Pilanesberg Nature Reserve (South Africa 4)

(Originally written November 2008)

The third weekend in South Africa, and we’re ever more courageous. First weekend in the environs of Pretoria, second weekend a few miles away at the cheetah farm, but now we’re heading out some 100 km to the Pilanesberg National Park, a game reserve. Rashina has chosen not to join us again, but her seat in the car has been eagerly taken by Helena, a Swedish expert on HIV/AIDS who is doing a little consultancy work in the office.

The best route to take, according to seasoned travellers in the office, is the N4 to Sun City, then look for signs. Ah, we know the N4, that’s the one that’s called the M5 in Pretoria, we won’t fall for that old trick again. Neither do we, the suburbs are soon reached, while swish hotels give way to bungalows and department stores give way to market stalls. Right, and there’s the N4, ha, if only we’d known last week, eh?

Motorway driving in this part of South Africa is very similar to driving on French “route nationales”. In Britain, it would be called a dual carriageway, but there is much less traffic, and from time to time a toll is exacted. Progress is swift, we ought to be there in just over an hour at this rate…

Of course, it’s comments like that that make God smile, because a few miles later the South Africa Department of Transportation runs out of money and we run out of road. The motorway simply stops underneath a bridge, and beyond is open bush. I swing the car up the slip road and find a sign at the top pointing to Hartebeestpoort Dam. Pulling off into a convenient layby, we check the map; yes it clearly shows the N4 going directly to Sun City, oh well, never mind. A new route is plotted and fed into human GPS Manju, then we set off again.

Our selection of maps hasn’t improved, so a lot of the route is simply guesswork. Mind you, when the road ahead turns into a dirt track, there’s not much guessing required to realise that we’ve gone wrong again. And yet, less than an hour later, having spent at least half that time not knowing where we are, we see a sign for Sun City and Pilanesberg National Park.

The approach to the Park is fascinating, as it lies within four nearly concentric rings of hills, formed by volcanic action over a thousand millennia ago. This was once a super-volcano, and I can’t help but imagine what the area must have looked like back then. Hot and smoky is my considered opinion, proving that the world of vulcanology isn’t missing my talents one little bit.

There’s a nominal entry fee at the gate, and we buy a useful map of the Park that indicates the areas where various animals are likely to be seen. The Park is some 500 km square, so the wildlife have plenty of room to hide, but we learn that there’s a chance of seeing the “Big 5” – lions, rhinos (both black and white), leopards, elephants and buffalo. Buffalo? Part of the “Big 5”? Surely, though, they’re fairly common? Indeed they are, but the “Big 5” are not the rarest of animals, they enjoy this classification for a different reason…

Before these enlightened times, and when game was much more plentiful in Africa, safaris like the one we’re enjoying were undertaken in order to shoot trophy animals. The “Big 5” were so designated because they were the hardest to kill, and hunters who bagged all five considered that they’d done pretty well. I check that June has left her high-powered rifle back at the hotel and warn all three of my passengers that I’ll be searching the boot for rhino carcasses before we leave. Amid much giggling, we set off down a dirt track.

It’s not every day that you turn a corner and find several zebra waiting to cross the road. “Mark, Mark! Animals!” comes a cry from the rear seats, in case I hadn’t noticed. (As you may be able to tell, Manju and June have many talents to recommend them, but when it comes to zoology, they’re a dead loss.) I stop the car, cameras are swiftly focussed, and the first of hundreds of pictures are taken. The zebra seem very placid and we all get good shots of them. (I am later to form the opinion that zebra are the Kate Moss of the big game world – I’ll swear that they pose.) Ooh, look, just a few hundred yards away are a herd of buffalo, quick, change lenses, zoom in, click, click, click…

Everybody got the shots they want? I’ll drive on then. Two corners later – “Mark, animals!” Yes, and there’s more zebra, grazing on the grass right by the roadside, providing an opportunity for some close-up shots. Zebra, it turns out, are very plentiful in the Park, a fact appreciated by tourists and lions alike.

