31 Mar 2009 – Back in the Swing of Things

Saturday morning was a blur of fitful sleeping on the three-hour ride from the Drakensberg Mountains back to the airport in Durban. We dragged ourselves from our beds at 4:30, nibbled on prepackaged breakfasts while the drivers loaded our suitcases into the trailer, and then did our best to fall back to sleep on the bumpy ride east. The lack of shocks in the big van meant that the three of us in the back seat were launched toward the ceiling at every minor bump, but at least our sleeplessness served some purpose: we got to see the sun rise over the African plains – an eerily dull, red plate pasted against a murky morning sky.

After checking in at the airport, we said our woeful goodbyes to Ben, who will be staying in Durban an extra week to help his organization present at a conference on HIV/AIDS. (We collectively began lamenting his absence within minutes of his departure.) We had almost three hours to kill before our boarding time, so some people grabbed food or scanned the shelves of the bookstores and souvenir shops in the terminal. I found an electrical outlet and plugged in my computer to work on a compilation video of our hike in the Drakensbergs.

The flight home to Cape Town was unremarkable except for the astounding number of infants and toddlers on the plane with us. Their chorus of wails and screeches reached such a pitch that it prompted the man sitting adjacent to me to raise his arms and wave them about like a wild orchestra conductor. Once we’d collected our luggage on the ground, again, we met Parks at our usual van with big grins and warm hugs, and when we rolled up to the front gate of 10 Loch Rd fifteen minutes later, everyone was relieved to be home .

Most of us spent the rest of Saturday afternoon unpacking, napping, doing laundry, and grocery shopping to fill the empty pantries. We began working on assignments due later in the week and watched movies in the evening. On Sunday, most people had left the day open for academic work and relaxation before the return to our internships the next day, so I split the day between laundry, running, homework, and watching Chicago in the common room before bed. I also made up for a week of no guitar by playing my fingers raw in the afternoon. Overall, Sunday was a pleasant buffer between the excitement of the excursion week and the down-to-business energy of the next.

Monday and Tuesday have been back to the usual pace of life in Cape Town. We’ve spent our mornings and afternoons at our internships and our evenings being as productive as possible (though the scale of productivity is highly subjective at 10 Loch Rd) with our papers and other assignments due over the next few weeks. With under a month left of our study abroad, our weekly academic work has accelerated into the final stretch and we’ve begun scrambling to plan out all of the extracurricular things we’ve yet to see and do in Cape Town. Looking forward, Thursday’s class day will be a bit different than usual, this week, but more on that as it happens.

27 Mar 2009 – The Drakensbergs: Hiking, Games, and Relaxation

Thursday morning we’d scheduled a group hike at 9AM, so after a buffet breakfast, we loaded into the vans for a fifteen minute trip to the bottom of the mountain trail. A guide from Monte-Aux-Sources led us into the foothills of the Drakensbergs along a riverside path that curved between large gray boulders and dry, prickly African brush. The views were stunning as we marched through the tall grasses with the mountains rising all around us and the river cascading down the rocky riverbed at our sides. We hiked for a little over an hour, pausing to take pictures of the views and the ancient rock paintings by the river, and then took a break on a rock at the top of a series of small waterfalls.

(Rock Paintings)

We were prepared for a swim in the rocky pools below, but we first had to shimmy down between the boulders through a small cave to reach the level of the water. Though it had grown quite hot by late morning, the mountain spring water was still dreadfully icy as we slipped into the deep pools. We spent the next half hour climbing over the rocks, under the falls, and into the caves beneath the rushing water. The setting looked like something straight out of an eco-travel magazine, with the pools of water dropping off beyond the boulders and the tree canopy yielding to a view across the valley towards the pale outline of distant mountains.

