were dry under the Landcruiser canopy and enjoyed every minute of the downpour. Once, unbeknown to us, Janet at the back had water pouring down her neck and was getting freezing wet! She didn’t want to spoil the beauty and awesomeness so suffered in silence. When she told us back in camp we roared with sympathetic laughter as she turned the air blue with choice expletives!
After the rain there’s sunshine, and the bush telegraph page is wiped clean: New spoor becomes clearly evident. Aha! The lions and cubs passed this way!
After a good soaking the animals would have to drip-dry. We could get under cover and have hot showers, hot drinks and warm dry clothing.
– warm & dry ladies après le déluge –
I think Hwange has become my favourite of all Africa’s big parks. It is simply fantastic.
Those sand roads are very special, smooth and quiet; a breakfast spread on a termite mound out on Ngweshla or Kennedy pans is special too.
Prologue – I had dashed off an email to Aitch in February 2009:
Hi Aitch – As ‘they’ so crudely put it, we need to ‘shit, or get off the pot’ as far as a decision to get to Okavango and to Beks Ndlovu’s camps this year. Either soonish (March), or September / October (very hot). We must decide yes or no, and if yes, who could we leave the kids with? Dilemma – K
–oo0oo– So glad we stayed on the pot! The kids were fine; We got to Botswana eleven months after that email, in January 2010, then flew to Kasane, where Karen & Mike Bullock kindly hosted us; Then Janet trekked us on into Zimbabwe for Aitch’s last – great, unforgettable – Hwange trip.
. . . if you pull your finger out of your arse. But anal-digital extraction is not really a prominent forte of mine, me being more a procrastinator, thinker, cogitater, planner and delayer sort of person. Circumspect. Not that I’m saying that’s a bad thing, I’m sure it has saved me money at times; I just can’t think of any specific instance when it did.
So the white Ford Ranger pickup clocks 150 000km and is due for a service – full diesel and turbo service and check the nipples or whatever these okes do that know what they’re doing. At 152 000 and 154 000 I’m still serene and only at 156 000km do I start thinking Shit, you’re actually a slack SumBitch, y’know!?
At 158 000 I start making plans and at 160 000 I actually phone Mario and tell him I will be bringing the Ford Ranger bakkie in as soon as I can organise a lift. “Any time” he says in his Italian accent. And then he says “Those Ford Rangers are wonderful vehicles, they’re bullet-proof”, not realising he has just given me a subconscious reason to take my foot off the Urgency, Jeez you’re Slack pedal again. He is a qualified mechanic who apprenticed and specialised on Alfa Romeos back in the day so he knows about cars giving grief and he can diagnose from fifty paces. He knows you have to LURV your car and LISTEN to your car and FEEEL for your car. Right.
Invariably, after a service, he gives me a long and earnest lecture about neglect and how to treat a car. He has serviced my Ford Cortinas and VW Kombis for at least 25yrs and knows I am not what you would call Italian for “meticulous”. As they say: Devi prestare un’attenzione meticolosa alle istruzioni perché le dirò una volta sola. Prestava un’attenzione meticolosa al suo lavoro assicurandosi che fosse sempre perfetto.
So at 163 000km I gear up for REALLY doing something about this and then luckily lil sister Sheila phones: Would I like to join them, they’re going to Ngoye forest in Zululand with a bunch of birders all older than us this weekend and can we take my bakkie?
So I phone Mario and my dilemma about how do I get to work once I’ve dropped off the Ford is solved: Sheila takes me to work then fetches me at 1pm and takes me and Jessie to the dentist. We walk the 3km home.
Now I have to fetch the Ford. Jon is in Jo’burg or Barcelona; Bruce’s Mom just died, he’s organising funeral homes; I don’t want to ask Sheila for a third lift.
WAIT! Jessie’s scooter! There’s a plan. I’m unlicenced and don’t have a helmet but I don my cycling helmet and a jacket and I’m off. Wheee!
Heather & Bruce on that scooter
Yussis I enjoyed it! It started to rain and those wheels are small but I zoomed off, 150cc’s whining. I diced – and beat – every car at all the lights. Twenty kilometres later I was there and asked Mario to help me load the Yamaha in the back of the Ranger. We huffed and puffed and we had to call his son Andreas to help, but we squeezed it in lying on its side with the handle bars hanging over the tailgate. I was about to clip Sambucca’s dog leash on the brakes to stop it from falling out when Mario said “The petrol is leaking out.” So we dragged it back out and abandoned it in his garage.
