"Your trip will be awesome," Ocea said to me as we sat down for dinner at The Grill in Sandton. "I have great inspiration," I replied as I put the napkin on my lap. Ocea Garriock is my IBM colleague and good friend who first introduced me to South Africa four years ago when she met me at Tambo and escorted me around Sandton to various customers. Over three subsequent trips, we became great friends, touring the Cape winelands, Drakensberg, and Victoria Falls together. When I took my wife Helle and sons Ben and David with me on a trip in August of 2010, we shared a house in Dullstroom with Ocea and her daughters, spending a wonderful weekend walking over waterfalls and having fantastic dinners full of laughter and stories.
This evening we were waiting for Simon to arrive. The Grill is a nice steakhouse in a modern shopping mall in Sandton, off Rivonia Road. The steaks in South Africa are beyond compare. The beef is often grass fed, no hormones please, and the cows are much older than in the USA when they are slaughtered. Often the beef is aged for many days before serving and the resulting steaks are flavorful and tender. Filets here are pronounced with a hard "T," no french Filays please, and I was ready to order one.
But Simon was a bit late so we had an appeltizer, which is a carbonated apple juice, and a starter of Springbok Carpacio, and talked about our African adventures. Since my last trip two years ago, Ocea has been going on long off-road camping adventures in Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Mozambique. And it is those experiences, plus my own boredom with western hotels and ubiquitous Starbucks in every capital, that have inspired my adventure in Namibia.
Even though South Africa is in Africa, it has not really been very common for South Africans to vacation in neighbouring countries. Years of Apartheid before 1990 made travel in Africa unwelcome for many white South Africans, who more often vacationed in Europe or Australia rather than next door. You are still more likely to meet Americans in any of the neighbouring nations than South Africans, even though the travel trends are changing as Africa tourism increases.
Last year, Ocea and Simon took a brave adventure driving North across Zimbabwe to The Mana Pools, where they met friends who smartly had flown to Lusaka in Zambia and driven rented 4x4's South to meet meet them at The Pools. The drive up involved predation of a human kind as Zim police had roadblocks ever 10 or so miles where they would profer AIDS brochures to travellers with outstretched hands looking for small bribes in US Dollars for the right to move on. It was a never ending series of corrupt waypoints that transformed the trip up into a massive irritation.
The Mana Pools themselves are a completely wild part of Zimbabwe, on the boarder with Zambia. Here, the Zambezi River widens in a delta to form many pools and lakes. There are no tourist lodges, or fenced camps, and for two weeks Ocea, Simon, and friends camped 3 meters from the river's edge, where hippos and crocodiles ruled the slow current. In the camp, they organized their cars in a circle like covered wagons on the prairie, with tents inside the circle angled inward facing one Range Rover in the center that was a security zone in case lions overwhelmed the camp. If you are also friends with Ocea, you can see some of her wonderful photos of The Mana Pools here on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150799276993037.401884.524003036&type=3
On the first night, their experienced friend Adrian warned them not to sleep with their heads next to the canvass of the tent as Hyenas may with one bite crush their heads in their jaws and pull them out of the tent to eat them whole!
While cooking their Brai (BBQ), there was a pride of lions just 10 meters off watching the foreigners cook the meat, drawn in by the smell yet still wary given the flames of the campfire. That changed as the sun set and the lions, perhaps 8 of them in all, took down an Impala just on the edge of the camp and noisily consumed it just minutes after the sun set. The travelers were huddled around their campfire as the beasts chewed on bones and fought over pieces of the carcass.
At one point, Ocea stood up to fetch some tea from a picnic table near one of the cars and stopped just a few feet from the fire circle. There was a hyena who had jumped on the picnic table and was devouring the trash they had hung in a bag from a tree branch over the table. The beast was about 10 meters from the camp and the sight of one so close froze her in her tracks. She back away and returned to the campfire.
Surrounded as they were by a pride of lions and groups of hyena in the bush, crocodiles and hippos in the river, they went to bed that night sleeping on the ground in their tents, heads far from the canvass, terrified at the barking sounds they heard all night (which they later learned were Springbok in heat). Waking the next morning, they discovered their campfire overrun with hyena tracks throughout the camp - with one print in their frying pan. However, nothing had disturbed their tents and they gained a new sense of security that the carnivores were not interested in humans sleeping in tents.
However, just after lunch a massive bull elephant strode into camp and started pulling down branches from the tree where they had hung their garbage bag. And later that day, they rented canoes and paddled down the Zambezi past massive crocs, pods of hippos, and elephants along the banks.
These stories fill me with awe and they have of course inspired me to take my own adventure across Namibia starting on Friday. I assure my friends that I will not sleep on the ground and nor will I put my head next to the canvas. Ocea tells me that lions and hyenas do not climb on cars and seek out humans sleeping in tents, but I won't take any chances just the same.
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