We hiked back down around 11:30, stopping for another swim at “The Cascades” (which reminded me vaguely of Slide Rock State Park in Arizona) and then landed in the grass at the empty lot at the trail head. While waiting for the vans to return, we occupied ourselves with yoga poses and headstands, and then we drove back to the resort for lunch.At 2PM, eight of us met up at the sand court on the main lawn for a rousing game of 4v4 volleyball. None of us was very skilled at the sport, but that provided the fodder for much hilarity and ironic psych-outs on both sides. We played three sets before the heat of the afternoon became overwhelming and we dashed for the pool. Many of us napped or walked around the grounds during the early evening, and then we met up for dinner at 7:00 in the dining room. We arranged to gather at the chess board two hours later for a game of manhunt, which 12 of us decided to play.
The resort grounds were perfect for the game, despite the steep slope of the hill towards the “base”, which we’d designated to be a large tree near the main building. We partitioned the lawn so that the area of play was contained in the shadowy field by the volleyball court and pool, and then played five or six rounds that saw people toppling over hedges, wiping out on the grassy hill, and sprinting across the yard, shrieking like the African birds that swoop overhead all day long. Even though half of the group dropped out of the game as we played, both the activity and the atmosphere were exhilarating. When we finished the last game, we sprawled out on the hill looking up at the starry sky and the flashes of lightening pulsating over the distant mountains.


On Friday the only thing that pulled people out of bed in the morning was the fact that breakfast closed at 9:30. The previous early mornings during the excursion, however - coupled with the early-rising sun - caused three of us in chalet 504 to awake by 7AM. We watched a movie on the film channel before walking up the hill to breakfast, where we met several other members of our group and arranged an 11AM volleyball game. The 4v4 match included a few new players and a lot of the same antics as the previous day, but we lasted only two sets, this time, before running for the pool.

After lunch at one, people went separate ways for the afternoon. While I played a game of tennis, many people lounged by the pool, and others had scheduled massages and spa treatments. Horseback riding and ATVing in the mountains had already been booked when we’d called, but as they were expensive activities anyway, everyone seemed content to take the afternoon slow and enjoy the resort atmosphere. There were several conference groups and families staying at Monte-Aux-Sources, as well, but few roamed the grounds, and we had the place nearly to ourselves for a game of capture the flag at 3:30.

I’ve never played a game of capture the flag nearly as strategic and stealthy as the 4v4 matches we played this afternoon on the resort grounds. The mountainside setting and the excessively landscaped area included courts, fields, trees, and shrubs that divided up the property. The game, therefore, involved relatively little sprinting across open fields and a lot of crawling and sneaking through trees and shrubs. Each game lasted about 45 minutes, and despite the seeming impossibility of locating a flag in such wide and vegetation-dense territories, our team pulled out a victory each time (even if that meant I spent twenty minutes army-crawling through mud and ferns behind the chalets to reach the other team’s flag). We got many an inquiring look from resort security and visitors as we skulked around the property, but that only added to the element of adventure.

After a good shower to remove the evidence of our covert operations on the resort grounds, we met up for dinner again at the main lodge. The cappuccino ice cream and mulva pudding for dessert drew a bunch of us in before we left to go pack up our things for our check-out early the next morning. At 9:00, most people left in the vans for a karaoke bar in a small, nearby town, which turned into quite the event once Vernon stepped up to the mic to sing and Marita was coaxed into dancing. Overall, the evening proved to be an excellent ending to a wonderful excursion. Now tomorrow morning we’ll all just have to peel ourselves out of bed at 4:30AM so that we can drive the three hours back to Durban for our 11AM flight back to Cape Town.

25 Mar 2009 – Traveling to the Draks

We started the day of traveling with another run on the Durban beachfront outside the Tropicana Hotel. This time we ran south down the boardwalk for a mile, and when that ended, we continued another mile on the sand before turning around at a stone pier. The weather was even warmer than the previous day, but the slight breeze helped to make up for the difference. Even so, when we reached the hotel again we were literally dripping with sweat and more than relieved that our air conditioning had spontaneously started working the night before.

