Merry (Late) Christmas to All!

Lajuma has gotten pretty quiet over the holidays so there were only five of us celebrating Christmas on the mountain. We all pitched in and made ourselves a lovely feast, and ate our way through a warm sunny afternoon. I made a roast chicken, which isn't in the picture but it looked much like other roast chickens you may have seen. There were potatoes and squash and veggies amd stuffing and lots of good stuff. The last of the Halloween pumpkins met its fate as pie, and there was lots of chocolate and booze too. 

Pete and I wanted to get up early on Christmas morning to go see the baboons, but we didn't know where they slept the night before, so we slept in instead. We got lucky though: the troop strolled past while we were eating dinner, chasing butterflies and looking adorable. I wanted to get them a present, but there is really nothing we could give them that they wouldn't be better off without. I still think they would look cute in little Christmas sweaters though. 

We planned to have a fire after dinner but got too into playing board games instead and then went to bed still stuffed. The fire has been postponed to tonight, which is probably better because we can cook food on it instead of being too full to eat.

As you can see I have found a way to get photos onto a computer so I can post them. Here are some of the best Kruger pictures...

We saw lots of wildlife within an hour of our arrival in Kruger Park: impalas, jackals, zebras, buffalo, and elephants. This big one walked right across the road in front of us. We also saw a cheetah the first night, which is rare. There are no pictures though because it was about 50m away through the bushes, and we only saw a bit of its back. We knew it was a cheetah not a leopard because the spots were individual, not arranged in rosettes.

Here is a kudu, because they are awesome. This is a male with big beautiful horns. 

This bird was one of the animals I really wanted to see, just because of its name: the grey go-away bird. Their call really does sound like a whiny "go-WAAAAY". We saw lots, especially around the camps.

This giraffe was actually in Hluhluwe-Imfoluzi Park, not Kruger. You can see the oxpecker bird on his horn.

Now that I've figured out the pictures I will keep working on it. Hope everyone's Christmas was as good as mine, and have a great Boxing Day too!

Home again, sort of...

Just letting you know I'm still alive and back at Lajuma. It's good to be home, as much of a home as I have right now. We had a great time but it was the kind of vacation where you need a vacation afterwards. I sunburned my legs snorkeling at Cape Vidal and it is very hard to move. I used sunscreen but my legs were pasty white and the sun is really strong here.

A lot of people have left Lajuma and more will be leaving next week. We will be six for Christmas and we have to get organized about food. So far we have lots of cake but forgot ingredients for stuffing. A turkey won't fit in the freezer so we have to get it sooner to the time.

Anyways, it's late so I have to say goodnight!

St Lucia

I am in St Lucia now, which is a little resort town on the Indian Ocean. It is busy but not unpleasantly so. People come for the beach and the fishing and boating, and a lot of them come from within South Africa. The ocean is very warm but the waves are the biggest I've ever been in and it's a little scary. I couldn't really swim in the surf but I managed to get out to where it was about a meter deep and body surf. By then the waves were breaking higher than my head and very powerful so I drank quite a lot of seawater. It doesn't taste any better in Africa. I'm not confident enough to go out beyond the breakers, especially since I haven't seen anyone else doing it. The beach is nice white sand and there is lots of it, not very crowded so it is great for just being lazy. There are no interesting seashells because they all get broken.

Our campsite is so close to the beach that I fell asleep last night to the sound of the waves. Then I woke up around midnight to the sound of the rain, and was glad I put the rain fly on my tent. I am always tempted not to, because it is cooler with just the inner mosquito net layer, but it often rains at night and I don't want to fight with the tent in the rain in the dark. It would be about a 2 minute walk to the beach except that there is a fence in the way, so it is about ten minutes. I am glad of the fence though because it keeps out the hippos and crocodiles. It doesn't keep out the smaller critters, like the 2m spitting cobra I found in the shower yesterday. The security guard chased it out. Now every time I go in the bathroom I have to check for snakes, but today it has been pleasantly cobra-free. The trash cans have no lids, making them into a convenient central food depot for the vervet monkeys and making a mockery of all the signs about not feeding the monkeys. They are fearless and I'm glad they are vervets and not baboons. Vervets are little so they scavange and beg and sneakily grab food, but baboons are big enough to really hurt somebody if you had something they wanted. It is nice to see the little baby vervets though. They are very cute and I can see why people are tempted to feed them.

