"Man it’s hot. It’s like Africa hot. Tarzan couldn’t take this kind of hot".
- Biloxi Blues
After an 8 1/2 hour overnight flight from Doha we arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa at 4:30 am We slept very little but the adrenaline was very high so we were awake against our will. (Sort of like being on call - but I digress).
We thought we would try to take a nap at a transit hotel in the airiport instead of negotiating getting out of the city in the dark while driving on the wrong side of the road.
We arrived ready to refresh ourselves and were told there were no vacancies.
“My name is Joseph and this is Mary, gesturing to my wife,” You mean there is no room at the inn?”
He stared at me a moment.
I waited.
Then he laughed, “No I am sorry, no room”.
So we decided to press on. We got a rental car and by the time the paperwork was finished, the sun started to come up. I was now faced with the reality of a 6 hour drive north to our Game Lodge with little sleep and on the wrong side of the road.
“It will be easy,” I thought, “I have done surgery this way.”
I was terrified with a resting heart rate of 200. But “Keep Calm and Carry on”, as they say. The British are crazy. It’s no wonder Brexit happened.
And how did this lunacy of driving on the left side of the road start? We know Roman Legions marched on the left side. Is this why? According to the current theory, if you are on the left with your wagon, your right arm (your sword hand) was free to fend off potential attackers coming at you.
Yeah, I thought that was crazy as well, but that is the best explanation around. Since the British used to rule everything, all of their colonies followed suit (Like South Africa). Napoleon (and later Hitler) thought this notion was rubbish and mandated everyone drive on the right in countries they conquered. You can always count on a good ‘ole dictator or two. Here in the U.S. we changed mostly because we did not want to be British.
So off we went. At first it was awful. I kept this mantra in my head “Left, left, left”. Colleen helped by periodically shouting, “Oh my God, turn the other way! We are going to die!”
Once we got on the the freeway it got easier and we had our first chance to really see this country. Qatar, where we were flying in from, was smashed flat on the anvil of the sun. It is a thin strip of dirt with no natural resources other than fossil fuel. All of the food in the country, all of it, must be imported daily.
So South Africa, by comparison, seemed impossibly lush. We drove into an area similar to the Central Valley of California with field after field of corn, soybeans, orchards, sheep farms, and cattle ranches. The land was verdant.
The odd thing was amongst all of this fertile wonder were coal mines. There were a lot of them churning away while sheep would graze nearby.
We climbed out of this farmland into low mountains with granite outcroppings covered in green grasses. The valley floor was grassland scarred with rust red tilled strips of earth. The rust color set off against the green grass was particularly striking. I did not know it at the time, but I was looking at classic African Veldt. It looked like Marin County in Northern California, yet...not. It was beautiful.
We climbed up to a broad plateau. Here the land changed again to earth that had more brown features mixed with the red. The soil here is more alkaline and trees need to be made of sterner stuff to tolerate the new ecosystem. Elephants live here. Mopane and Acacia trees dominate along with the Sickle bush.
The Sickle Bush has horns that are so sturdy and sharp that when elephants eat them, they pass through them intact and end up in their manure. If a Jeep drives over the manure it will flatten it’s tire.
It is a stark landscape, unique, and beautiful. I was looking at African Savannah for the first time.
We reached our turn off. It was a dirt road that took us almost 20 kilometers into the bush. A hot, dusty hour later we arrived at our lodge.
Here is where we are staying for the next three nights.
Tomorrow - Into the Wild
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