After showers and breakfast, we checked out of the hotel and loaded up the vans at 10:00. A drawn out stop at an ABSA bank delayed our departure for another half hour, however, and also depressed us some as we found out the exchange rate had yet again dropped (this time to R9.35 to USD1). The four-hour drive to the Drakensberg Mountains was elongated by bathroom breaks and lunch at yet another Steers at a middle-of-nowhere rest stop. The scenery grew more grand and dramatic as we drove, with the hills thrusting skyward into rocky mountains and yellow flowers interspersing with the corn fields that lay beneath them. The air blowing in the windows was so hot and driving that at times it felt like we were stuck in the crosswinds of massive hairdryer, but as we drove into the mountains the van temperature grew cooler, and we read and slept in greater comfort. Just after finishing a novel I’d been reading, the van was suddenly enveloped by the majestic Drakensberg Mountains, and we all had our camera arms hanging out the sliding windows. We climbed into the hills beneath them for about twenty minutes before we reached the Monte-Aux-Sources Resort (which sounds like “Montasaurus”, or some kind of dinosaur, when spoken aloud).

We checked in and divided into small groups for the individual chalets in which we’re all staying for the next three nights. The little houses cascaded down the grassy hillside, overlooking the green and brown range of Drakensberg peaks (including the famed “Amphitheater”) that rise impossibly tall in the distance. Once we settled in, we explored the grounds amidst the pretty landscaping – the pool, the tennis court, the basketball and soccer courts, the sand volleyball court, the boccie green, the jungle gym, the super-sized, walk-on chess board… and indoors, the sitting room piano and board games.

With so many options at our disposal and a solid field of potential game players, the isolated paradise (there wasn’t even internet access) of Monte-Aux-Sources became an athletic haven for many of us. We rented tennis rackets and a ball at the front desk in the main building at the top of the hill and played a novice game of doubles for about half an hour until we realized we’d rather play soccer. We returned the rackets and took out the soccer ball, and after positioning the nets on the converted basketball court, we played a game of three vs. two against the boys. It was exhilarating simply to throw together a game so easily, having the equipment and players ready on a whim, and by the time we headed to dinner at 7, those of us who’d played were sufficiently worn out.

The buffet dinner was set up in the large dining room with several long tables seating other large groups that were dining at the resort. The food selection was diverse and delicious, once again, and before we finished, we discussed options for the next two days in the mountains. Some people decided to look into hiking or horseback riding, while others contemplated spa treatments and massages. After dinner, the four of us in chalet 504 decided to rent out the game Scrabble from the front desk, and we played for about an hour, even though we never managed to get rid of all of the letter tiles because the game included twice the usual number of pieces. Sometime before midnight, most of us called it a night, but we not until we'd flipped through the six channels on the chalet television and found nothing worth watching.

24 Mar 2009 – Durban

This morning Kevin, Dan, and I went running on the beach outside our hotel at 7:30. We ran north along the harder packed sand by the water for about a mile and half, until we reached a shipping yard and were shooed back in the opposite direction. Even though the sun was still low over the water, the utter lack of wind and the considerable humidity made the run rather grueling, so I was thankful for the distraction of the pretty scenery and the rare chance to run on the beach.

After a buffet breakfast, the whole group met in the lobby for transport into the center of the city to a tour of the largest mosque in the southern hemisphere. We removed our shoes outside the large but unassuming building that sat in the middle of a bustling market area, and followed our guide inside for a lesson on the traditions, culture, and rituals of Islam as practiced within the South African mosque. We were allowed to take pictures of the ornately gilded building during the tour, so camera flashes filled the room as we sat on the Persian-carpeted floor of the prayer area and listened to the guide speak.

We walked across the street at 10:30 and spent the next two hours in the much-talked-about Indian market, which was located inside a mostly-enclosed building and smelled overwhelmingly of the eastern spices that many of the stalls were selling. The city of Durban has a large Indian population, and the crafts and culture have been influenced by the demographic. We all charted our own course through the maze of eager vendors and bright, colorful fabrics, browsing and purchasing an array of crafts and clothing, and doing our best not to offend any of the vendors who latched onto us hoping to make a sale. The noisy, redolent market certainly felt like the Indian markets I’ve seen in films and documentaries, selling everything from wooden crafts and beadwork to spices and live chicks. It was hard not to be overwhelmed by the atmosphere, but eventually we all seemed to make out well with some good bargains and good stories to boot.