It’s very handy having three other pairs of eyes in the car, because I have to keep mine on the red dirt track ahead. There are very few metalled roads in the Park, and the switchback tracks are rutted by dry water courses, leading to a bumpy ride if taken at speed. Frequent and sudden changes in gradient require a fine touch on the gears. Put it this way, it would be fun in my old four wheel drive Mercedes G-Wagen, but in the office Toyota Corolla, it’s hard work, and progress is sometimes slow. (I daresay that the very occasional driver who appears behind us exclaims “Why is the car in front always a bloody Toyota?”)

Then there’s the scenery to consider, and I frequently do, because it’s spectacular. Tall tree-topped hills rise and fall, everywhere you look is either above or below us. I’m beginning to understand the term “bush”; it’s essentially grassland with a random sprinkling of copses, woods and forests. The grass may be short and green or high and yellow, and the woods may be composed of trees alone, or trees and bushes, sometimes conquered by climbing creeper plants. Overall, the colour scheme is a greenish brown, but here and there are bursts of exotic hues, as trees, bushes, climbers and ground cover erupt with flowers of blue, purple, red, orange… oh, this is certainly not like driving in England, I think, as the car drops into a rut with an axle-bending thunk and cries of pain from the animal-spotting team.

There’s tiny movement on the road ahead, unnoticed by the team, who have their eyes trained on a longer view. Well, I never… several dung beetles are shoving their heavy load down the track, each one pushing a ball more than ten times their own height. I stop the car and point them out. (For a second I consider saying “Manju, June – insects!”, but I beat the idea down.) The beetles must be immensely strong; even though they’re bigger than I expected, the dung ball each one is rolling must be fifty times their own body weight. They’re all heading in the same direction, to some beetle encampment I daresay, where the top beetles will compliment them – “Wow, dung! Just the very thing we’ve been looking for!” Mind you, if I come back as a dung beetle – and my karma strongly suggests that this is likely – I’ll be the one saying suspiciously, “Uh huh… but what do you want it for?”

A little further down the road, we find a troop of monkeys engaged in foraging through the grass. Of course, as soon as we notice that several of them have babies clinging beneath them, the car is filled with cries of “Aww… so sweet!”, as, indeed, they are. It’s only the curmudgeonly old driver who is urging caution and windows only open far enough to clear camera lenses, because monkeys are quick to learn, and if any animal here is likely to equate cars with food, it’s a monkey. What’s more, where there are monkeys, there are baboons, and they have a reputation for big teeth and swift anger. A sudden baboon trying to gnaw your face off is bound to put a damper on the day, I feel.

Lunch is mentioned, and it may have been the driver who mentioned it, and when he mentioned lunch he really meant beer. Yes, lunch would be good, but the opinion of the less thirsty animal spotters is that we should take a turn around Hippo Loop first.

OK, that’s the plan, but let’s just check something first. What’s the most dangerous animal in Africa, measured by human deaths per year? No, not the snake. No, definitely not the lion. No, you don’t get tigers in Africa. No, a mosquito isn’t an animal, it’s an insect. Look, stop guessing, it’s getting embarrassing. The most dangerous animal in Africa is the hippopotamus. It is fiercely territorial in the water, and has been known to smash boats with a bite from its powerful jaws. Out of the water, the hippo is somewhat dim, and can wander further away from its territory than it intends to while grazing. When it realises that it can’t see the river, lake or whatever aquatic environment it calls home, it panics and runs, taking the most direct route and ignoring bushes and other ground cover – and hippos can run faster than you’d imagine. Most of the deaths are due to unwary people colliding with four tons of speeding hippo that’s just burst out of what seemed to be impenetrable thornbush. So, we will keep the engine running ready for a fast getaway.