Several people have told me that hippos regularly roam around the center of town at night, and I would like to see that. The oddest thing I have seen in town was a pig. It's not even livestock: there is a tourist family here with their pets, four large dogs and their pig, on leashes. I just saw the man lift it into the back of the pickup truck. I guess it can't jump in like the dogs can. The dogs bark a bit at people walking past and the pig grunts at them. It's really bizarre: I can see them out the window and I can't stop staring.

I just went on a hippo and crocodile boat tour. It was more interesting than I expected: we got a very good view of the hippos and crocs and there were a lot of interesting birds. Jacandas are little water birds that look like they are walking on the water but they really just walk on the underwater plants. There were fish eagles and egrets and herons, and the pigmy goose which is tiny like a grebe. We saw the dominant male hippo marking his territory by spraying poop around with his tail. His name is Vincent Van Hippo because he only has one ear.

Tomorrow we will go horseback riding on the beach, and I want to go for a walk as well. Early morning would be the best time, maybe even if it is raining again. It is not quite as hot as Louis Trichardt but it is more humid and can be uncomfortable. We are staying three days in St Lucia, which is a nice change from Kruger where we stayed a different place every night. Kruger National Park was amazing, I will tell you about it another time, but it was one of the coolest things I have ever done. We saw four leopards, wild dogs, elephants really close... Anyway, I should go to dinner now. We are going to the same restaurant as last night because it was really good and cheaper than buying a stove or firewood to cook for ourselves.

More Creatures

It has been a good week for wildlife here at Lajuma. I finally got to see the kudu! I was hiking, listening out for the baboons, when three kudu bounded across the road about 5m in front of me. They are the size of small horses, with huge spiral horns. There were a few more off in the bushes but I couldn't see them very well. They really are majestic and you can hear the hoofbeats when they run. I have also seen a mother warthog with three little wart-piglets. The baboons were trying to play with one of the piglets and it was running away squeaking with a sound like one of those squeaky toys you give to dogs. One of the advantages of being with the baboons is that you see more other wildlife. Other animals are less vigilant because they assume that the baboons will give alarm calls if they see anything dangerous. The baboons are habituated and don't really react to us, so I often see bushbuck or duiker or warthogs looking confused because they see scary humans and the baboons are not running away. I also saw the vervet monkeys, which are not habituated so they are less often seen than the baboons and samangoes.

The rainy season has brought out less desirable wildlife as well, like rain spiders and mosquitoes. There are tiny black ants everywhere. They don't bite people but they crawl on me all the time, and get into any food that is not sealed up. My boots were infested one morning, and there were so many in the kitchen light fixture that it stopped working. They are mighty predators in their tiny insect world: a group of ants will surround and kill much larger moths and beetles and spiders. The geckoes help a bit, sitting on a wall next to a line of ants and picking out the biggest ones with a lightning-fast tongue. Most people have geckoes in their rooms now. My biggest one is about three inches long, plus as much again for the tail. Its name is Howard, I forget why. Pete has a huge one named Godzilla, and the one at the bush camp is Klaus. There are also lots of tiny ones but they don't have names. They look like mini dragons.