On our own for the afternoon, we returned to the hotel to change for the beach (or other destinations) and then went separate ways until dinner at 7PM. Most people hit the sand and surf across the street, but some walked around the city and wandered through the road-side shops on the beachfront road. Later, we all met up and drove to dinner at an Indian restaurant about ten minutes away, where we once again faced an impossibly large and tasty assortment of ethnic cuisine. The foodies of the group especially enjoyed the departure from fast food dining for the second night in a row, ordering curries, rice dishes, and items that were far too spicy for me to take more than a bite. The group morale was high when we left the restaurant around ten o’clock, and ten of us headed to the cinema down the road to see a 10:30 showing of Slumdog Millionaire.

As anticipated, the Oscar-winning Best Picture was a fantastic film that had us all talking the entire cab ride back to the hotel at 1AM. The depiction of the Mumbai slums had felt very similar to the townships we’ve been encountering outside of Cape Town, and the setting of the film against the powerful backdrop of Muslim India seemed to fit wonderfully with our tour of the Indian market and mosque just hours earlier here in Durban.

Tomorrow morning we’re off excursion destination number three: the Valley of a Thousand Hills and the Drakensberg Mountains.

23 Mar 2009 – Hippos, Crocs, and Dinner in Durban

This morning we met at breakfast in the dining area a little after 7AM and then loaded up the vans and trailer and hit the road by 8:00. It took about an hour to reach the St. Lucia estuary, where we ambled through a gift shop and then boarded the ferry up the river for aquatic animal viewing. During our two hours on the river we saw several pods of hippos, a few crocodiles, and dozens of indigenous waterfowl, one of which perched about four feet tall on the reedy river bank. Half of our group sat on the lower deck out of the sun, while the rest sat or stood on the rooftop platform, switching sides according to the guide’s advice. The water was the color of chocolate milk, and from time to time we saw the dark, lumpy heads of the hippos bobbing up and down in groups. The crocodiles sunned themselves on the beach, while an eagle alighted on a crooked branch surveying the water for wayfaring fish. Overall it was a mellow ride, which we shared with about fifteen or twenty other tourists carrying binoculars and zoom-lens cameras.After another round of souvenir shopping, we piled back into the hot vans and headed to lunch around the corner at a small restaurant with a straw-canopied outdoor seating area. We lingered a bit after lunch, glancing in some of the shops nearby on the short stretch of commercial road in the middle of nowhere, and I charged my computer for a few minutes inside the restaurant. We had three hours ahead of us in the vans before reaching Durban, the night’s destination, and the ride was far from comfortable, but somehow much of the group in the big van managed to doze.

The Hluhluwe area is South Africa’s biggest pineapple growing region, and driving along the highway towards Durban this afternoon, the citrusy scent frequently wafted in through the windows. Those of us in the back of the van were treated to a bumpy ride, since the fifteen-seat vehicle seems to be missing any semblance of shocks. We made several stops for bathrooms, stretching, and snacks, and reached Durban at 6:00 after hitting traffic.

Durban looked a lot more like Hartford or Bridgeport than Cape Town from afar. We drove through the urban streets past minibuses and street markets for a few minutes until we emerged onto a glitzy, neon-lit ocean front street boxed in by hotels, casinos, resorts, and restaurants. We jumped out of the vans in front of the Tropicana Hotel, across the road from the beach, and checked in at the front desk in groups of two and three. Dinner was booked for 7PM at a resort hotel and casino about five minutes away, so we all spruced ourselves up as best as possible in twenty minutes and convened in the lobby for the drive down the road.When we arrived at the resort hotel, the giant waterfront building was obnoxiously bright and glowing against the dark sky – a beacon of neon light attracting gamblers and consumers from all over Durban. It looked like something right off of the Las Vegas strip. The building housed a cinema, casino, and several shops and restaurants, including The Havana Grill, where we’d reserved a private room for the evening. We were seated around a large square of fancily-decked tables in a dining room resembling something between a board room and a yacht cabin, and we poured over the menu of delicious sounding dishes as the wait staff took drink orders and delivered the night’s specials.The antics over dinner – particularly those related to the consumption of copious amounts of food – made up in part for the slow pace of the event. Much of the table was growing full after the starters, so we were all just about bursting once we were a few bites into the main course. The desserts had caught my eye early on when we were perusing the menus, so I made a point to save room and split the five or six desserts with other people at the table, but since I was one of the only people who could still even contemplate a third course, I wound up eating more than my share of desserts for the evening: crème brule, chocolate mousse, coconut cheese cake…Most people were fairly distended with what the group has come to call “food babies” by the time we plodded out of the room three and a half hours later at 10:30PM, so just five decided to stay and try their luck on the casino floor. The rest of us opted to return to the hotel, where I proceeded to buy an hour’s worth of internet and check in on my housing and class registration, which had been scheduled for that afternoon. We also flipped through the five or six channels on the television in the room, trying to make use of the sudden novelty, but we found nothing but South African soap operas and – strangely – two different recent Lindsey Lohan movies.

