Letter of the month
We really enjoyed this email from Mike
about his trip to South Africa with his wife Shaun, and we thought you would
too.
Hi Ian and
Paula,
...
we left on vacation the evening of the 14th of September and returned on the morning of the 24th. We ended up picking none of the three options in my previous email. Our itinerary was crammed (at least by our standards - we're used to being busy on city breaks, but usually in a more autonomous spontaneous way - this trip was mainly around pre-booked activities). The vacation occurred in three distinct phases, each lasting roughly three days: Oceans, Safari, Geology/Paleoanthropology.
Our itinerary, with brief commentary, was as follows:
Sept. 14: Go to work in the morning. Leave mid-afternoon. Go home and complete house cleaning with Shaun (she wants the place spotless for our neighbours are caring for our cats). Go to Heathrow. Board flight to Cape Town, South Africa. Try to enjoy on-demand video of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven. Fall into light doze. Get awoken by an irate elderly man seated behind me for the sin of moving around too much in my sleep.
Sept. 15: Arrive in Cape Town. Get picked up at airport by driver who takes us about an hour's drive east-south-east along the coast to Hermanus, our base for the next three nights, famous for its cliff-side land-based whale watching. Shaun has a nap in our seaside hotel. I walk out looking for whales and walk along the cliffside for 15 minutes, not really expecting to see any. Then I arrive at a small bay and see a couple of Southern Right Whales frolicking. I run back and wake Shaun and drag her out. We run out onto a rocky promontory and watch whales approach to within 20m or so. Shaun takes many pictures of "dassies" or rock hyrax, small rodent-like animals that every South African, it seems, will inform you are not rodents but have as their closest living relative the elephant. I later look into this and find out that the evolutionary divergence occurred no less than 75 million years ago (i.e. contemporaneous with dinosaurs). I discount the relationship between dassies and elephants (strictly speaking inaccurately but it feels right) to roughly the same as that between me and a newt.
We watch lots more whales and then eat an excellent and rather inexpensive meal. I'll say no more about meals; they were generally very good and rather cheap.
Sept. 16: The playfully high risk day. We are picked up at our hotel by a driver with a small van full of fellow daytrippers. The driver hands me a bottle of water to wash down an anti-nausea pill. It turns out to be paint-thinner (probably, as the substance is only tentatively identified a day later during a happenstance meeting with the driver). I spend an hour or so self-monitoring for signs of poisoning. We board a small vessel in Gansbaai (about 45min east down the coast from Hermanus) and bounce through the water for 1/2 hour or so. Then we put on wetsuits and masks and alternate in groups of four floating in a cage lashed to the side of the ship and watch great white sharks (at least a dozen in succession). The sharks are magnificent; the longest are fully 4m in length. One hit the cage and another bit the cage and shook it gently (gently by the standards of 1 ton animals) but generally they ignore it. The most unlikely and spectacular sight is of a seal leaping out of the water with a shark coming up right after it, closely followed by the shark bursting from the water (at least 1/2 its body length) with the seal in its mouth. Seagulls descending on the water right afterwards confirmed the fate of the seal.
Afterwards we were dropped off at a tiny airstrip and we each enjoyed a one-hour microlight aircraft flight over the coast (innumerable whales, perfectly visible dark against the light brown of the coastal ocean floor, plenty of mother and calf pairs, many mating pods) culminating in a flight over a cliff (gaining 3000 feet of altitude in a couple of seconds) and some basic aerial acrobatics.
Sept. 17: Whale watching day. A tour operator (Ingo) who organized a number of our excursions picks us up as he is taking his children on a morning whale-watching cruise (2.5 hours) with us. On the drive to Gansbaai, Shaun and I organize through Ingo another cruise in the afternoon that is part whale watching but also takes us to Dyer Island and the smaller Geyser Rock where a colony of 20,000 (or 60,000 depending on the source) Cape Fur Seals reside. The whale watching is fun; I particularly like standing on the narrow upper decks (against advice of crew) gripping the rails madly while the afternoon ship does high-speed runs between different viewing locations. Of course we see lots of whales (all Southern Rights) with many close approaches and some breaching in the distance. For me the highlight is the seal island. It is a beautiful desolate small rocky island that is covered with seals. The island and the water around it are filthy with seals, blurry with seals.