The barn, where I'm staying, has plenty of fauna, but bush camp has even more. They don't have a cat, and they have hollow bamboo walls that provide safe little highways for enormous mice, which then attract predators. They had a bit of a surprise the other day. It turned up late at night so I only heard about it the next morning, when they drove up with a box in the back of the truck. There was a big sign taped to the box "Danger: Black Mamba! DO NOT OPEN!" They caught it with a net, and I don't know how they got it into the box without being bitten. They were on the way to take it to Obrecht, the property manager. He is amazingly knowlegable about wildlife and pretty much everything else in southern Africa, and he got his special snake stick, opened the box very carefully, and showed us the snake. It really was a black mamba, a small one less than a metre long. It was remarkably agile and strong, much more active than the garter snakes I play with at home, and a matte greenish black colour. Snakes try to avoid biting people because they need their venom to kill prey. A snake is likely to starve if it wastes all its venom biting a person, not that that's much of a consolation. I see snakes occasionally but I watch out for them and stay far away and they have never bothered me so far. Oh, and at the party at bush camp last night I noticed they have the warning sign taped to the fridge now. That ought to freak out the next bunch of new people staying there.

Tomorrow I leave on a trip to Kruger and Imfuluzi National Parks and Swaziland. I might have a chance to post something and maybe upload photos at some point, but don't count on it. I will be back at Lajuma on the 16th and should be able to write then.

A Holiday at Lajuma

Holidays are a bit different in a small isolated place like this. People have to try a little harder to celebrate things that would just happen back home, or to celebrate different cultures' holidays.  Halloween was going to be a big deal: Pete made a huge fire, we got pumpkins to carve, and I had balloons and candy vampire fangs. Unfortunately a big storm blew in just around sunset. The fire went all horizontal so you couldn't get near it, then the torrential rain put it out, then the lightning knocked the power out. Drinking beer while shivering in the cold rainy dark got old pretty soon and we all went to bed early.

Only one of the pumpkins got carved so I used another one to make pie. It worked surprisingly well but you can't get pie plates here so I had to make it in a big rectangular cake pan. Pumpkins here are a bit different: I got two that were pumpkin shaped but pale green and one that was dark green and covered in lumpy warts. The flesh was orange and tasted like pumpkin at least. 

To make up for the disappointing Halloween party we were determined to have a good Guy Fawkes Day party. Camilla made a cake but baked it too long so it was more like chewy squares or cookies. It tasted good though, especially with a melted marshmallow smeared on top. 

We couldn't find the baboons that morning so I had the afternoon free to make a guy. It is surprisingly hard to make a life sized dummy out of sticks and string but I managed. It's all in the choice of sticks. We used the carved pumpkin, quite moldy by now, for a head. I had to hold it up since the dummy wasn't strong enough to support the pumpkin. The last few days have been hot and dry and the fire was really going so the guy didn't last long. It was kind of sad actually. We had a good brai over his ashes and talked until the coals were barely glowing. 

It looks like Christmas is going to be a small affair. Most people will leave in December and new ones will arrive in the new year. The ovens here are not up to roasting a turkey, assuming we are able to purchase a turkey, but maybe we can roast it over a fire. People used to cook a whole ox that way so we should be able to manage something. 

Town Day

Lajuma is only an hour and a half from the town of Louis Trichardt, so every Monday is town day. They are supposed to pick us up at 8, but it's usually later. There are almost 20 students now and most people needed to go, so we had a little convoy of beat up pickups and the van. I rode in the least powerful truck, which had the trailer for some reason, and we had to get out and walk up the steepest part. I don't think I've mentioned the road yet. Lajuma is up a mountain, 7 km from the paved road, and that 7 km takes about half an hour, more if it rained recently. Fortunately the rainy season is getting off to a slow start: two storms and some mist, then it got sunny and hot again. 

Louis Trichardt is small and usually very hot, but it is the biggest place around and has quite a few stores. The strangest thing is if you ask store staff whether the store sells something, they will have no idea. It's not just a few people, it is about 9 out of 10 (I don't know where to find stuff here; don't judge me!) The occasional person that knows something will be very nice and helpful though. 

You can get the same sort of groceries as at home except that everything is a bit different. Cottage cheese is a spread here, and you can't get proper spices, only spice mixes and they all contain salt. They have rusks here, which are tasty crunchy bread things that fit in your pocket and are surprisingly filling. I hope I can get them at home. 

