Flying back to Darwin for five days, and watched Midas Man on the plane – new film about Brian Epstein, the manager of the Beatles.

Worth watching.

Mossel Bay

Mossel Bay is the first port of call after joining our cruise following three days of recuperation (for me) in a flash Capetown hotel. We’ve headed around the Cape now and are travelling up the African east coast bound for the Arabian Sea and Dubai in three weeks time and did Mossel Bay yesterday. The origins of this town date to the explorations of the Portuguese explorer Bartholomeu Dias in 1488. It is one of South Africa’s oldest settlement sites, in the Garden Route of the Western Cape Province, set in a pretty blue bay.  The earliest human people here may have actually evolved in situ, rivalling Olduvai, for a million years of hominid settlement has occurred due to the coastal bounty. A tourist feature is the Post Office Tree site, where sailors heading for the spice Indies would put letters into an old boot under the tree, letters which returning ships would pick up to take back to Europe from this furthest reach of Western civilization. It still feels like that, a small out-of-its time coastal town, where we take an hour-long bus ride to visit a private game park. We traverse some verdant countryside with dairy herds of Guernsey cows and I say to Hairy that this is rich peasant land now going slightly wild. Deliberately so, I suspect, as with climate craziness in Australia, which is rampant here too.

The game reserve is a genuine wildlife sanctuary covering many miles where native animals are able to roam free and live without being fed; some lions, but no cheetah or leopard, keep the population levels of impala, wildebeest and the many other cognate ungulant species under control, though I suspect they also have to cull. The park also shelters zebra, giraffe, hippo, huge buffalo, and elephant, all of which we saw in their natural habitat, including a cute week-old zebra colt and an hours-old wildebeest calf. Those calves can walk within half an hour of birth and now that one is fully capable of keeping up with the herd, though they keep him in the middle, says our guide, whom we were fortunate enough to have to ourselves. 

I was late out of the toilet at the main reception area and restaurant and the nine-seater tiered land rover vehicle was full, so a sudden decision was made to take out another one for just me and Hairy, with a more senior Africaan’s guide – a young white bloke in his thirties yanked in at the last minute. Good to get his comprehensible English and none of the invented information favoured by local guides. The pride of the reserve is a number of rhino, protected from poachers. During our two and a half hour drive over bumpy terrain tracks we were very privileged to view rhino very close up – especially a magnificent territorial male, with two horns, the main one over three feet long. There was also a mother and calf rhino. Surgically removing their horns to protect them from poachers is cruel, says our guide, because rhino use their horns in daily living and territorial display.

This man turned out to be a treasure, very knowledgeable about animals and habitat. We noted some gum trees and Hairy said get rid of them before they take over. Our man agreed, saying they were slowly removing them, as they leached the watercourses. They also had a problem with introduced Australian black wattle which bled tannin into the streams. He was especially interesting as he told us about how elephants grieve and mourn their dead, returning to the site of a matriarch’s death with regularity to console each other.   

As it was just us two, the guide was very willing to talk about the reserve and its place in South Africa, where tourism is the dominant export industry and a major source of local employment.  We employ over 250 people here, he says, far more than we need, but governments compel us to be less profitable to keep employment up. Hairy’s face at this news is a picture of disapproval. Unemployment in the socialist paradise of South Africa is now running at 52% and underemployment is also rampant. Shanty towns litter all of the roadsides in towns and cities where large acreages of shanties also exist. Our talk turns to electricity, for the reserve runs off solar panels and night-time diesel generators. Don’t get me started, says our man, for we export our good coal to Mozambique but we aren’t allowed to use it for ourselves. Sounds familiar, we say to him, telling him of our similar situation in Australia.

I get bold. Actually, we are very strong supporters of President Trump and hope that things soon will start to change re the global warming scams, I say. We don’t see much science behind it all, I add. Yes, says our guide, we are all hoping for a change in this nonsense now. I am a Trump supporter myself, he adds, a committed environmentalist but sick of the way South Africa has been captured to such sectional interests and the corruption that this has entailed.  

Soviet Art Exercise bites the dust, because other people’s money.
Excellent. I hate the imposition of ugly corporate art on the natural landscape.

Cassie, it’s good to see you back and commenting.

My condolences to you and your family on your loss. The hole doesn’t fill, the empty chair remains, you close your eyes and think you hear a voice or a tune, or some other little reminder of the one who is gone.

You have been in my thoughts in this season of sorrow. Remember all the good times, let the tears flow, and don’t be surprised if you remember something funny that she said or did and laugh out loud at the memory. They are the very best ones, so hold them dear.