The working week ends, and we’ve survived our takeaway diet, endured rain so heavy that there have been serious floods in nearby Lesotho province, put up with lightning strikes that have banjaxed most of the hotel TV channels, and even coped with 36 hours of no water, which, apart from requiring us to drink bottled water, meant no washing and no flush toilets. We’ve also discovered Eastwoods, an excellent bar/restaurant with an extensive menu that, among many other delights, features a T-bone steak, chips and a beer for £3.50. It’s but two streets away from the hotel, and it would be a perfect Base Camp… if only I was here with team members who knew what a Base Camp was. We have been to Eastwoods precisely once, on Sunday at lunch time and remained in the hotel every weekday night, like good little civil servants. It’s only the bearded team member who has been distinctly uncivil about the arrangements.
That’s all over, though, and it’s the weekend! Shortly before leaving on Friday, one of the managers approached and asked if we had plans to travel outside town, and if so, would we like a car? Yes, we would, because Rashina’s going to be spending the weekend with her family in Jo’burg, taking her car with her. Accordingly, I’m temporarily given employee status, added to the group insurance, and handed the keys to a Toyota Corolla. Any charge? “No, just replace the petrol.” Nice one, petrol here is roughly 60p a litre.
We’ve been recommended to visit two nearby animal sanctuaries, an elephant centre and the De Wilte Cheetah Farm, both very close to each other, and about 45 minutes drive west of Pretoria
It has proved almost impossible to purchase a driving map of South Africa Britain Pretoria
Needless to say, we miss the turn for the N4 that will take us directly to Hartebeestpoort. It’s no fault of Manju’s, the turn is marked “M5”. No matter, we know we have to travel west, and that the Dam area is a popular tourist attraction, I expect there’ll be signs for it if we head in that sort of general direction. (Readers familiar with my travels will, I am sure, be holding their heads in their hands and muttering “Oh no…”) I turn off at the next main road that heads sort of west-ish.
It’s certainly a lovely day. The heavy rain of the past week is gone, and the sun is shining so constantly that we’re glad of the air conditioning in the car. The dash readout shows a very acceptable 26C as we drive through the suburbs of Pretoria South Africa
We roll on, past the light industry on the fringe of town, and then we’re out in the country. Much of it is undeveloped, with houses and farms being sporadic. Apart from the odd palm tree, it’s curiously like driving in England
There are some differences, of course. When approaching a crossroads in Derbyshire, for example, it’s rare to come across a watermelon stand. Rarer, too, to find a small open-air concern that will either sell you a rug or tint your windows, a business combination that I suspect is unique. Oh, and here’s an enterprising fellow who has set up a small barbecue, on which he’s grilling sweetcorn, in hope that a motorist will need a snack. And now here’s another, with some wood carvings, and he’s so keen to sell them that he’s walking down the middle of the road, waving them at passing cars with, apparently, very little thought for his own safety.
One major difference is the lack of speed limit signs. We go for miles without seeing one, and I have to use my judgement as to what is a safe speed. In fact, we round one bend and find ourselves in a police speed trap, where the coppers are rather busy. One, standing in the middle of the road, frowns at me and makes the universal sign for “Slow down, you madman!” But what to, officer? We’re doing no more that 55, taking our time and admiring the low mountain ranges that roll along either side of the valley we’re driving through, and the last speed limit sign we saw was 100 kph… although that was ten miles back. Luckily, the frowning peeler waves us on, guessing that we’re just stupid tourists. We’re luckier than some folk, who have been pulled over and are in deep conversation with a number of uniformed constables. (My pal Neil, who is in Zimbabwe
Aided by Manju’s excellent guesswork and some inspired blundering from the driver, we eventually pass a sign that confirms that Hartebeestpoort will soon be reached. A mile or so later we surmount a hill that gives way to a view of a pretty lake, with a development of houses at one end. The road runs down the hill to skirt the water’s edge. Ah… and here’s a snake farm, apparently a big tourist draw. No, Manju and June, we will not be stopping here, what with snakes of any kind giving your driver what is known in medical circles as “the screaming heebie-jeebies”.
We stop by the waters edge, and, whilst keeping a wary eye out for escapee snakes on the lam, I unsling my latest purchase, a digital SLR camera. It has an unbelievable list of settings for the professional, but luckily all of them can be set to “auto”, which means that every decision is taken by the camera. As I frame up a picture of the lake and depress the shutter, the camera focuses, works out which F-stop to use and computes the optimum speed. The result is a better picture than I could ever have taken with my old (analogue?) SLR, and I was no amateur with that. Oh dear, I knew this day would come – I’m holding a machine that’s cleverer than me. (In fairness, some have suggested that cans of sliced vegetables are cleverer than me, but that need not detain us.)