Sept. 18: Cape Town and environs. We are picked up at 6:30am and are driven to our hotel in Cape Town, unusually with no scheduled agenda. We rectify this immediately and arrange for a driver/guide to take us around the Cape beginning at 1:30pm. We use the morning to take a cable car up Table Mountain (flat tabletop mountain looming over Cape Town...but wait a minute, you've already been there: "First Month, Last Night" and "The High is the Low"). Unlike your experience of Table Mountain, ours was excellent, primarily due to the cooperative weather. Next we zipped down the mountain and over to the Aquarium: I particularly liked the jellyfish and the giant white crabs.
At 1:30pm our tour guide picks us up for drive down the Cape. He is quiet and a bit "down" at first but then picks up quite a bit when he realizes that we are actually interested in his commentary and the tour. It was a thoroughly enjoyable journey: whales breaching close offshore, the penguin colony at Boulders Beach, a troop of baboons (whose complex social behaviour was pointed out to us and explained by our guide), the oddball fauna (fynbos) comprising the smallest but richest of the world's six floral kingdoms, the spectacular scenery of Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope (it was very very windy - fall over wind - but that is precisely what I wanted for the Cape of Storms and shipwrecks). Curiously, I was very gratified to agree with the oceanographic argument that the Indian/Atlantic Ocean boundary really lies there, rather than at Cape Agulhas, the southernmost point of Africa; I like the fact that I can now claim to have been in the Indian Ocean. Some locals state you can actually see the colour difference in the major currents as they meet off Cape Point.
Thus endeth the Oceans portion of our tour.
Sept. 19: The Safari portion. Go to airport. Fly to Jo'burg. Get picked up at airport by a driver to who takes us on the 2.5 hour journey to Pilanesburg National Park, a 55,000 hectare game reserve circular in shape because it is bordered by a 1.2 billion year old collapsed volcanic crater. We were taken to our luxury digs, the Tshukudu Bush Lodge, in one of six bush cottages on a hill overlooking the savannah. What amazed me was the density of the animal population, leading me to later get assurances that the park ecosystem was self-sufficient, and wasn't an enormous zoo. On the drive into the lodge (10 minutes?) we saw zebra, warthog, baboons and waterbuck. We dropped off our stuff and immediately went on a game drive with two other guests and a guide. Giraffe, rhino, elephant, hippo, crocodile, wildebeest, jackal, impala (many impala), zebra, warthogs, various antelope variants. You've done game drives. I like how the afternoon drives transition into night, and I don't mean twilight, I mean having difficulty seeing an elephant 15 feet away without illumination.
Sept. 20: Two game drives: one at 6:00am until 9:30 or 10:00, another at 4:00pm. More critters including indolent lions in the afternoon. I really like seeing buffalo at night on the way back (the 4th of the big five - unfortunately we missed leopard, but I would have preferred hyena or African hunting dogs or even cheetah, which we also missed. I did see a pack of banded mongoose, however, bounding over a rock face). As night fell and as we ate the second of two terrific dinners in the main lodge, we were able to enjoy the terrible beauty of a bush fire ravaging a hilltop in the park: it looked like a fire necklace around the hill, with individual flaming trees and bushes visible through a telescope in the lodge.
Note there is a lot of time in between the drives. Shaun spent some of that napping; I sat on our balcony and marvelled at what I could see in terms of wildlife (the highlight being a troupe of baboons working their way across the plain - oddly reminiscent of a platoon of WWII era soldiers picking their way across a hostile landscape - very spread out with alternating walking and sentry-like observation, at least the adults). Ultimately from the vantage point of our cottage and the lodge I saw baboon, warthog, wildebeest, impala, kudu, rhino, vervet monkeys (they stole my biscuits and sugar for tea), giraffe, rock hyrax (the closest living relative to blah blah blah), and some other antelope types. Apparently if you simply sit on your balcony you will eventually see pretty much every animal.