As we got ready for bed, however, we were startled by a swell of cheering coming from outside our fifth story window. With a little exploration, we found that the drawn-out commotion was originating from the many windows of the Four Seasons hotel, which sat adjacent to the Tropicana. Shadow figures danced in the windows and hollered ANC chants (among other noisy cheers) out into the night, seemingly unprovoked and without prior coordination. But the fervor continued for far too long for it to have been unplanned; the hubbub waxed and waned for nearly an hour out the front windows of the hotel, and it was only when we were about to shut our window for the night that the ruckus died down. In the morning, we would discover that the hotel had been hosting an ANC rally of come kind, and many of the windows were plastered with posters of Zuma’s grinning mug.

22 Mar 2009 – Safari! (“Did Disney come by and stage this for us?”)

Today was quite possibly the best day I’ve spent in South Africa, so far. I probably could have guessed it would be a good day, given the itinerary (the long-awaited safari) and the location (the rural African region of Hluhluwe), but I couldn’t have imagined a more perfectly suited course of events than those that transpired in the last seventeen hours.

I awoke to my alarm at 4:40AM and battled my way out of the mosquito net to go wake the people sleeping in the other bedroom. We scrambled into our layers of warm clothing and grabbed our cameras on the way out the door, where we met up with the rest of the group at 5:00 under a fluorescent light by the lodge office. Even though we’re on the opposite side of South Africa, we’re still in the same time zone, and the sun rises about an hour earlier than in Cape Town. So as we pulled out off the bumpy dirt driveway in the safari trucks, there was already a glow on the eastern horizon.

The trucks were the quintessential African safari vehicles – beige and green with four rows of bench seats each stacked a bit higher than the ones in front of it, a square frame canvas roof but open sides, a fold-down windshield, and coolers of food and water packed under the seats. In the semidarkness and midnight cold, we shivered against the wind that whipped through the open truck, huddled under blankets and hoods. The sun rose at our backs as we sailed along the rural road to the game reserve about a half hour away, and the clusters of circular, thatched-roofed huts became more numerous along the green ridges we passed. The traditional villages dotting a vast rolling landscape were reminiscent of the Native American reservations in the western US, while the cattle that meandered across the road in packs reminded me of stories about sheep on the roads in Ireland.

