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the road to Nyalaland
Sunday, March 30 2003
setting: Khoka Moya Campground, Kruger National Park, Northern Province, South Africa
Khoka Moya employs a drummer whose job is to make a racket at 5am every morning to awaken the guests so they can go on the morning game drive. Due to jet lag and plane-travel sleeplessness, my body seemed to think that 5am was as a good of a time to wake up as any other.
The morning's drive was rich in animals: Cape Buffalo, a White Rhinoceros, and a dramatic grand finalé of giraffes and zebras. We spent a considerable time driving back and forth through the bush trying to track down an elusive elephant, but this turned up nothing.
When the time came for us to settle up with Khoka Moya manager regarding the loss of my camera charger, my worst fears were realized. I gave them an estimated price of $15 for its replacement cost, which was a wild guess and probably, I realized later, too low. The woman we dealt with (who happened to be the wife of the macho guy who'd been our dinner entertainment last night) took my dollar figure, and, using a horrible exchange rate of 7.3 to the dollar, converted it into Rands. Gretchen thought Khoka Moya should also spring for the price of a disposable camera, since it seemed unlikely that we'd be able to get my camera recharged before disappearing again into the bush for a three day walking safari up near Punda Maria. The woman utterly refused, saying that R109.50 was all she was going to give us. She went on to justify this by saying the destruction of my camera charger "was an accident," and that the girl who had had this accident "Is an Afrikaans speaker, only speaking limited English, and had misunderstood..." That girl was actually sitting there
(strangely, wearing a khaki skirt)
as this altercation unfolded. When I'd talked to her yesterday, her English had seemed flawless. Interestingly, the altercation was unfolding by proxy, with Gretchen taking my side and this woman taking the girl's side. Gretchen pulled out all the stops in trying to procure a better settlement, even mentioning that I run a website and that I will surely make a note of our treatment at Khoka Moya. After it was clear that Gretchen wasn't leaving until she got a better settlement, the woman finally caved and agreed to give us R150 for our trouble. One gets used to the level of customer service one experiences in the United States, the land where the customer is always right. To us it seemed counter-intuitive to nickel and dime a customer after screwing up his equipment. It makes more sense to be gracious and overcompensate for one's errors, anything to preserve the reputation of the business and the goodwill of the customer.
Jules the tracker carried our bags to our car, we graciously tipped him (South Africa has something of tip-based economy) and hit the road.
Navigating the complex of highways running northward just west of Kruger National Park was again complicated by the difference between the map and realities on the ground. In some cases north-south highways bore route numbers that the map assigned to east-west routes heading to entirely different towns. My job was navigator, to make as much sense of this chaos as possible while Dina drove. Though signage was horrible, the condition of the roads themselves was uniformly excellent. Pot holes are almost nonexistent in South Africa.
Meanwhile Gretchen was in the back seat using the cellphone to make calls to stores in towns along our route, doing her best to track down a five volt, two ampere power supply for my camera. I didn't care about its make or model, just its specifications. I'd cut off the proprietary-connector-terminated wire from the destroyed power adapter and would be able to attach it to anything that successfully came up with the right levels. If nothing else, I could always use a computer power supply. Unfortunately, we were in a rather remote part of the world and none of the stores Gretchen called had any suitable devices in stock. Interestingly, as remote as we might have been, we almost always had cellphone coverage.
Somewhere not far from Punda Maria, we stopped at roadside place that claimed to be a café. It obviously wasn't a place frequented by white people. Its parking lot was a rutted patch of dirt out in front and a group of children were helping pluck a slaughtered chicken in an adjacent tin shed.
Inside, there seemed to be few things for sale aside from individual slices of bread and limited selection of soft drinks. As in all places in South Africa, the soft drinks had been bottled by the Coca Cola Corporation. Pepsi, the choice of a new generationTM, is unknown here. We sat down on rustic old bench in the main area and ordered a bottle of Fresca for five Rand. It came in a huge industrial-strength bottle - about two litres in size. We drank it out of plastic cups that looked as if they'd been in continuous use since the 1970s. While I stared off into the middle distance and a group of café regulars talked and ate pap in an adjacent room, Dina and Gretchen were trying to figure out logistics for the Cape Town part of the trip (which Dina would not be going on). I'd sort of wanted to go to Lesotho to experience the "Switzerland of Africa" and collect another stamp in my passport book, but Gretchen wanted to spend more time on the Garden Route. I said fine, let's just do the Garden Route then.
[REDACTED]
This particular region of South Africa was rich with semi-traditional villages, most of them featuring thatched rondavels as the principle architectural form. Occasionally, though, some prosperous person would have a metal roof or a boxy addition. The oddest sight was a conventionally repulsive American-style ranch home surrounded by rondavels.
One had to be careful driving because of all the cows milling around. Occasionally there were also goats, occasional dogs, and, in one place, a great many donkeys.
At the Punda Maria headquarters we rendezvoused with five other people in preparation for our walking safari. Firstly there was Barnaby, filmmaker for the BBC and his young American girlfriend Nicole. (Barnaby had made all the arrangements for this safari.) Then there was Chalice (the Voice of America reporter we'd dined with some days ago). She would be Dina's roommate at our camp. Finally there were two other women, one of whom was American. The other was a real (though still white) South African.
I was weary from the drive and found the pre-departure chit-chat of all these people tiresome. Meanwhile Gretchen was nowhere to be seen. I figured she was having one of her pouts somewhere, but I had no idea that the situation was actually much worse. Suddenly she appeared with a ghastly look on her face. It turned out that she'd left her backpack back at that café! It had all her stuff in it and it wasn't the sort of thing she could just forget about. So she and Dina set out to recover it, leaving me soaking in the marinade of chit chat. The only real entertainment was a group of pesky Vervet Monkeys who'd taken an interest in our rice cakes. Like all first-time observers of this species, I was amazed by how blue their testicles were.
About an hour later, Gretchen and Dina returned with the bag. They'd given the woman at the café a R20 tip.
The next big problem was the issue of what to do about Gretchen's vegetarianism during our three days in the bush. Dina had neglected to mention this when arrangements were being made, and now our tracker, Chris, didn't know what to do. "Not even chicken?" he asked. He'd never heard of such a thing. Eventually Gretchen managed to track down some baked beans to be included with the meals.
Towing a two-wheeled trailer of supplies behind us, we set off northeastward into the bush in a Land Rover. There were a few giraffes and blue-faced guinea fowl along the way. Near our destination, the Nyala camp, Chris stopped to point out an elephant chomping away a couple dozen feet away. It was a bachelor male who, we were told, frequents the Nyala camp perimeter.
The Nyala camp looked even more like the set from Survivor than the Khoka Moya game lodge. For one thing, there was absolutely no electricity at Nyala. It was dark when we arrived, and the place was lit entirely by a small log fire and kerosene lanterns (one set in front of each thatched-roofed cabin by Thomas the cook).
Dinner tonight consisted of a cast iron cauldron of barbecued chicken, a tupperware of pap contributed by Chris, some sort of cucumber-rich salad, and a bowl of baked beans for Gretchen. Chris turned out to be something of a jokester and kept referring to Gretchen as "the vegetarian."
See some photographs from the South Africa trip.
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