Sept. 21: The safari highlight occurs in the morning: we watch four adult female lions hunting wildebeest. Much tension as we watch one lioness work its way downwind of the wildebeest while the other three (setting a trap) spread out in tall grass bordering the more open plain where the first lioness is stalking. The first three work their way up a riverbed to get closer, complicated by the fact that they have to work around a rhino. One of the three decides to bolt after a giraffe. The giraffe runs, spooking the handful of wildebeest into a mini-stampede. No dinner for the lions, but it was fantastic to see the whole drama laid out in front of us.
We are driven to Pretoria, arriving in a mall parking lot by 1:00pm, ending the Safari portion of our tour and beginning the Geology/Paleoanthropology portion. A German-born geologist named Aki picks us up and takes us on a guided tour of the Tswaing meteor crater, a 220,000 year old crater in the savannah roughly 1.1km across, with the crater rim 60m above the surrounding plain and the crater floor 120m below the rim. It was very hot and so Shaun and I eschewed the long walk (3.5 hours) in favour of walking partway around the rim and then partway down into the crater. The object that hit was 50-60m across and released energy equivalent to the first H-bomb test.
We were driven back to a hotel in Melville, one of the less terrifying suburbs of Johannesburg and for the first occasion of our journey, ordered out for food because we were exhausted.
Sept. 22: At 7:00am we were picked up by Aki for a full-day guided tour of the Vredefort Dome, a geologic structure (very recently - July in fact - declared a World Heritage Site) consisting of a partial ring of hills about 70 km in diameter and the area within them. These are at the center of a crater that was originally 250-300 km in diameter, due to the impact of an asteroid some 10km in diameter about 2 billion years ago, making the Vredefort Dome the oldest and biggest impact structure on the planet. Our geologist guide showed us a number of hill formations, rocky outcroppings and a quarry with evidence of the impact (pseudo-tachylite: melted granite solidified as a dark glass-like rock; shattercones: odd formations in rock formed by the impact shockwave; vertical or even overturned crust rock strata). As well, we saw 3 billion year old rock containing iron bands that were formed when the first free oxygen released by primitive life (prokaryotes - cells without nuclei) reacted with oceanic dissolved iron and the resulting iron oxides precipitated down to the ocean floor. All very cool.
Interestingly, we eat a sort of picnic on the private land of a farmer Aki knows, on a hilltop surrounded by the circular rock-pile remnants of a Tswana Iron-age hill fort (small dwellings really).
Sept. 23: Our last day. We are picked up at the luxurious time of 9:00am. We have a driver/guide (an effusive German) and a Ph.D student scientist. We drive off to the Cradle of Humanity, a World Heritage site consisting of a 470 square kilometre area containing 13 fossil sites many of which have produced fossil hominids. In fact these sites have produced something like 40% of the fossil hominids discovered in the past half-century. Fossils of australopithecus africanus, paranthropus robustus, home ergaster and possibly one other (homo habilis?) have all been found here. We lunch at a site called Drimolen, not generally open to the public and have lunch after a presentation in front of a table covered with high-resolution casts of a plethora of primate and hominid skulls (some famous, like the Taung child and Mrs Ples). We look at breccia (rock composed of fragments embedded in fine-grain matrix) replete with fossil animals extracted from the Drimolen site. We look at breccia embedded in the cave walls (really the wall of the hole we are in) that scientists are painstakingly sifting through in the hope of finding more hominid fossils. Later we head for Sterkfontein, another famous site. We infer from our scientist guide's behaviour that he is not supposed to take us on "guided" tours of the cave itself (perhaps stepping on the toes of the official site tour guides). We slip in the back way and make our way through the magnificent and surprisingly large and complicated cave structure. During the drive to and from the sites I ask every question I can think of about hominid evolution. Shaun and I later agree that having two guides come along is overkill, leading to overpricing, but also that we simply had to visit these sites. A magical day, culminating in being driven to Jo'burg International Airport and boarding a flight for home.
Sept. 24: Planes, trains and cabs. Shaun and I arrive at home mid-morning, basking in the aftermath of what we agree was the best vacation of our adult lives.