I have my bakkie back. The noise wasn’t a hole in the exhaust, the fan belts were shot; the seat belt light was just a loose wire to an airbag; the brake light was low brake fluid; I’d imagined the discs paper-thin, so I had stopped braking for the last few weeks; Two minutes after I got there Mario poured brake fluid into a reservoir and the light went off!
Nothing was as bad as I’d imagined. So he fixed everything and did the 150 000km service 13 000km late all for R2200. Things are actually fairly easy if you pull your finger out of your arse.
~~oo0oo~~
If you check the Italian words “attenzione meticolosa; volta sola; and perfetto” – you will find this translation: Wot I’m Not.
Tom is at Lungelo’s but he has to be at Kip McGrath extra maths at 8am so I call him and remind him to be at the gate at 7.15 sharp. Lungelo stays in the Westville Prison grounds.
He’s not that wide awake when I get there and protests at having to wake early AND do work IN THE HOLIDAYS! Do I understand the concept of “HOLIDAY”?
We’ll stop at Spar and get you something to drink and eat and you’ll be OK once we get there, my boy. Well, I’m going to sleep straight afterwards and can I have a Monster energy drink please?
OK, fine.
Outside Kip he eats his smoked beef slices and sips his Monster. I watch a black-headed oriole and a golden-rumped tinker in the trees around us.
When its time to go in he says Please don’t let anyone finish my Monster. Put it in the fridge for me. (He’s going to walk home).
Take it with you and sip on it while working, I suggest.
Oh Emm Gee, another phase. Now we’re thirteen and we NEED to “get buff“. To bulk up. School starts in a week and five weeks of lying on the couch while I say “Come for a walk” is over. Suddenly, we now need to get fit and bulked up in the next couple days!
It’s 6.55pm and TomTom and his mate Francois who’s staying over NEED money and NEED to walk to Pick n Pay to buy “future life” a fake-promise cereal endorsed by people who will say anything for $$$. OK, OK, off you go, I say. It’s late, but PnP is just 200m up the road.
Pring from his phone: Dad, PnP is closed, can we go to Spar. Spar is 4km away and it’s 7.15pm. I ask: Don’t they close at 7.30? No at 8pm he says We can make it Dad!
I’m not going to stop him. Off you go.
Halfway through my apple crumble n custard and black coffee which I’m eating as part of my alternative Tim Noakes diet – the original one; my other diet is the Tim Noakes ‘Banting-type’ Diet – I have misgivings. His friend with him is an only child and his Mom once specifically worried about him not being able to ride a bicycle out in the big wide world, so maybe she wouldn’t approve of a 4km walk at 7.15 and a 4km walk back in the dark.
So I head off once I’m done to see how far they’ve got and to give them a lift. Just like most other Westville Moms.
Actually, Tom has ridden a lot and walked a lot and swam quite a lot these hols, so I do exaggerate somewhat.
They made it – I found them on their way back already.
Lunchtime high on the Momfo cliffs overlooking a great bend in the Mfolosi river. Our guides lit a fire and began to prepare our lunch. We shucked off our light daypacks and settled down for another ‘well-deserved’ break after our gentle amble up the hill.
From our high vantage point we had already seen a buffalo in the sandy river bed, a rhino on the far bank and a lioness hiding behind the reeds on the opposite bank. As we watched she stalked across the wide river bed towards some zebra. She lay down and waited once she was on the near bank. A few more lionesses and a lion walked across the sand to our left, crouching and flanking the zebra, who panicked and dashed off straight towards the first lioness. She pounced in a cloud of dust and she and her target disappeared behind the thorn bush. We strained to see what happened. Did they get their lunch?
After a while they all walked out looking a bit disgusted with themselves. So no, probably not.
While scanning with my telescope I took a good look at the rhino and called out excitedly to the rest. Hey, come and look! It’s uBhejane, not another white rhino like the many we’ve seen. We all had a good look and confirmed the jizz and the hooked lip of the rarely-seen ‘black’ rhino. What a sighting!
Scoping well left of the river up an adjacent valley I noticed baboons in two sycamore figs, the mfolosi tree that give the river and the park its name. Suddenly they started barking and swearing in fluent baboon-vloek, and a magnificent leopard appeared in view, staring up into the tree above him. I got the scope on him and called the others. He was most obliging and waited till all nine of us, including the two rangers had a good look before flicking his long tail and bounding up the tree, to increased pandemonium from the residents. We heard loud shrieks, even ruder words and then much barking and squealing. I watched for a long while to see if I could spot the leopard again. But we didn’t find out if he got his lunch either.