A circuit of Hippo Loop later, and the grand total of hippos seen is one, and that with its head down below the reed level at the side of the lake. In fact, the only photos we have simply show a black hump in the reeds. If we could get closer, I daresay we’d see a few eyes poking out of the water, but a snap of a bunch of eyes isn’t worth the potential snap that would result from a fast-moving hippo foot on the back of the neck. Lunch, then.

There’s a water hole and a salt lick on the plain by the open-air restaurant at the Pilanesberg Centre, which means that diners can watch a parade of animals as they eat. A group of wildebeest are taking advantage of the facilities when we arrive, and further out, a herd of buffalo are cropping the grass. A rail has been erected just beyond the restaurant deck, and birds perch on it, clearly ready to exchange photo opportunities for food. Smaller birds fly onto the deck and dart under tables for dropped delicacies, seemingly without any fear of humans – “Wot, a photo? Sure, guv, let me just put my foot on this bit o’ sausage else Reg over there’ll have it… how’s that, then? Got yer snap? Right – don’t mind me asking, but you doin’ anything with that tomato? OK, no offense meant… wow, she just dropped a whole bread roll! LADS!!! See you, guv –“

There’s a gift shop at the Centre that sells souvenirs which can be bought almost anywhere, especially by the side of the road, and probably cheaper, too; there are carved teak bowls of all sizes, soapstone animals, assegais, painted ostrich eggs, T shirts of ethnic design, wooden figurines, totem masks, bush hats and mounted horns. I’m not tempted… but wait! Here are a range of canvas bags to be slung over the shoulder, and here’s a green number that my laptop and external periphery will fit into. I hardly dare believe it… but I think I’ve found a Rambling Syd Rumpo gander bag. It’s less than a tenner, my Folkcast alter-ego picks it up and pays for it.

Helena, Manju and June buy some souvenirs, then ask me “What have you bought?” The Swedish, Indian and Nepalese representatives have no idea what a gander bag is, and I sense that any explanation will be both long and fruitless.

A few hundred yards down the road, a group of okapi are nervously waiting to cross some clear ground by the side of the road. As we slow to a stop, the first takes its chance and bounds across the short grass alongside the car. In twos and threes, the rest follow, giving us the chance to get photos of them leaping through the bush.

Further along, there are more zebra casually posing, some looking directly into the camera from a few feet away, others artfully gazing into the middle distance. “What do you think, Claude – full-on stare with major eyelashes or profile?” “Oh, profile, Derek, you know the left is your best side, and give them your pout, dear, you’re so good at it… Miranda, darling… ne crappez devant les touristes, uh?”

We turn off the main road, one of the few metalled ones in the Park, and continue down a dusty path. A mile or so later, we see a warthog in a hurry, with a younger one in tow. They’re trotting across an open plain, too far away, really, to get a decent picture, but we snap away hopefully. (In fact, my camera comes with sophisticated editing software, and I’m later to find that cropping then expanding the detail in my pictures produces excellent results.)

I’m just rounding a corner when Helena touches my arm and breathes – “Mark – it’s a rhino.” It takes me a moment or two to see it, but yes! Through the branches of a tree, around a hundred yards away, we see a rhino, half hidden by bushes. I let the car run to a halt by some clear ground, but as I do, the rhino slowly moves back behind the bushes. Rhinos are Helena’s special delight, so we wait to see if it will emerge again, but all that is visible is a snout and a horn. Reluctantly, I engage first gear and we move off.

We’re luckier ten minutes later, as a pair of rhino are grazing some twenty yards away. Still partially hidden by bushes, they’re exposed enough for us to get some pictures that will enable a viewer to identify that they’re rhinoceroses, rather than rhino-shaped shadows. Then, though, they melt back into the bush. As we discover when we find our third group of rhino a little further along the track, they’re shy creatures, and prefer not to be observed…

“Mildred – people! Clicking people!”

“Ohhh, and me all covered in dust and wotnot! Just slowly walk away, Reenee, we’ll hide behind those trees.”