Sorry about the delay in getting back to you, but I had to write this in instalments.
cheers,
Mike
...
we left on vacation the evening of the 14th of September and returned on the morning of the 24th. We ended up picking none of the three options in my previous email. Our itinerary was crammed (at least by our standards - we're used to being busy on city breaks, but usually in a more autonomous spontaneous way - this trip was mainly around pre-booked activities). The vacation occurred in three distinct phases, each lasting roughly three days: Oceans, Safari, Geology/Paleoanthropology.
Our itinerary, with brief commentary, was as follows:
Sept. 14: Go to work in the morning. Leave mid-afternoon. Go home and complete house cleaning with Shaun (she wants the place spotless for our neighbours are caring for our cats). Go to Heathrow. Board flight to Cape Town, South Africa. Try to enjoy on-demand video of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven. Fall into light doze. Get awoken by an irate elderly man seated behind me for the sin of moving around too much in my sleep.
Sept. 15: Arrive in Cape Town. Get picked up at airport by driver who takes us about an hour's drive east-south-east along the coast to Hermanus, our base for the next three nights, famous for its cliff-side land-based whale watching. Shaun has a nap in our seaside hotel. I walk out looking for whales and walk along the cliffside for 15 minutes, not really expecting to see any. Then I arrive at a small bay and see a couple of Southern Right Whales frolicking. I run back and wake Shaun and drag her out. We run out onto a rocky promontory and watch whales approach to within 20m or so. Shaun takes many pictures of "dassies" or rock hyrax, small rodent-like animals that every South African, it seems, will inform you are not rodents but have as their closest living relative the elephant. I later look into this and find out that the evolutionary divergence occurred no less than 75 million years ago (i.e. contemporaneous with dinosaurs). I discount the relationship between dassies and elephants (strictly speaking inaccurately but it feels right) to roughly the same as that between me and a newt.
We watch lots more whales and then eat an excellent and rather inexpensive meal. I'll say no more about meals; they were generally very good and rather cheap.
Sept. 16: The playfully high risk day. We are picked up at our hotel by a driver with a small van full of fellow daytrippers. The driver hands me a bottle of water to wash down an anti-nausea pill. It turns out to be paint-thinner (probably, as the substance is only tentatively identified a day later during a happenstance meeting with the driver). I spend an hour or so self-monitoring for signs of poisoning. We board a small vessel in Gansbaai (about 45min east down the coast from Hermanus) and bounce through the water for 1/2 hour or so. Then we put on wetsuits and masks and alternate in groups of four floating in a cage lashed to the side of the ship and watch great white sharks (at least a dozen in succession). The sharks are magnificent; the longest are fully 4m in length. One hit the cage and another bit the cage and shook it gently (gently by the standards of 1 ton animals) but generally they ignore it. The most unlikely and spectacular sight is of a seal leaping out of the water with a shark coming up right after it, closely followed by the shark bursting from the water (at least 1/2 its body length) with the seal in its mouth. Seagulls descending on the water right afterwards confirmed the fate of the seal.
Afterwards we were dropped off at a tiny airstrip and we each enjoyed a one-hour microlight aircraft flight over the coast (innumerable whales, perfectly visible dark against the light brown of the coastal ocean floor, plenty of mother and calf pairs, many mating pods) culminating in a flight over a cliff (gaining 3000 feet of altitude in a couple of seconds) and some basic aerial acrobatics.
Sept. 17: Whale watching day. A tour operator (Ingo) who organized a number of our excursions picks us up as he is taking his children on a morning whale-watching cruise (2.5 hours) with us. On the drive to Gansbaai, Shaun and I organize through Ingo another cruise in the afternoon that is part whale watching but also takes us to Dyer Island and the smaller Geyser Rock where a colony of 20,000 (or 60,000 depending on the source) Cape Fur Seals reside. The whale watching is fun; I particularly like standing on the narrow upper decks (against advice of crew) gripping the rails madly while the afternoon ship does high-speed runs between different viewing locations. Of course we see lots of whales (all Southern Rights) with many close approaches and some breaching in the distance. For me the highlight is the seal island. It is a beautiful desolate small rocky island that is covered with seals. The island and the water around it are filthy with seals, blurry with seals.