So as far as lunches go, we can only confirm that we definitely ate ours, and that it was the delicious traditional huge white bread sarmies with butter, tomato and raw onion with salt and black pepper, washed down with freshly-brewed Five Roses tea. Mmm mmmm!
Four of the Big Five for lunch. On foot! Actually, sitting on our bums at lunchtime. What a day! And the rhino was the real Big Five member, not the more placid white rhino. The big five idea originated in the days when they were considered the five most dangerous animals to hunt. The days when the way you “got” the big five was to kill them, not just to see them. We joked as we packed up to walk back to base camp that we now needed to see an ele on the way home to round off our lunch. Well, we did. It was almost ridiculous. But thrilling.
And that was not all . . .
The next day our walk took us on a different route. As we crossed the low Mfolosi in the blazing sun we asked our guides if we could swim. ‘Well, you can wallow,’ they said, ‘It’s not deep enough to swim.’ So wallow we did, King Fogg and I; and that’s how we came to spot the Big Six, adding the rare Pink-faced Ceramic-white Freshwater Mfolosi Beluga Whale to our tally of wondrous things spotted in that very special place, the wonderful Mfolosi Wilderness Area.
– thankfully dressed again after our underpants wallow – the skin would have over-exposed the picture! –
~~~oo0oo~~~
The next day we walked upon this sleeping pride, loafing on the riverbed. They scattered when they saw us, the male on the right leading the flee-ing, tail tucked ‘tween his legs! They’ve learnt not to trust those dangerous upright pale primates.
– a pride about to skrik –
~~~oo0oo~~~
baboon-vloek – impolite baboon dialect used when worried
From:pete swanepoel home Sent: 16 December 2014 To: Allie Peter; Greg Bennett; Doug Retief; Subject: Deepdale – Hella Hella
Hey Allie, Greg & Doug I just posted this story about an Umko trip with BernieJamludi The Jet. Thought you might like to check it out:
Cheers – Pete PS: I’m licenced to scribble:
~~~oo0oo~~~
Hi Pete
Great, and a very personal story to be shared with the “old boys”.
Pete, I have now worked out what you MUST do and that is start putting together an anecdotal account of the famous canoe stories from way back then. We would have to do a chapter on the Tarka Canoe Club and some of the other trips, the Whisky canyon episode etc. etc.
You will have to be the scribe and we can then get the fellows together with a small supply of cold tea in order to refresh memories — remember ‘n man praat altyd die waarheid na ‘n paar doppe !!
Allie
~~~oo0oo~~~
Well, ex-Chairman Allie Peter started a small seed growing; in March 2015 ex-Chairman Charles Mason and I sat down to write the Umko 50 years book. We finished it just before the fiftieth Umko in March 2016, where Rob Davey handed out 300 copies to all who took part in that memorable race.
Some things I love about Mkhuze: Those dirt roads between the fever trees (there’s lotsa tar too, these days). Few people. Polite people even at a lion kill (‘After you! No, after YOU!’). Lots of birds.
– Fever tree dirt track Mkhuze –
African time; African efficiency. We had electricity – at times, but not at our site, which I found out after I’d set up camp fully. Couldn’t test, as the generator only runs from 5pm to 10am – which is plenty, but you can’t find out if your site is working if you arrive when it’s not running. No problem, I set up a field kitchen 60m away from my site. We had water – at times. Even hot water at times. The bins had monkey- and baboon-proof lids – some of them.
FRIENDLY inefficient staff: Got any charcoal? Yes. Where? There. You’d looked there, but you go and look again: fokol. Go back. Doesn’t seem to be any. Yes, it is there. Where? I show you. None. HAU!! It was here! Screech of laughter: Hau! So she goes and fetches extra from the stores, hosing herself at the fact that ‘Strue’s Bob, there wasn’t any when she thought there was!
At the waterhole a sexy young thing with a 400mm lens got chatting away to this 59yr old. She musta been 19 in the shade. Burbling away about look at that and watch here for the pygmy kingfisher and have you seen the lions behind that bush and the poor wildebees calf lost its mother and the lions nearly ate it and etc. Fairly unusual for a Seffrican she was. My 17yr old can seldom string two words together to a stranger!
Very little ranger or staff presence so the ous were up and out on game drives well before the meant-to-be time of 5am.
Patrick the ranger on a game drive in his open top Landie stopped me – he recognised us from two previous visits when we went on drives and walks with him – and asked again, ‘Where’s the boy?’ Remarkable really, as the one visit was in May and the other in 2009! I spose we do stand out a bit. I told him Tom thought he’d rather be eaten by a lion than endure two teenage girls for six days.