The chill and the anticipation kept everyone wide-eyed and awake until we reached the entrance to the game reserve, where we drove beneath an arch indicating the north end of the reserve and started down a long road into the park. The landscape remained largely the same, but the huts were gone and the hills and greens that surrounded us were of a much grander scale. With the sun still rising over the hilltops, our vans stopped first for a hyena skirting along the side of the road and then a pack of buffalo lounging in the tall grasses about fifty meters away.
We had to learn quickly how to use our “quiet excited voices” so as not to scare away the animals, and as the sun warmed us up a bit, we grew more animated and engaged in scanning the landscape for four-legged fauna. (The situation produced some seriously laugh-worthy lines, like when Jordan exclaimed that we’d just passed “a donkey!” when in fact it had been a buffalo.) For the next two and half hours we bumped and jostled along the winding, rutted dirt roads through the bush, descending the hills into valleys with dense, lush thickets of tropical forest, and then climbing again into the dry, grassy hills. In some places, the twisted trees and dry, gnarled brush vegetation lined the narrow roads, and we’d occasionally turn off onto other trails and overlooks as we came upon them.Between 7 and 8AM, there was a dearth of activity on our safari route. The air was slightly warmer and the wind didn’t race through the vehicle with the same intensity, so unavoidably, people started to doze off. When we’d heard stories about last year’s students falling asleep during the safari, we’d never understood how that could have been possible, but I’ll admit that even my eyes had begun to droop by the time we pulled off into a little picnic area for breakfast. The guides emptied the contents of the coolers onto a picnic table under a low-hanging tree (which several people promptly climbed), and we tucked into egg, ham, or cheese sandwiches, chicken, and chocolate muffins. The leafy, Afro-tropical environment and the lack of white noise on the game reserve made the place seem almost mystical, but we couldn’t help but feel disheartened by the fact that we’d seen so few animals. The warmer and sunnier it became, the less likely we were to come across any animals, so we set off after breakfast with low expectations. But just minutes after leaving the picnic area we came upon three zebras munching on the tall grass by the side of the road. Excited to have found our first well-positioned group of African animals, we scrambled to get our cameras out and craned our necks to get a good view around the front of the van, only to have our driver pull up right beside them moments later. The zebras didn’t seem bothered by our presence (or our shutter snaps) at all, despite our close proximity, which allowed us to take pictures and softly chuckle at the way they blatantly ignored us and went about their morning meal.About twenty minutes later Jill gave a shout after noticing a group of giraffes standing in the dense forested area on the side of the road, and as the van pulled over, we did our best to contain our ecstatic outbursts of good fortune. Though they were largely concealed in the brush, we toppled over one another in the van to get pictures of the gangly creatures – usually just a disembodied head or a section of neck between the leaves. If we’d only known what scene was in store for us over the next hill, we might not have bothered with all of the mediocre snapshots.There was nothing particularly unusual about the hilltop mudflat and watering hole at which we stopped about ten minutes later, except that it turned out to be the gathering place for half a dozen different species of African wildlife. This perfect safari microcosm included two rhinos, a sleepy buffalo, a pack of grazing springbok, a thirsty giraffe, three zebras, and a family of warthogs, all standing or lying in uniform groups several meters apart, minding their own business and enjoying the sunny autumn morning. Ben seemed to capture our disbelief best with the rhetorical question, “Did Disney come by and stage this for us?”
We spent about twenty minutes sitting quietly in our van, watching the scene unfold – the baby warthogs running over to jump in the mud, the rhinos nudging one another and then rolling over to nap, the springbok jumping through the grass. And then we turned around and saw the giraffes.At first there was just one of them, bent awkwardly forward in a pose evocative of a praying mantis, slurping water out of the muddy pit. But soon three others appeared over the hillside, emerging from the trees and gliding regally through the golden grasses like some kind of prehistoric creatures. We watched in awe and amusement as they stalked towards the water, stooped to drink, and then posed for our pictures with their heads held high. We also were literally tossing ourselves over one another along the bench seats to get in pictures with the giraffes in the background.After all of the excitement, it was unlikely that any other animal sightings could have elicited such a giddy response from our group, save a lion or leopard spotting. But before the end of the safari at 11, we did see several more giraffes, zebras, buffalo, and elephants on a distant ridge. The last hour we spent driving back towards the entrance gate, and cruising over the tops of the green, sunlit hills, our van inevitably broke into song (The Sound of Music and several songs that included the word buffalo.) When we jumped out of the vans at the curio shop at the end, we all seemed quite satisfied with our safari experience.
The group stopped for lunch at the Protea Hotel on the way back to the Sand Forest Lodge. We were thoroughly exhausted after the early wake up and the safari excitement, so it was a relatively quiet meal around the small wicker tables in the hotel dining room. While we waited for the bill, I sat down at a baby grand in the hall and played (as quietly as possible) the few songs I could remember after two months away from the piano.

When we got back to the lodge, many people took naps or jumped back in the van to visit a craft market down the road. I took the memory cards out of my camera and started uploading, editing, deleting, and labeling the hundreds of pictures from the morning. I’d gotten through about half of them from the first camera when I started to feel overwhelmingly tired, and then it dawned on me that I was in absolutely no rush to do anything; I could just close my laptop and fall asleep where I lay, stretched out across the big bed.