We return to the car and join the queue to cross the dam, which is smaller than I’d expected. There’s a queue because the road that runs over the dam wall is a single carriageway, and progress is controlled by traffic lights. After a few minutes, we traverse the short distance across. Hmm, not sure that it was worth seeing, to be honest – but here’s a café some few hundred yards up the road, shall we stop and walk back, have a look at the view from the dam wall? Yes, we will.
We get out of the car, and the loss of air conditioning is immediately felt. By the cringe, but it’s hot, over 30C. As we walk back down the hill to the dam, we pass a board that explains that the dam was built in the 1920’s, and points out just how large a volume of water is currently pressing upon it. The technical specifications are lost on me, all I know is that there’s a huge lake on one side, and the only thing that’s stopping it rushing down the valley on the other side is a dam that I thought was a touch on the small side. Dams, of course, are thinner at the top (this is the cue for millions of hydraulic engineers to cry sarcastically “Oh well done, sir!”), and as we stand on it, it’s clear that many tons of concrete and several years of hard work lie beneath our feet.
The view over the lake to the hills in the far distance, now beginning to get lost in the heat haze, is very fine. When we gaze over the other side of the dam, though, all our cameras are unpacked and much clicking ensues. What we are looking at, far below, is the Crocodile River sliding through a picturesque valley, dropping into rock pools, sometimes rushing busily, but mostly taking its languid time. Twenty feet up the bank on our right is the lake outfall, and white water shoots from it to run into the river.
The sun is fairly whacking down the heat, and I’m glad of the eye shade that my hat affords. It’s a proper countryman’s hat, made of thick waxed cotton with a jaunty feather stuck in the band, and it was bought to provide respite from the best and worst that an English summer can throw at me. (Mind you, the look of it was rather spoiled when June enquired in all seriousness, “So… you have a cowboy hat?”) Perhaps we should seek some refreshment and shade back at the café?
Refreshed, and with a new map from the café that clearly shows the route we should be taking, we press on, reaching the Cheetah Farm nearly an hour before the afternoon tour starts. Shall we find some lunch, then? A couple of miles further down the road there’s a small parade of shops and we stroll into a mini-supermarket in search of sandwiches. No plastic-wrapped selection here, all sandwiches are freshly made to order and then toasted. Ah ha, and they do burgers! That’s an easy choice, then, I’ll have a Zen Buddhist cheeseburger. (“Make me one with everything.”) What’s this, though? A burger appears to be just another sandwich here, because two slices of white bread are being buttered, shredded lettuce is spread liberally on them, tomato slices are placed carefully, the burger and cheese are added… and then it goes into the toaster. Well, lightly cooked lettuce is a new one on me, but the result is rather tasty. A burger sandwich… I doubt I’ll forget it.
Returning to the De Wildt Cheetah Farm, we join the fifty or so thrill-seekers who are ready for the tour, and are shortly met by our guide, who gives us a brief history of the farm. She explains that it used to be a chicken farm, until the owners found a pair of abandoned cheetah cubs in the early 1970’s and swiftly contacted Pretoria Zoo for help in preserving them. The cheetah specialists there went quietly nuts, explaining that cheetahs were a very endangered species, and were expected to be extinct by the year 2000.
With the aid of the zoo, more cheetahs were housed on the farm, with the intention of breeding them. This was initially unsuccessful – indeed, the female cheetahs did nothing but fight, both with the males and the other females. Eventually, the cause was discovered; female cheetahs are unusually solitary animals, and what they particularly hate is another cheetah. So when do they mate, then? The answer is, rarely.
A female cheetah comes into season once every two years. There is no set cycle, and the cheetah exhibits no different behaviour, bar one thing. She allows males to approach her. As the staff of the Centre couldn’t anticipate when their females would be receptive to some male company, they put each one in her own large fenced-off “territory”, then allowed the males to run through a wide alley between the territories once a day. Almost all of the time, the females hid when the males appeared, but if one did not and started paying a little attention, a male was put into her territory. If she accepted him, fine, if not, another male was selected… and when she started to fight her short-term mate, she was out of season and he was out of her territory as soon as possible.
The breakthrough came in 1975. In that year, there were just 9 recorded live births to cheetahs in the wild, and that’s the worldwide total. The cheetahs at De Wildt produced 23 cubs. They haven’t looked back, and to date, they have raised over 750 cheetahs in as wild a surrounding as is possible. Some have gone to zoos, but many have gone to nature reserves, where they have lived their lives like any other cheetah born in the wild.