Mkhuze very dry and huge tracts recently burnt. The water hole was muddy and hugely popular. Everyone took turns to churn up the mud and poo n pee in it! As thirsty as they were (they would come running up to it, keen to drink) they showed great reluctance to actually start drinking. But they had no choice. This morning one of the wildebeests was lying dead next to the edge. Unmarked. We speculated one of the rhinos had reprimanded it (they had “baleka’d” anything that came near to them as we watched them drink).
The only thing that baleka’d them was a male warthog. When a rhino said to him voetsack, he said No, YOU voetsack and made the rhino move over. Courage! ~~~oo0oo~~~ Note to self: There’s LOTS that needs fixing with your camping equipment! I forgot the braai grid and couldn’t find one in six shops in Mkhuze village 18km away. I took the wrong gas bottle, didn’t fit. No problem, the girls got cold food* and hot tea – I had grabbed the electric kettle from the kitchen as I left home.
As always, the fridge worked a treat, so in the heat they got plenty of ice-cold drinks and water.
Next time I’m gonna be SO organised . . . *Don’t feel sorry for them! They got some toasted sarmies from the Rhino Dino once or twice – and Phindile also made us one lekker breakfast.
~~~oo0oo~~~
fokol – none
Hau! – goodness gracious me
baleka – move away! fuckoff! language isiZulu
voetsack – pr: footsack; move away! fuckoff! language Afrikaans
I heard a cry on high as I parked on the roof at work. Glancing up I saw two crows cartwheeling, freewheeling, locking claws and spiralling like a propellor high above me. What a magnificent display of flying excellence!
Buzzing around above and below them was a drongo, divebombing and harrassing them, cheeky little blighter. They ignored him and carried on exuberantly showing off. Wow!
Isn’t that amazing!? I said to my 74yr old carguard Bridget as she shuffled up asking “And now?“.
I pointed out the birds. “Yes,” she says off-handedly, “Those two parents are teaching the young one to fly”.
I had a sick boy last night. Jess was away and it was just the two boys. I knew Tommy was sick when he only ate half his fried chicken.
“I’m shivering, Dad”, he said as he piled on a second duvet lying curled up in the armchair in front of the TV.
Let me feel you: You’re boiling, my man! Off with those duvets and all your clothes!
“But I’m cold Dad!”
Yes, you feel cold, but you’re hot as hades. I have to cool you down. I wet a cloth and sponged him down and gave him a dose of ponstan anti-fever muti. I had already given him an imodium after two runny tummy trips to the loo. Took him off to my bedroom and made him lie clad only in his underpants on the sheet and switched on the aircon.
“Dad,“ he says urgently, “I think I’ve got ebola, “ he says.
Uh huh? I ask. Why’s that?
“Well I read if you have a high temperature and a runny tummy and vomiting you’ve got ebola. Can ebola kill you Dad?”
Well, yes it can, but I don’t think you have ebola my boy.
“But I touched the mouse that Flaky (the snaky) threw up after I fed it to her,” he protests.
OK, we’ll monitor you fella, but remember bangbroek, you actually picked up the mouse with a plastic bag, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
“Will you take me to the doctor?”
Yes, if you’re still sick in the morning, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to cure this particular ebola.
“Mom would have taken my temperature, “ he says slyly, teasing me now that he’s feeling better.
You’re right, she would have. Silently, I wonder where her thermometer is.
“And she would have made me juice,” he grins, when I make him drink cold water.
Yeah, right! don’t push it! You might have tummy bugs and I’m not feeding them any sugar. I set the alarm for 1am to check if he needed more ponstan but when it rang I felt him and he was as cool as a cucumber.
“I’m fine Daddy. Thank you,” he mumbled and resumed his snoring.
Maybe he was practising for this outbreak four years ago, when he wore this apparently ebola-proof gear to a school dress-up day?
Jess and her two mates giggled away the weekend looking for big beasts. Elephants was what they were after, but they stayed in hiding. Eventually we were placing bets on seeing elephant poo! not even the whole animal! Still no luck. We saw lots of rhino and a a few buffalo instead. Plenty antelope and lots & lots of birds. Beautiful.
Evenings they watched movies while I read Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything (again!) and listened to the nightjar.
Mkhuze is very dry, so all the animals from miles around crowd the waterhole. Mudhole, really – very little water. Amazing that just a few miles away at Nsumo Pan there is miles of shoreline and clear blue water, but we saw very few animals there. Just hippos. Wisely croc-shy, maybe?