I awoke to the sound of dozens of birds twittering outside the open windows and the voices of my three lodge house mates. Kevin walked by the window a few minutes later and jumped inside so that we could make a plan for running that evening, and from that point on, the big, swing-open window in my room became the primary mode of entry and exit for the house, out of pure convenience.

Four of us decided to run a little after five, and we decided to take one of the lodge’s paths through the bush towards the woods on the far side of the property. We ran for about half an hour through African forest and grasslands, dodging vines, giant red ant hills, and piles of springbok droppings. While racing along the winding path through the trees, we also just nearly missed running into a fist-sized (probably poisonous) spider that was hanging in its web at face-height across our path. At the end of the trail we emerged into an open field and loped through the tall grasses flanked by the wildebeest, zebras, and springbok that lived on the lodge reserve. We stirred up a bit of a frenzy as we ran past them, scattering the exotic menagerie in our path. Later we laughed about how we’d imagined ourselves as African bush people, running amongst the wild animals.

We ended the run by jumping into the pool, which was empty in the quiet, half-dark yard. We spent a lazy half hour cooling off and generally just enjoying the atmosphere – the sunset, the wildlife chirping and chattering around us, the refreshing temperature of the water. A few nappers began to emerge from the lodge houses around 6:15, and we took that as our cue to get ready for dinner, so we showered and returned to the dining area at the side of the yard. Dinner was an array of vegetable and pasta dishes, with meat options and cake bread for desert, but the conversation over dinner managed to top the delicious food. While waiting to sit down for the first course of vegetable soup and rolls, we’d struck upon the topic of religion and ethics, always a hot-button issue. The discussion had morphed into a debate that drew in most of the group at one point or another and had us squeezed together around one of the larger tables, two-to-a-seat for a brief period of time, as the opinions of the ultra-left clashed with those of the group’s centrists.The debate rambled on over the next two courses (and as many hours), and went off on tangents from time to time. Marita joined the fray after a while, and other people dropped away from the conversation as they grew weary of the topic or finished their dinners. I decided to head back to the room around 8:30 to sit down and finally finish working on the safari pictures and the day’s blog. People popped in and out of the room throughout the evening – mostly through the window – and the whole group spent at least part of the evening packing so that we could get an early start in the morning. Around 11:30 I pulled the mosquito netting around the pillows, again, and went to sleep.

21 Mar 2009 – Flight to Durban, Drive to Hluhluwe

When traveling with fifteen students and three program leaders, it is a feat just to get everyone together and in the right place at the right time. So the fact that we all made it onto the plane to Durban this morning made Ben a very happy person. Though I’d packed the night before, I was racing the clock to shower and get out the door after the run to the Rhodes Memorial this morning, but we managed to have everyone in the van by 8:30 with the luggage packed into the open trailer in the back. The check-in at the airport was a complex process given the size of our group, and we had only about a half hour to grab something to eat before boarding the plane at 10:20. The generally slow service in South African restaurants – even in the airport – put us in a bit of a time crunch, but we all managed to get through security and onto the plane without any problems.We flew on Kulula Airlines, presumably a domestic-only airline, on a two-hour flight to the eastern coast city of Durban. Several people took advantage of open rows of seats, which they commandeered to stretch out and nap for the quick hop across the country. Upon our arrival, we all agreed that the flight had been almost comically short after our 18-hour flight two months ago. We grabbed our bags and walked out into the hot, sunny afternoon air, where two vans and one luggage trailer were poised to take us the last three hours of our trip to the town of Hluhluwe (pronounced sort of like “kloo-kloo-ee”). Climbing into the vans, most of the group embraced the hot dry air that had been missing in Cape Town for almost a week. I immediately chose a seat with an open window and shed my long-sleeved layer.

Our drivers, Themba and Moses, drove us out of Durban along a highway surrounded by green hills and tropical flora. The geography appeared more quintessentially “African” with the patches of red dirt and endless grassy hills spreading out in all directions. We stopped at a rest stop for a quick lunch a little after 2:00, eating at the rest stop staple, Steers. The restaurant has come to elicit heavy sighs from the group whenever we face buying a meal there, but the fast food burger joint was satisfying enough to hold us over for the next two and half hours in the vans. (Note: During the excursion, our meals are covered by the trip fund, which is essentially comprised of the money we paid upfront for the term abroad. Nevertheless, it still feels like a treat not to have to pull out our wallets at every meal.)