Sept. 18: Cape Town and environs. We are picked up at 6:30am and are driven to our hotel in Cape Town, unusually with no scheduled agenda. We rectify this immediately and arrange for a driver/guide to take us around the Cape beginning at 1:30pm. We use the morning to take a cable car up Table Mountain (flat tabletop mountain looming over Cape Town...but wait a minute, you've already been there: "First Month, Last Night" and "The High is the Low"). Unlike your experience of Table Mountain, ours was excellent, primarily due to the cooperative weather. Next we zipped down the mountain and over to the Aquarium: I particularly liked the jellyfish and the giant white crabs.
At 1:30pm our tour guide picks us up for drive down the Cape. He is quiet and a bit "down" at first but then picks up quite a bit when he realizes that we are actually interested in his commentary and the tour. It was a thoroughly enjoyable journey: whales breaching close offshore, the penguin colony at Boulders Beach, a troop of baboons (whose complex social behaviour was pointed out to us and explained by our guide), the oddball fauna (fynbos) comprising the smallest but richest of the world's six floral kingdoms, the spectacular scenery of Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope (it was very very windy - fall over wind - but that is precisely what I wanted for the Cape of Storms and shipwrecks). Curiously, I was very gratified to agree with the oceanographic argument that the Indian/Atlantic Ocean boundary really lies there, rather than at Cape Agulhas, the southernmost point of Africa; I like the fact that I can now claim to have been in the Indian Ocean. Some locals state you can actually see the colour difference in the major currents as they meet off Cape Point.
Thus endeth the Oceans portion of our tour.
Sept. 19: The Safari portion. Go to airport. Fly to Jo'burg. Get picked up at airport by a driver to who takes us on the 2.5 hour journey to Pilanesburg National Park, a 55,000 hectare game reserve circular in shape because it is bordered by a 1.2 billion year old collapsed volcanic crater. We were taken to our luxury digs, the Tshukudu Bush Lodge, in one of six bush cottages on a hill overlooking the savannah. What amazed me was the density of the animal population, leading me to later get assurances that the park ecosystem was self-sufficient, and wasn't an enormous zoo. On the drive into the lodge (10 minutes?) we saw zebra, warthog, baboons and waterbuck. We dropped off our stuff and immediately went on a game drive with two other guests and a guide. Giraffe, rhino, elephant, hippo, crocodile, wildebeest, jackal, impala (many impala), zebra, warthogs, various antelope variants. You've done game drives. I like how the afternoon drives transition into night, and I don't mean twilight, I mean having difficulty seeing an elephant 15 feet away without illumination.
Sept. 20: Two game drives: one at 6:00am until 9:30 or 10:00, another at 4:00pm. More critters including indolent lions in the afternoon. I really like seeing buffalo at night on the way back (the 4th of the big five - unfortunately we missed leopard, but I would have preferred hyena or African hunting dogs or even cheetah, which we also missed. I did see a pack of banded mongoose, however, bounding over a rock face). As night fell and as we ate the second of two terrific dinners in the main lodge, we were able to enjoy the terrible beauty of a bush fire ravaging a hilltop in the park: it looked like a fire necklace around the hill, with individual flaming trees and bushes visible through a telescope in the lodge.
Note there is a lot of time in between the drives. Shaun spent some of that napping; I sat on our balcony and marvelled at what I could see in terms of wildlife (the highlight being a troupe of baboons working their way across the plain - oddly reminiscent of a platoon of WWII era soldiers picking their way across a hostile landscape - very spread out with alternating walking and sentry-like observation, at least the adults). Ultimately from the vantage point of our cottage and the lodge I saw baboon, warthog, wildebeest, impala, kudu, rhino, vervet monkeys (they stole my biscuits and sugar for tea), giraffe, rock hyrax (the closest living relative to blah blah blah), and some other antelope types. Apparently if you simply sit on your balcony you will eventually see pretty much every animal.