The problem with town day is that it is too long. We started at Cafe Rosa for breakfast. Most of the other patrons are old white Afrikaners who go to the church next door, which is a little weird but the food is great and we always get a warm welcome despite being a horde of scruffy backpackers. You can get vetkoek (pronounced fat cook) which is a huge deep fried dough thing with filling. The best filling is eggs and bacon and cheese, a real heart attack on a plate kind of thing. I didn't get that today though, I went for a nice healthy carrot cake. It's only one day a week and I spend at least four other days hiking and scrambling up the mountain from dawn to dusk so I can eat what I want. 

After breakfast I went to the bookstore and it wasn't there. It's not really a store, just a woman who usually has a few tables of used books next to Robot Hardware, and she wasn't there this week. Sadly, Robot Hardware does not sell robots (unless you count creepy toy puppy things that have batteries to make them look like they're breathing). 

My next stop was the mall. I met some of the other students at the good restaurant, Mikes Kitchen. Melissa had a daiquiri which was over a foot tall and very skinny and pink, and I decided I needed one too. We were there for a few hours and then it was time for groceries, the real reason we go to town. 

Pete drove one of the trucks today and he wanted to leave early so we managed to leave by 3. Everyone else had to wait for the official departure time of 4, which usually turns into 5. The town doesn't really have anything to do, no movie theatre or bowling or anything like that, and it is stupefyingly hot and not particularly scenic so going for a walk is no fun. Leaving early was a good thing, and most importantly it got us home in time to check the baboons' sleeping sites. If we know where they are sleeping we can get there before they wake up tomorrow, which will be about 5:15 in the m

Rain, and Various Creatures

Well, the rainy season arrived the night before last, announcing itself with an epic nine hour thunderstorm! You couldn't tell which lightning went with which thunder. I was trying to sleep when it started and I could actually feel the thunder rumbling. Somebody saw lighning hit our house but things must be well grounded because it didn't do any damage, didn't even blow a breaker.

The power up here is surprisingly reliable, considering it comes from a homemade generator powered by a waterfall. The current is a little erratic so the lights flicker sometimes, but we always have light and more importantly computers. There is even Internet but the bandwidth is limited so we can only do basic stuff.

Anyway the thunderstorm stopped around midmorning so we were able to go out after the baboons. Soaking wet baboons do not look happy; they tend to huddle together and their tails get awfully muddy. The rain muffles sounds so they lose track of each other so I saw several joyful reunions. Naturally I followed a small group of juveniles who got separated from the rest for a few hours, and they moved fast looking for the troop but they went the wrong way and took me on a longer walk than usual, with a lot of steep cliffy bits.

The rain stopped in the afternoon. It comes and goes but there is still a fair bit of sunshine in between. Everyone is happy about the rain. Laura doesn't have to water her tree saplings, Jordan's termites have emerged from hibernation, and it is not so hot anymore. Bonnie the cat does not approve of it though. She is young and has likely never seen a storm like that but she does enjoy the plentiful frogs. I don't know how we got so many frogs so fast. They are rusty red on top and brown underneath and they are very loud. I found one in the bathroom; it's not nice to find something large and moving when you are more than half asleep.

About the bushbabies, they do have huge eyes but you can't mistake them for anything else that lives around here. Yellow eyeshine up a tree is a bushbaby, orange eyeshine is usually a civet or jennet, blue eyes around knee level are a leopard (who should be left alone) and the tiny purple eyes right on the ground are spiders. Yes you can see spider eyes and the lawn is full of them! The cat has yellow eyes but she is much friendlier than a bushbaby.

The Rainy Season?

The weather is a popular topic anywhere, and here the rainy season is mentioned at least daily. It should have arrived weeks ago, or not until November, and it was supposed to come today, or Tuesday, or not for weeks yet. Nobody seems to know but everyone has heard rumours.