Dunno if it was this visit or another, but in walking around the camp I saw the bluest bird I’d ever seen – and it was a Black Cuckooshrike! I would have confidently asserted to you that Black Cuckooshrikes are black. Well, usually, but have a good look in bright sunlight:
– ’twas just like this – – the blue of the Black Cuckooshrike – from ethiobirds.smugmug.com – thanks –
Tom back in civilization had a ball too. His weekend was very different to ours: beach, shopping mall, KFC, two movies, a home in Durban North with dogs and pet pythons. Plus he was given three shad his host had caught. He brought them home, scaled them, filleted them and fried them with fresh-cut potato chips. Delicious! Quite the chef, my Tom!
Tomaldinho! I was seeing dollars sign$ I was going to sign him up with Amazulu in Durban – No Dad!! PSG in Paris!! Oh. My bad. I need new boots, Dad! Lime green ones.
– Soccer Tom – ‘It was nothing chaps! I do this every day!’ – about to be mobbed after scoring –
But then suddenly it was rugby. RUGBY Dad! I need new boots. You can’t play rugby in soccer boots, Dad! I’m a rugger player now!
Greg Seibert was an exchange student to Harrismith back in 1972. He mailed me in 2014 to say his brother Jeff was coming to SA for work in Port Elizabeth. He’s with General Motors. I said get him up to KZN and we can go to a game reserve. Short notice, so I booked Hluhluwe.
– eles in the mist –
Greg thought he may join us but it didn’t happen. Very sadly.
~~~~~ooo000ooo~~~~~
I wrote to friends after: Hared off at short notice to Hluhluwe-Mfolosi park. Harrismith’s 1972 Rotary exchange student Greg Seibert contacted me to say his brother was in SA. He works for General Motors and I spose he was checking to see if they still sell Chevs in this neck of the woods. He’s from just outside Detroit, Michigan.
Mfolosi was dry and Hluhluwe was burnt, the logs still smouldering from a fire that burnt about half the park. Lots to see in the line of big grey animals plus antelope and painted dogs. Lots of birds, too.
Jessie’s grade 10 class had Dr Chris Barnard and Heart Transplants as a subject last week.
When she told me I asked, ‘Did you tell them your Mama worked with him?’ Actually, no she hadn’t. She vaguely knew Mom had done it, but wasn’t confident enough to step forward. My shy Jess.
So out with Aitch’s old albums of her working next to the old sleazy charmer, still quite young back before 1983 (when he retired). She says he tried his luck to get her to go out with him one night, as he apparently did with all the nubiles on the team.
And there in the pics was Aitch in theatre greens and mask: The cardio-vascular perfusionist operating the heart-lung machine – ‘the oxygenator’ – that kept the patient alive once the blood circulation had been diverted away from their own heart and lungs. And there was the famous cad watching. And there was a heart in a jar.
– The Prof and The Mom –
Off to school went the album the next day and Jess was the focus of much attention and oohing and aahing. Which she loved.
Geoffrey Caruth is a doer. He gets going. He has run an indigenous nursery in an industrial area for decades, he ran an Olde Heritage Shoppe for years, he built a pond in a park – as a donation to the people of Westville; he has a lovely young (much younger!) wife and two ugly old dogs. He lives on the bank of the Palmiet river, on the boundary of the Palmiet Nature Reserve. Sure, he thinks that to be an Englishman is to have won the lottery in life, but hey, even he’s not perfect.
Recently he decided to re-introduce bushbuck into the 100ha Palmiet Nature Reserve in Westville, KwaZulu Natal and – typically – got off his butt. I would have talked about it, he rallied the troops. The bushbuck or imbabala (Tragelaphus sylvaticus) should be eminently suited to our valley and we hope they’ll thrive here.
So this week, 18 months after he decided to launch “Operation Nkonka”, we were in the Palmiet watching five beautiful bushbuck, three females and two males, jump out of the back of the truck and explore their new home.
Geoff and Warren Friedman watch with pride and angst:
A = Release site
B = Where I last saw a bushbuck
C = Our home
Later four more were released. Soon we’ll be fawning over their offspring, we hope!
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nkonka is isiZulu for male bushbuck;
bushbuck in general are imbabala; the Cape bushbuck is our species; the other is the Harnessed bushbuck or kéwel, a different species in west and central Africa. Convergent evolution has them looking very similar but ours is closely related to the Bongo and the Sitatunga while the Harnessed is closer to the Nyala. The Nyala has the wonderful Latin name Tragelaphus angasi – you can imagine how that came about! (angazi in isiZulu can mean ‘I don’t know’).