Sept. 21: The safari highlight occurs in the morning: we watch four adult female lions hunting wildebeest. Much tension as we watch one lioness work its way downwind of the wildebeest while the other three (setting a trap) spread out in tall grass bordering the more open plain where the first lioness is stalking. The first three work their way up a riverbed to get closer, complicated by the fact that they have to work around a rhino. One of the three decides to bolt after a giraffe. The giraffe runs, spooking the handful of wildebeest into a mini-stampede. No dinner for the lions, but it was fantastic to see the whole drama laid out in front of us.
We are driven to Pretoria, arriving in a mall parking lot by 1:00pm, ending the Safari portion of our tour and beginning the Geology/Paleoanthropology portion. A German-born geologist named Aki picks us up and takes us on a guided tour of the Tswaing meteor crater, a 220,000 year old crater in the savannah roughly 1.1km across, with the crater rim 60m above the surrounding plain and the crater floor 120m below the rim. It was very hot and so Shaun and I eschewed the long walk (3.5 hours) in favour of walking partway around the rim and then partway down into the crater. The object that hit was 50-60m across and released energy equivalent to the first H-bomb test.
We were driven back to a hotel in Melville, one of the less terrifying suburbs of Johannesburg and for the first occasion of our journey, ordered out for food because we were exhausted.
Sept. 22: At 7:00am we were picked up by Aki for a full-day guided tour of the Vredefort Dome, a geologic structure (very recently - July in fact - declared a World Heritage Site) consisting of a partial ring of hills about 70 km in diameter and the area within them. These are at the center of a crater that was originally 250-300 km in diameter, due to the impact of an asteroid some 10km in diameter about 2 billion years ago, making the Vredefort Dome the oldest and biggest impact structure on the planet. Our geologist guide showed us a number of hill formations, rocky outcroppings and a quarry with evidence of the impact (pseudo-tachylite: melted granite solidified as a dark glass-like rock; shattercones: odd formations in rock formed by the impact shockwave; vertical or even overturned crust rock strata). As well, we saw 3 billion year old rock containing iron bands that were formed when the first free oxygen released by primitive life (prokaryotes - cells without nuclei) reacted with oceanic dissolved iron and the resulting iron oxides precipitated down to the ocean floor. All very cool.
Interestingly, we eat a sort of picnic on the private land of a farmer Aki knows, on a hilltop surrounded by the circular rock-pile remnants of a Tswana Iron-age hill fort (small dwellings really).
Sept. 23: Our last day. We are picked up at the luxurious time of 9:00am. We have a driver/guide (an effusive German) and a Ph.D student scientist. We drive off to the Cradle of Humanity, a World Heritage site consisting of a 470 square kilometre area containing 13 fossil sites many of which have produced fossil hominids. In fact these sites have produced something like 40% of the fossil hominids discovered in the past half-century. Fossils of australopithecus africanus, paranthropus robustus, home ergaster and possibly one other (homo habilis?) have all been found here. We lunch at a site called Drimolen, not generally open to the public and have lunch after a presentation in front of a table covered with high-resolution casts of a plethora of primate and hominid skulls (some famous, like the Taung child and Mrs Ples). We look at breccia (rock composed of fragments embedded in fine-grain matrix) replete with fossil animals extracted from the Drimolen site. We look at breccia embedded in the cave walls (really the wall of the hole we are in) that scientists are painstakingly sifting through in the hope of finding more hominid fossils. Later we head for Sterkfontein, another famous site. We infer from our scientist guide's behaviour that he is not supposed to take us on "guided" tours of the cave itself (perhaps stepping on the toes of the official site tour guides). We slip in the back way and make our way through the magnificent and surprisingly large and complicated cave structure. During the drive to and from the sites I ask every question I can think of about hominid evolution. Shaun and I later agree that having two guides come along is overkill, leading to overpricing, but also that we simply had to visit these sites. A magical day, culminating in being driven to Jo'burg International Airport and boarding a flight for home.
Sept. 24: Planes, trains and cabs. Shaun and I arrive at home mid-morning, basking in the aftermath of what we agree was the best vacation of our adult lives.
Sorry about the delay in getting back to you, but I had to write this in instalments.
cheers,
Mike
Posted: Mon - October 10, 2005 at 06:48 PM
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Published On: Oct 11, 2005 07:34 PM
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Published On: Oct 11, 2005 07:34 PM