Lajuma is a great place for rumours, like the one about the zebras that were bought by the previous owner of the property. There are definitely zebra bones where one fell off a cliff (they don't normally live in such mountainous terrain) and there may or may not be surviving zebra around. There is so much dense bush around that large animals can certainly hide in it.

I saw a young kudu yesterday, and bushbuck and red duiker and about a dozen mongooses. I didnt know mongooses were social but apparently many species do live in groups. And I saw my first bushbaby last night. That makes four of the five primate species in the area: baboons, samangos, vervets and the thick tailed bushbaby. I still need to see the lesser bushbaby, but they are usually harder to find.

And speaking of primates, I finished my sock monkey! It looks ok except for the ears which are a bit raggedy. Anyone know how to make better ears for a sock monkey? I might just leave it though and say it is an old male that has been through the wars. Baboons tend to have scars, torn ears and broken tails, especially the males. I am getting better at recognizing individual baboons, especially the males but a few of the females and juveniles as well. Anyway I still have some socks left, so when the rain hits and we get stuck inside sometimes I will make a sock elephant.

We had a lot of thunder and scary dark clouds this afternoon, lots of leaves clattering down on the roof, but not a drop of rain. It still feels kind of unsettled though.

Sitting under a tree...

It's 1 pm here and I'm sitting under a tree in the yard watching samango monkeys scampering around. They climb pretty well and on the ground they look almost catlike in the way they move.

We went out early this morning to follow the baboons and found them just before 6 am in a big fig tree. After a breakfast of figs they went to sit in the sun. They wandered up to a neighbouring farm to graze in a burned patch, then around 10 they went through an impenetrable thicket and up a cliff and we lost them. While we were following them it was unbelievable being so close to these wild animals and having them not mind.

I am being watched. The two white horses that live on the property have come up behind me. They are supposed to be feral and nobody looks after them, but they like people well enough. They will eat from your hand and they like to be brushed. We have sat on their backs but they don't take kindly to being told where to go. The way to make horses accept you as the leader is to make them run around a pen until they will come to you and behave, but we don't have a pen and I think these horses might just kick you instead of running. Lady, the mother horse, has scars all over her neck from a leopard attack years ago. Anything that can fight off a leopard probably won't be easily pushed around. Leopards usually don't attack people and a horse is even bigger so I don't know why it went after her.

I have been at Lajuma for a few days now. It is up in the mountains and not the traditional African safari kind of place. There is some grassland parts but much of it is dense brush and everything has thorns. Big thorns and little ones, curved or barbed, and all out to get you. It is worth it though. I have seen mongooses (mongeese?) and klipspringers which are funny little antelopes. The bushbabies are funny. I have not seen one yet but they make funny noises at night, little startled screams. There are lots of brown ibises that make a kind of hooting sound that I keep mistaking for a baboon.

And of course there are the baboons. One troop is habituated to people and they will keep doing their normal behaviours within a few meters of people. They came to the house yesterday and spent a few hours grazing on the lawn. It was amazing to have dozens of wild animals going about their business just meters away. Apparently once they are fully habituated you can walk among them and they won't even look up. These ones were still more suspicious than that. There are about 70 baboons in this troop but they are usually spread out enough that you can't see them all at the same time. It is not easy to find the baboons. We have gone out looking for them a couple of times and spent hours walking and listening and not found them. Once we really get started we will follow them all day and see where they spend the night and meet them at the sleeping site at dawn. The first thing I need to do is find my way around the site. Sometimes the baboons will go somewhere that people can't, like down a cliff, so I need to know alternate routes to catch up with them.

I am surprised how cold it is here. We are just north of the Tropic of Capricorn (there's a sign on the highway marking it) but it is downright cold at night. Days are warmish as long as you are in the sun but shade drops the temperature about ten degrees and it can still be chilly. The other night there was the most massive epic thundercloud ever. There was lots of lightning and everyone thought it would be the start of the summer rainy season. We got lots of wind but only a few raindrops and it has been sunny since then, so I don't know when the rains will come.

