Kruger Day 5, Hamakuya Day 1
Thursday April 25
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| wildebeest herd |
In the early morning, right after breakfast, we left Mopani
camp and headed towards a park gate to leave Kruger. We still had about 5 or 6
hours before we crossed the border out of the park. We tried to go to
Mozambique because we were 2 kilometers from the border, but the road had
washed out in the January floods this year, so we couldn’t pass through. Sigh.
Some other time. In case you don’t know this about me, I have been obsessed
with Mozambique ever since I decided it was the coolest word there is. But in
some other lifetime or some other trip, I’ll go to Mozambique. For now, having
been 2km from it will have to suffice. We were also about 3 km from the
Zimbabwe border. Kruger actually extends into all 3 countries, so it’s a really
cool area and has fascinating history and archaeological sites too.
We crossed the Tropic of Capricorn and got out and took the
requisite group photos of us all officially entering the Tropics.
We also saw a pair of hyenas that were again so curious. I
love that about them! The Lion King portrayed them as so evil and malicious. But they're just fluffy, cute, and curious. Their representation in that movie isn't the least bit accurate.
We saw a herd of elephants drinking from a water collection
tank and it was another one of the cutest things I saw in Kruger. The little
ones had a hard time reaching their trunks up and over and they couldn’t see
what they were doing, so it was really comical. And the littlest baby needed
help from the mom to get water at all.
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| This one is having a difficult time getting her trunk up and over the edge of the tank. |
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| Somebody on the far side struggling... |
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| Baby needs help. |
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| The creepy power lines |
The terrain started changing and the place started feeling
weird. Really close to the borders of the two other countries. We saw baboons
and elephants, but we also saw a series of power lines. These power lines are
infamous because they were the route that the refugees took from Mozambique to
South Africa during the civil war there. And many people died there or were
eaten by lions there since the lions in the area figured out that the people
traveled under the power lines. David is producing a documentary called “Under
the Wire” about the history and culture of these power lines. Him telling us
about this all didn’t make me feel any more at ease. It was eerie as our small
caravan of three vehicles trekked through this creepy area. Still today it is a
highly used drug and human trafficking route. I didn’t feel unsafe, but I
certainly didn’t feel comfortable. The Hakuna Matata happiness vibe of Kruger
was dissipating into the eerie sticky air. Even seeing lots fewer animals was
creepy. We saw a group of giraffes at one point and I felt relieved to see
another form of life besides the Mopani trees. We saw an elephant and some
baboab trees which were cool.
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| Young giraffe herd |
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| Vultures: when they're the only form of animal life you see in an hour's worth of driving, you know it's bad. |
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A tributary of the Limpopo River
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Then I had an eerie meeting of childhood and present as I
was in this weird in between place not seeming to be in South Africa or Mozambique
or Zimbabwe but some other weird planet. There was no life. No animals. There
were some ancient ruins of an ancient Zimbabwean civilization on a
mountainside. The ground was cracked and dusty like no other part of Kruger
we’d driven through so far. And then David explained that we were driving
through what was formerly under the Limpopo River (Rudyard Kipling’s
Just So Stories, anyone?) when it used
to be a lot higher. I can’t explain the feeling I had, but there was an
eeriness that everyone felt. Everyone was quiet. Everyone felt very
uncomfortable. It was so bizarre. Like something from a movie. And definitely a
horror movie. We saw a flower on the roadside and all got excited because
Kruger doesn’t really have many flowering plants so we hadn’t seen them in a
while. David stopped the car, got out, and picked the flower from the plant and
handed it to me since I was in the back seat right by where it was. I grabbed
the flower and in about 3 seconds, it released a weird yellow liquid onto my
hand that burned. I had wet ones in my bag, so I just wiped it off and was
fine, but even the flowers in this place are messed up. It was a weird place,
one I was quite relieved to leave behind.
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| Dry season on it's way. |
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| Eerie Place in Kruger: Nyala Valley |
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| Green yet mysteriously desolate |
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| Look at this cool tree! |
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| Limpopo River |
After we left this area, we drove a bit further and exited
Kruger through the Parfuri gate. It was sad to leave Kruger, but particularly
weird to leave it after such a weird an un-Kruger-y experience at the very end.
But I guess that as authentically Kruger as the rest of it was. Just not a part
that any tourists would ever hit up.
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When I go back to Kruger, I'll be here to research this.
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The afternoon’s weirdness didn’t stop. Shortly after emerging from Kruger, we started seeing civilization, other human life. And not having seen anyone besides my profs, guides, and classmates for the past 5 days, I felt weird seeing other humans. Bizzare, huh?! It was also odd being such a conspicuous spectacle driving down the highway in our open-air safari vehicles. Again, the wind blew in our faces. I felt as if everyone was staring at us as if we didn’t belong.
We drove into Hamakuya and stopped at a mine’s c-store to stock up on anything we might need in the next few days. I can’t emphasize enough how much we stood out, the twenty of us American college students walking into a small convenience store in a rural area of the Limpopo province in South
Africa.
Back on the roads again, we soon hit dirt “roads.” Some of
them were questionably roads because the potholes and ruts were so disruptive.
I was sitting in the back of the safari vehicle and the red dust was just
coating my hair and my skin and my ears and then eventually the inside of my
mouth and nose and eyes. The three of us in the back row decided to turn around
so that the dust from the car in front of us wouldn’t be blowing directly into
our faces and that helped significantly. We made it into a game between the two
trucks – we used the walky-talkies (that had been used to communicate between
vehicles in Kruger) to sing a song to the other vehicle behind us, and the three
of us in the back row danced or acted out the lyrics for them. We definitely
made fools of ourselves, but at this point, we were back in such a rural area
after leaving the mine area so nobody was there to see it but our audience.
As we got closer to our destination, the roads got dustier
and bumpier. We even had to drive across a shallow river at one point. Yay.
Roughing it. We drove through some very small villages that would make Maple
Hill, Kansas look not so small. There were lots of kids running around in their
school uniforms in each of these villages since it was around afternoon time
when kids get out of school. The kids kept on waving at us and shouting as we
drove past in our exposed vehicles, “Makua! Makua!” David explained that makua literally means “white thing” in
Tshivenda (the language of the Venda peoples). So they literally were shouting
white thing at us as we drove past. Haha! Pretty crazy…
Our destination
was Tshulu Camp, David’s research headquarters for tropical water studies in
Hamakuya villages. When we arrived, we were split into four tents, according to
our groups for the homestays.
However
“tents” barely applies to these structures. They were indeed tents, made from
cloth and with zippers for enclosures. But they were massive, had five beds in
them, and a bathroom and shower built at the rear. And there was a permanent
floor and deck made of nice hard wood. WHAT? Anyway, it was cool. We had about
an hour before dinner, so we explored the river near the camp, but kept a lookout
for crocodiles since they do inhabit that area of that river. We also saw a lot
of baboons and watched the sunset over the river.
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| View from the front of our tent. |
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| Smitha, Hope and Michelle, three of my fellow homestay group members being silly in front of our Tshulu Camp tent. |
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| Professors Amanda and Jacob |
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| Everybody happy to not be sitting in a vehicle |
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| Professor Jacob du Plessis |
After another delicious
dinner, the volunteer coordinator and David’s research assistant, a former
volunteer from Ireland gave us the pre-homestay talk: instructions, what to
expect, etc. For the most part, it allayed my fears. But it definitely made me
nervous about some things. I tried not to worry and instead tried to relax and
not grow impatient during the almost-2 hour-long talk. After it ended, I walked
back to my tent and curled up in my cozy fluffy tent bed and instantaneously
fell asleep.
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