The brief introduction over, we walk the short distance to one of the cheetah pens, where two of the big cats are patrolling the fence. Up and down they march, stopping occasionally to glare at us, and allowing plenty of photographs to be taken. Our guide explains that they are not tame animals (and as they’re not beating seven bells out of each other, they’re clearly not females), but they’re tolerating us because they know when the visitors arrive, lunch isn’t far behind.
The cheetahs at the Centre are fed on horsemeat, and a couple of large lumps are tossed over the six-metre high fence. Both cats leap up to catch the meat, then retire into the longer grass behind them to eat. “They get horsemeat six days a week”, our guide tells us, “But when we first started keeping cheetahs, they suffered from a calcium deficiency over time. In the wild, cheetahs will eat small bones, which they can crunch up and get the goodness of the marrow, but horse bones are too tough for their jaws. So once a week, they get whole chickens so that they can have some bone in their diet.”
She goes on to mention that the one thing that people know about cheetahs is that they can run at 70 mph. What we may not know is that this speed can only be maintained for very short distances, and that the cheetah burns almost all its energy on that one explosive burst of speed, while its body temperature can nearly double if it is forced to hunt in the fierce sun. After chasing, and hopefully killing, another animal, cheetahs are completely spent, and have to lie in the shade for at least half an hour in order to recover. For that reason, the cheetah tries to get as close as possible to its prey before attacking, and prefers to hunt in the early morning and late afternoon.
We walk across the compound to a couple of other pens, where honey badgers are kept. The honey badger doesn’t eat honey; it eats, amongst other things, beehives, and takes its name from the destruction it wreaks on them. We’re warned that the honey badger is a very fierce animal, with no sense of fear, and it will fight and eat scorpions, venomous snakes, porcupines, rabbits and even small crocodiles up to one metre long. It has almost no predators, due to its fearlessness and the wounds it can inflict with its claws; indeed, even lions will try to avoid a fight with a honey badger.
That’s all the animals in the compound looked at and photographed from every angle, now it’s time for the tour. We climb into seats in the back of two Toyota Africa , they can be very endangered if they start taking chickens from farms. The half dozen or so that are here have been moved from farms where they were threatened with shooting, but the Centre seeks to educate farmers about the positive benefits of having a caracal about the place. They eat a lot of vermin, and can become quite tame. Privately, I’m not sure about giving a wild cat a home, I mean what about the smell? Still, if they can put up with it, ho, ho…
Pieces of chicken are hung high on the chain-link fence that encloses the caracal, and we watch them leap up and climb to earn their lunch. Like all cats, they seem to be twice as long when they’re stretched out as they appear to be when sitting on the ground.
Moving on, and it’s vultures next. Far too much information is given for me to remember, but one point sticks in my mind. Many species of African vulture are becoming threatened – and it’s all due to various countries official lotteries. Apparently, when an animal dies, the vultures seem to appear out of nowhere. Forget all that “circling overhead” stuff you see in films, one minute there isn’t a vulture in the sky, and the next, the ground is covered with them, all making their way purposefully inside a fallen giraffe. The reason for this is that vultures fly at up to 17000 feet, far too high to be seen, and they have extremely sharp eyesight. When they see a fresh carcass, they simply drop down to eat. Their sudden appearance, as if armed with some advance warning, has lead to a belief that vultures can see into the future. It is also believed that eating a soup made from the head of a vulture can confer the same power on humans, and since the introduction of lotteries in Africa , vultures have been illegally hunted on a massively greater scale than before by people who want to win the jackpot.
Our lorry grinds on, down a hill and round a corner, where we pause to watch the rare brown hyena being fed – horse again – then into a very large compound containing a herd of antelope. We don’t stop, although the lorry moves slowly enough for everyone to get a picture or two. We travel several hundred yards through the bush, a gate is opened, we move forwards… and suddenly the lorries are surrounded by a pack of wild dogs, running beside us, criss-crossing in front of the cab, and uttering a curious high-pitched “Yip, yip, yip!” It’s nothing like the bark of a dog, being an almost musical twittering. With their black faces splashed with a band of white across the eyes, they remind me of a bunch of terribly serious clowns who have suffered a bit of a financial crisis in the make-up department.
We stop by a pond, next to a couple of feeding trays, and lunch is poured into them. It’s dry food, supplied by a well-known pet food company, as the trays proclaim. Eukanuba is one of the sponsors of the wild dog breeding project – and a breeding project is very much required, as the wild dog is Africa ’s second most endangered species. There used to be hundreds of thousands roaming sub-Saharan Africa, but numbers are down to around 3,500, of which about 500 are in South Africa
We watch as one dog, undoubtedly the dominant male or female, leaves the pack and approaches the feeding trays, watching us carefully. The dog is actually standing in the tray now, still making sure that this isn’t a trap, while the others stand close by, like soldiers sensing an ambush. Then the head goes down and the entire pack rush to eat, jumping over one another, pushing each other, and yet never disturbing the dominant one. Within thirty seconds, all the food is gone and the pack is trotting away down a path back into the bush.