Tomorrow is town day when everyone will pile into a van and go to Louis Trichardt for groceries. I am looking forward to seeing the town. It is safer than Johannesburg so we can walk around and see stuff.

A Few First Impressions

I am finally in South Africa! I'm at the Moafrika Hostel now and it's the nicest hostel I've ever stayed at. Actually it's nicer than any hotel I've ever stayed at, cool African decor and very clean and peaceful. I think I'm the only guest here which is weird. Hostels are usually full and there's always someone to talk to. The staff seem really nice and they speak good English but they speak Zulu among themselves so joining their conversation would be awkward.

Every property here has serious fences around it, mostly concrete walls topped with razor wire, and this is the good part of town. The hostel has a fence and a couple of guard dogs. I was a bit alarmed to see a rotweiller bounding up to me but he just pulled up one of the garden stakes and wanted to play fetch. I wouldn't want to break in uninvited though. They say this is a suburb but it doesn't look like a suburb to me. It is all fenced compounds scattered over the landscape with dirt tracks between them. The adjacent compounds contain houses or apartments, and some don't seem to have any buildings at all, just a fence around some dry grass and red dirt.

I spent yesterday in Heathrow airport, which is huge. It's at least a ten minute walk to get anywhere, and that's on those moving sidewalks. I had to take a subway between terminals, and another subway within the second terminal to get to the gate. The whole place was like an expensive mall, but with planes. All the stores seemed to sell the same stuff, mostly liquor and perfume, so it was not very interesting. Of course, I was very sleep deprived and spent the whole day falling asleep on my feet and waking up just before I fall. I didn't sleep at all on the plane from Calgary to London because by the time it felt like bedtime the sun was rising under the wing. I had a window seat and got a good view of dark blue sea, with ice in it I think. Planes take a shortcut over the arctic so we flew over southern Greenland in the night and I guess there could be ice so far north. It was light by the time we flew over Ireland, which was very pretty, but I didn't see much of England because of the clouds. I would love to visit Britain some day (the airport doesn't count even though I did have to get my passport stamped to change terminals).

The flight to Johannesburg was longer but I was tired enough by then to sleep a little bit. The Johannesburg airport was much less fancy than Heathrow, more like minor airports at home. The driver who picked me up thought it was funny how impressed I was with the local plant life. Our fancy garden flowers back home are just plants here, growing wild. Apparently I arrived just as the spring flowers are getting going. There are bushes with blue and red and purple flowers, and succulent plants and palm trees and trees with little spiky leaves along their branches that may be monkey puzzle trees, and I don't recognize much of anything. I tried to go for a walk but couldn't figure out how to get out through the fence. I could have asked someone but the fence seems like a sign that it's not a very good idea to wander around aimlessly so I walked around the yard. There were chickens and ducks in a pen, and the rotweillers came with me. Dogs like having someone to follow. There were ostriches down the street, a male and two females. I took a picture but they were too far away so they just look like dark dots against the dry grass. The soil itself is a distinct red colour, almost but not quite like PEI. It looks like I thought Africa would look.

I thought it would be hot here but it isn't. It was perfect this afternoon and now that it's dark it's downright cold. It got dark faster than at home, not much twilight, and early around 6:30 or so. I tried to watch the sunset from the porch but it didn't last long and I missed it when the dogs tried to climb into my hammock. There are crickets that sound just like the ones at home and a few night bird calls that I don't recognize. 

Dinner will be some kind of venison pie made of three kinds of local antelope, and after dinner I'm going to bed early. I have to leave at 5:30 AM to get to the bus station by 9. It's about 40 or 50 km but it's rush hour. It seems like an incredible waste to have people stuck in traffic for hours every day when they could be doing more interesting and productive things like, well, anything else. If a million people waste three hours every day in traffic jams, and they do this every day, that must add up to lifetimes of hours down the drain. A reasonable commute is one of my requirements for how I want my life to be, even if that means living in a smaller place to be close to downtown.