“But they’ll see our bottoms!”

“Can’t be helped. Anyway, yours is nothing to write home about, frankly. To be brutally honest, dear, if they want to take pictures of your bum they must be pretty desperate.”

We’re turning towards a gate some 20 km away, because it’s well into the afternoon and Pretoria is at least two hours away. To our regret, we haven’t seen any lions, but that’s not entirely a surprise. It’s far too hot for any decent lion to be out and about, they’ll all be lying in a shady spot, far from any dirt track and the intrusion of cars. We haven’t found any elephant or giraffe, either, but perhaps we were just in the wrong part of Pilanesberg. There’s an awful lot of it, after all, and we’ve probably covered no more than 30% of the available ground.

We pause to watch a group of baboons knuckling their way across a field to some undisclosed venue, and my gaze takes in the longer view, across the plain to the distant hills and back through the millennia… my goodness, early humans must have thought they’d arrived in Paradise when they discovered this place. The rings of long-dead volcanic rock create a natural shelter and a defendable territory, while the availability of edible wildlife must have meant that meat was always on the menu.

Recognisable humans, rather than clever monkeys, probably originated way off to the north, in the Rift Valley, but one of the earliest skeletons of homo sapien was discovered not too far away from here, and the region to the east of Pretoria is known as “The Cradle of Mankind.” Some faint echo of the past, reaching out from thousands of years ago, lets me see this view as our shared ancestors did, and I know at this moment that they looked upon it and saw that it was good. Here is grassland for herds to graze, here are forests to give us wood for our fire and weapons to hunt with, here are streams to give us water, here is shade from the sun and protection from the rain… who could want anything more? And yet – what’s over the next hill? Could it be anything better?

Thank goodness we’re still wondering what’s over the next hill. What was over the hill was Discovery. The discovery that plants that dropped seeds onto the earth made new plants… agriculture, no need to follow the herds, cultivate their food and they’d stay with you, so you could stay in one place… and so building permanent homes, crikey, here comes architecture, also better try to make a record of how we got here in case we forget, seems that we need to learn to write, oh, let’s not forget reading… and off we went, always trying to find out what was over the next hill, even when the next hill was on the Moon.

Without that spirit of curiosity, we’d still be living in caves, listening to the wolves howling outside and arguing about whose turn it had been to bring the baby in.

My inner Neanderthal retreats, as my attention is caught by a flight of intensely-coloured butterflies. There’s always something new to see here in the bush, and chances are it’ll either have your arm off before you know it, or give you some dread disease. Probably not these butterflies, though, so I reckon it’s OK to keep the window open. Hovering near the windscreen is a dragonfly the size of my hand, but we’ve seen so many like it in South Africa that it’s hardly worth comment.

Time is passing, and we push on toward the gate, but only a few corners later there’s a herd of antelope hesitating about crossing the road –

“But, Gerald, a car might come…”

“A car has come, Mavis, and it’s stopped. Honestly, I think it’s safe.”

“Well, if you’re sure… cooee, Mrs Patterson! Gerald thinks we can cross the road here…”

And so, nervously, one by one, they cross the track just feet in front of the car. The speed limit everywhere in the park is 40 kph, but the guide book suggests that more wildlife can be seen if drivers keep to 20 kph. It suddenly strikes me, looking at the dithering parade just beyond the bonnet, that tearing round at 60 kph might mean missing a lot of wildlife… but those we hit, we barbecue later!

Nearly five o’clock, though, we ought to call it a day really… and yet, as we’re a few kilometres from the gate, there’s another rhinoceros, and this time it’s standing in open ground. Three hundred yards away, quick, change lenses before it runs for cover! The rhino is grazing in short grass, a foot or two away from a small grey boulder, occasionally lifting its head to look around. It hasn’t noticed us, or heard the furious clicking from within the Toyota; I’ve got my zoom on and am trying to find something to steady the camera with…

And that’s when the small grey boulder waggles its ears.