During the rest of the drive, most of the van slept or read, often doing so with headphones in their ears or while watching the scenery pass by. Rolling fields of corn gave way to patches of woodlands made up of tall, straight Eucalyptus trees and broad ferns. The expansive land and sky was ever constant, however, dwarfing the circular, thatched-roof huts that squatted on the sides of the hills in small clusters. The appearance of these little traditional homes only added to the feeling that we’d entered a region of South Africa that had not been touched by time or Western culture to the same extent that Cape Town has been.

It was growing dusky when we pulled onto the dirt drive into Sand Forest Lodge around 5:30. We’d been traveling through rural, isolated Hluhluwe and then on empty two-lane roads through the fields for about twenty minutes when we finally reached the game reserve in which the lodge was located. We immediately noticed the springbok grazing in the brush just outside the lodge houses, which stood unassumingly beneath a bunch of tall canopy trees near the drive. We unloaded the vans as the lodge owner doled out the keys to our rooms, and then we explored the lodge houses and settled in before dinner.

There are between 2 and 6 to a house for the two nights we’re staying at Sand Forest, and the rooms are absolutely the picture of an “African Game Lodge”. In addition to a large kitchenette and living room area, our lodge house has two bedrooms and two bathrooms. The floors are a raised stone and tile with woven throw rugs, the muted tan walls are filled with African art, landscapes, and animal prints. The rustic wooden frames of the furniture compliment the earthy tones in fabrics that cover the chairs and beds, and the side tables resemble carved chunks of tree trunks. Elephant and zebra figurines also adorn most of the items in the room and decorate the rest of the lodge. To top it off, the lamp shades are wicker, the large drape-framed windows look out on the game reserve, and the beds have mosquito nets hanging from the ceilings. It certainly has the appropriate African eco-lodge ambiance.

After we’d sufficiently taken in the bucolic atmosphere, we made our way out onto the grounds to view the springbok, wildebeest, and zebras that roamed in the lingering daylight. There were no partitions to stop us from walking right through the fields in which the animals were grazing, and we got awfully close to the zebra and wildebeest before they took off at a startlingly fast gate towards the lodge houses. Their breakneck run took them straight past the pool and open-air dining room (complete with thatched roof and kerosene lanterns), where about half the group was sitting and staring in shock. With the lodge to ourselves for the night, we lingered on the brick patio and on a set of swings as the stars appeared overhead and the bats and bugs came out around us. Sitting together in the quiet, windless night, Vernon told us about previous trips he’d taken to the Durban area and about the differences between this rural, traditional part of South Africa and Cape Town.

Around 7:00, Dan, Kevin, and I walked around to the eastern side of the dining hut to find a darker spot from which to view the stars. It only took a few moments of gazing skyward to realize that the view topped Plettenberg – and perhaps even the planetarium. We stood transfixed for nearly fifteen minutes before we walked back for dinner, which we ate by lantern-light around several sturdy wooden tables inside the three-walled enclosure. The three-course, buffet style rice and curry meal was quite good, and we finished off with a dessert of peaches and fresh cream. Of course, most of us couldn’t pass up the chance to stargaze some more before turning in for the night, and given the relatively early hour (about 9:00), seven of us opted to walk back to our viewing spot in the middle of a field about a hundred meters from the lodge. We stared up at the night sky and mused over the sheer number of stars, universes, and possible extraterrestrial life forms (and on and on) until we got tired of craning our necks and standing in the cold.

Though the weather is more humid here than in Cape Town, the change in temperature between the sunny afternoon and the dark evening hour was significant, and the cool air and the bugs drove us inside by 10:00. We’ll all be waking up before 5AM to head out on safari tomorrow morning, and we’re all incredibly excited for the event, so no one in my house seemed averse to calling it an early night and heading to bed around 10:30. I, for one, will be perfectly content to fall asleep in my comfy queen bed to the faint chirping of crickets out my window. Not even the mosquito net draped over my pillow could detract from the serenity of the atmosphere we’ve encountered so far at Sand Forest Lodge.