South Africa – A World in One Country
Day Eighteen – 9-10 October 2013 – Day of Lions and Airplanes
Weather: Well, I know it’s like 4 degrees at home and I can’t wait.
I’m up at 5 am, a half hour before I need to be, but that gives me time to have the luggage ready and sitting by the door. Breakfast is included with the game drive so I’m out to meet the guide, Richard, by 5:50. And he is driving one swanky safari vehicle. He tells me it’s a Land Rover assembled in South Africa. It has six individual bucket seats in the back instead of three benches and each seat has a console where a blanket is stored.
All it’s missing is a cup holder.
I climb into the back seat and Richard suggests I sit closer to the front since it’s cold.
I’m from Canada, Richard. This isn’t cold. LOL
Even driving, it wasn’t cold. Refreshing actually and interestingly enough, the temp dropped once we crossed a dry river bed. The drop was very noticeable.
It won’t last. I know how hot it’s going to be in an hour.
We pick up one gentleman on the way and two couples who are staying at the lodges right on the Stanley and Livingstone reserve. Which is a nice spot with antelope and zebras grazing in front of them.
The reserve is 31 km if you follow the perimeter and is home to the Big 5. They know they have four lions – 2 male, 2 female – in the park that were donated from other locations, but they don’t know how many leopards there are because they hide.
Don’t I know it?
We drive for a while and don’t see much. There’s not much green but the bush is thick so it’s hard to see beyond ten metres or so. Even so, the guide spots three rhinos grazing about twenty metres in.
He moves the truck to give the best views and after a while we move to an open spot on the other side for our morning tea.
He expects the rhinos to come in our direction, but when we leave, we find them at the bottom of the hill, but still in the brush. He says there must be a deal on the buffet as they seem to enjoy that spot.
We don’t drive much farther when we come across another game vehicle and everyone looking to the left. Under a tree about 100 metres in are two lions. One male, one female.
Sweet.
I get a few pics and start taking video just as the lion gets up, does the kitty cat circle walk and lies down again.
We stay about 15 minutes watching them before moving on. From there we see giraffe, eland and impala, but not a single elephant. What a switch.
Richard points to the elephant dung as proof they’re really there. And he pulls over next to some rhino dung and picks up a piece.
Yeah, you’re thinking what I’m thinking.
And so was he. First thing he says is that he’s not the one making our toast at breakfast.
He picks a piece of wood out of the dung and shows it to us. The edges are cut at a 45 degree angle which is how they tell rhino dung from other types. The way they chew slices the wood and shoots this way and none of the other animals do that.
He shows us hyena dung, but that’s as close as we get to a hyena.
At 9:30 we pull up to a hut for breakfast cooked in the open.
I went to the bathroom and when I saw the sign for the ladies side, I had to wonder if it were a commentary on all the malva pudding I ate.
Richard cuts breakfast short a few minutes so that he can get me back to the lodge for 10:30 and I walk in at 10:32. Pretty cool. That gives me time to change and get my luggage out.
My transfer shows up and we have to pick up one more person at the Zambia border. Luckily, we don’t cross over to pick her up cause I don’t have $75 left to get back into Zimbabwe. It’s a short drive to the airport and since I’m business class for this first leg, I get to skip the line.
I check my bags which will go all the way home and check out the shops. There are more shops here than I’ve seen anywhere else in Zimbabwe or Botswana. Lots of t-shirts and that, but not a shot glass to be had. I go through security into a very overcrowded waiting area where the announcements are impossible to decipher so everyone is constantly asking “which flight.”
There are like three flights for the day, so it’s not hard to guess which one is which. I spend my last $5 on a Coke and the SA flight is called. I get settled into my window seat and a woman I had talked to earlier sat in the aisle seat and her daughter sat between us. I heard this woman say something about how ridiculous it was that they messed up the seat assignments (as she had had a discussion with the flight attendant to get the aisle seat). Then her daughter said “oh mom, stop complaining. We’re leaving the country. Hell, we’re leaving the continent.”