On, then, to see the animals that give the centre its name, into the area of bush where the cheetahs live. Gates are carefully opened and closed, the truck moves forward toward a patch of open grassland… but, oh dear, one of the staff walking back from the gate to rejoin us has stepped just a little too close to an evergreen tree that has foliage extending down to the ground. Immediately, a cheetah erupts from between the leaves, smacking the ground with its front paws and baring sharp teeth. There’s no danger – cheetahs won’t attack humans unless cornered, and this one is just giving a territorial warning – but it’s an effective demonstration of how fast these animals can move.
Once we reach open ground, the trucks stop and the cheetahs are fed. Unlike the ones back at the compound, these cats eat where the meat has fallen, allowing us to take as many close-up photos as we wish. When they finish their lunch, they stalk around the trucks for a while, giving us all the once-over, then disappear back into the bush. It’s been a remarkable few minutes; I’ve got far closer to these wild animals than I expected to. They’re both impressive and beautiful when seen at close quarters, yet still in their natural habitat.
Our transport turns for the Centre, and on our journey back we see a very rare King cheetah (a genetic mutant that was thought to be an entirely different species), more antelope, ostriches, monkeys and a nyala.
Back at the compound where we started, the final treat remains – the opportunity to meet Byron. Byron is a cheetah who has become completely humanised, so he can’t live with other cheetahs. Much care is taken to minimise the contact that the cheetahs have with humans, to ensure that they retain the ability to hunt and behave as cheetahs ought to in the wild; but Byron was an orphaned cub that had to be hand-reared. He’s not a pet, but he’s safe to approach if visitors are properly introduced into his environment by his keeper. In fact, Byron acts as an “Ambassador” cheetah for the Centre, and is taken into schools and businesses when Centre staff are giving presentations about the work they do with endangered species.
For 150 Rand, it’s possible to enter Byron’s large exercise area, and, while he is being fed steak by his keeper, stroke him and have one’s photograph taken. If I don’t take the opportunity, I know I’ll regret it, even if there’s a part of me that says “But it’s a cheetah, for goodness’ sake!” And so, stepping rather gingerly into Byron’s environment, and out of mine, I approach him from behind as I’ve been directed. Now, surprising a big cat from behind would seem to me to be a recipe for disaster and a set of interesting scars, but I’m following orders. The handler’s words are ringing in my ears – “If he sits up, just step back.” Darling, if he sits up, I’ll probably clear the fence with a single bound, don’t you worry.
Now, I’ve stroked a tiger – yes, well that will have to be another story, won’t it? – and I can report that a tiger’s coat is rougher and coarser than that of a domestic cat. Byron’s coat is short and silky, though. In fact, it’s just like stroking a cat… hang on, something’s happening… a faint rumbling fills the air, will there be a thunderstorm soon?
Good Lord – it’s Byron. He’s purring! “He likes you,” remarks his handler, as another staff member snaps photos of the three of us. Well, cats usually do like me, perhaps the effect isn’t confined to domestic felines, quick, bring me a lion! I’m tempted to tickle Byron’s tummy, then remember that my own cat of many years ago used to take such tickling as an opportunity to snap all four paws onto my arm, claws extended… maybe not, eh?
So that’s pretty much it, then. The three of us walk back to the car, well pleased with the animals we’ve seen and the photos we’ve taken. For around £14 per person, it beats Longleat in my view, although it’s not quite as convenient. Even though the car was carefully parked in the shade, and the sun is much lower, entering the car is like stepping into an uncomfortable oven. On with the air conditioning, then and let’s point the motor in the direction of Pretoria
Forty five minutes later, we’re entering the Pretoria suburbs and once again the signs are making very little sense, until Manju cries “There’s the Union Building Union Building is the central seat of government in South Africa
We’ll have a quiet day tomorrow, then, shall we? Lunch at Eastwoods, maybe? Oh, you two fancied some shopping… what, for souvenirs? No, for shoes… and clothes… at a huge shopping mall where there are many shoe and clothes shops. Fair enough, says the grimly accepting driver, but strikes a bargain. He points out that men don’t really understand the powerful hold that shoes have over some women, just as most women don’t understand Scalextric. I am therefore at their command until lunchtime only, at which point they will be herded from the mall with tazers if necessary. Lunch will follow, it will take place at Eastwoods, and T-bone steaks and beer will feature heavily.
They do, and all.
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