Ohhhh… it’s a mother with her baby. We haven’t seen lions, giraffe or elephants, but this makes up for any deficiency we may have felt. Sightings of baby rhino are rare, and even though baby doesn’t do anything beyond perfecting its impression of a stony outcrop, I’m chuffed to bits to have seen and snapped Mum and Junior. Helena, of course, is enormously pleased.

Gently easing in the clutch so as not to disturb this family scene, we slip away, and reach the gate a few minutes later. A short comfort break before we hit the highway back to Pretoria, folks? The animal-spotters take the opportunity to visit the facilities, while I walk over to a large display of souvenirs, yes, it’s the usual stuff, carvings, jewellery, teak boxes and bowls, primitive art, stoneware, leather goods, cleverly beaten tinplate, hello, what’s this….? A stone chessboard, and chessmen carved from stone to represent animals, the pawns being monkeys and the King, of course, a lion. “You like?” mutters a salesman in ragged T shirt and shorts, who stations himself at my side.

Actually, I do like. I like a lot. It’s the perfect Christmas present for my brainy brother, it’s probably expensive, but we might as well open negotiations…

“It’s OK… how much?”

“200 rand. You want it wrapped?” Oh, this man is good at the game!

“200? What’s your best price?”

Salesman pretends to think – “For you, 180 rand.”

“Sorry… I could maybe go to 150 rand, but 180 is too much. Never mind, my friends are coming back, we have to go. It’s a beautiful chess set though…”

“OK, boss – maybe 170, I talk to…” and he nips off into a shack under a tree.

“Yes, I can do for 170. OK?”

“No, I said 150 was the top price. But perhaps we can agree on 160, last final offer?”

Yes we can, he’s suddenly very pleased and we’re good friends. Look, here are the animals, see how lovely? And the chess board, how intricately carved? Let’s go over to the shack, he’ll wrap them carefully.

A glance inside the shack reveals tools, a bench, shards of stone, sawn wood… so you are the man who makes these things, my friend? Yes, he is. How do you make a chessboard of stone, then? Easy… he takes a sliver of stone, whams a chisel down on it three, four times, here is a tile, yes? He takes a rag, dips it into a pot, then rubs the tile with it. A slight sheen appears. Rub lots, he explains, and it shines. Now, only 63 more to make. Here is glue, put on lots, make chessboard, wait a day, then rub more so that glue can’t be seen. And the animals? Easy too, stone is soft, sharp chisel, no time at all, maybe one day, maybe two to make them all. Look, here is a monkey, nearly finished, here is chisel, tap…tap…tap-tap… see how?

So how long to make this chess set? Three days, no more.

I walk away with a chess set that my brother will have to tear out of my cold, dead hands. 160 rand is about £11, and my friend laboured for two days, maybe three to make it. We’re both satisfied by the deal, but only one of us is shamed by it. The roots of poverty are complex, and aid doesn’t always mean giving people money – in fact, it rarely does – but I know that this handmade chess set would cost a lot if it was displayed in a shop window in Knightsbridge. (Rashina later chides me for making too high an opening offer – “Start at a third of the price, man, never pay more than half!” Yeah? Well, if the stonemason thinks he’s exploited some rich tourist, then I’m glad for him.)

We leave Pilanesberg, and with the setting sun behind us, drive back towards Pretoria, swiftly picking up the N4. Oh, so it does go to Sun City, after all? Fair enough, let’s see how far we can get before the road runs out, perhaps we can find a swift way to negotiate the break.

The N4 takes us straight back to the centre of Pretoria. Was the end of the road a hallucination this morning? It’s not until Monday when we’re back in the office that the riddle is explained.

There are two N4s. We were on the wrong one. Typical, I think, making a mental note that the difference between a real GPS and Manju is that you only have to punch the route in once with the real thing.