Oh man, there must be a story there!
And I think that story would trump mine.
The mother and daughter never said a word to each other for the rest of the flight. Not a single word.
We got into Johannesburg by 3 pm and that gave me 5 hours to shop! I didn’t have to change terminals and was free to shop till I dropped. I picked up some last minute gifts like another piece of tanzanite, a gold pendant for my sister and South African themed Pandora charms for my nieces.
I stop at the Mugg and Bean for something to eat and ordered a chicken burger. What I got was like a foot tall. I looked at my watch and realized I only had like three hours before I would be eating dinner on the plane.
Yeah. The treadmill awaits.
I get down to the gate and sit in one of the 20 seats there set out for the flight of 300 and next to me is an English woman talking to someone on the phone about how she didn’t know which gate to go to because the big sign didn’t say and the small screen at the gate didn’t say. (The big screen is like Heathrow which doesn’t tell you where to go until about 45 minute before the flight. This woman apparently kicked up a stink to find out where to go before it was displayed and was laying it on thick to whoever was on the phone despite the fact we were all there well before the flight was boarded.)
Seriously, woman!
Then the flight is called and another English woman in front of the first one is told her seat is 62E. The woman says no, she had it changed and that she was 68 years old and shouldn’t be expected to sit in that seat. The line comes to a standstill as we have to listen to her rant about how she had changed the seat and wasn’t moving until it was changed.
Seriously, woman!!
The attendant finally shooed her to the side so they could deal with the rest of us and I go aboard, only to notice the first woman is on the phone again complaining about her seat. She’s disgusted “they had put her there” and goes looking for an attendant to complain.
Seriously, what is it with Africa and complaining women!!!! LOLOL
And no, I’m not complaining. I really do watch this behavior in absolute fascination.
She spent the flight in middle seat after all. The flight was full and that was very apparent by the very long take off roll and for the longest time it seemed the lights of Johannesburg were much closer than I liked. It took a while to gain altitude but as they say, if the flight attendants look calm, everything is normal.
I have a delightful British woman in the seat next to me. Finally! A woman with my sense of humour. We had a good laugh and then I settled down to watch a movie while dinner was served. I watched After Earth and the end of Hitchcock that I missed on the way down. The lights went out and I followed close behind. The nice part about this flight was that it included a comfort pack for everyone – eye mask, toothbrush/paste and socks.
Pretty nifty. I have to say I’m impressed with South African Airways.
I sleep for about seven hours, waking up maybe three times – mostly because my tail bone is complaining. Then I have a dream that the woman next to me wants to get out and the seat in front of me moves forward and she just walks out. Then she shakes my arm in reality.
I tell her about the dream and she says she had shook me five minutes earlier. More than enough time to have a dream.
It’s 4 am and breakfast is an omelet. I start to watch Invictus but South African cuts off the entertainment system much too early. We land on time in London and I transfer to Terminal 3. With seven hours, I buy some internet to catch up and check out the shopping. I pick up a pair of London themed Pandora charms for my nieces for Christmas and have lunch from Pret a Manger. Great carrot cake. The terminal has no outlets but a lot of charging terminals with both UK and European plugs so I can keep my tablet charged.
My Air Canada flight to Newfoundland is on time and I get an empty seat next to me. After having watched Hitchcock on the SA flight, I just had to watch Psycho on this one. Yeah, I’ve never seen Psycho.
And then The Man of Steel.
This is the first time I’ve landed in St. John’s from overseas and get a look at the customs there. Pretty straight forward. I can see a line of people chosen for “special treatment” behind the customs guys so I put on a smile and when he asked where I had been, I list off all six nations and add that no one from my tour went to Victoria Falls. He looked up and said “what? You’ve got to be joking.”
We had a great chat and he stamped my passport and off I went.
To pick up the cats.
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