Day 11: Fish River Sun and Hogsback

We started day 11 by going to the Fish River Sun Resort and indulging in an amazing breakfast buffet before our three hour hike.  On the way into the resort, we were excited to see monkeys playing beside the road and we stopped and watched them for a bit.  The breakfast variety was amazing: smoothies, crepes, omelets, meats, cheeses, dried and fresh fruits, cereal, pastries and even ice cream!  While the adults finished up tasting every bite of our food, the younger people who may or may not have tasted their food as it was snarfed down, went outside for a game of giant chess.

On the tables outside of the restaurant are bottles of Monkey repellant.  I have a suspicion that the liquid in the bottle is water, but whatever works to keep the monkeys away from my delicious breakfast is fine with me!

I love driving through new lands.  Some say that you can't really get the feel of the culture if you live in a place for a while, but I beg to differ.  Observing the homes, the agriculture, the businesses, the land and the animals inspires my imagination as to what some of the culture is.  My imagination may not be National Geographic worthy, but I won't soon forget the emotions that my eyes send to my brain and heart. Along our way we saw many, many aloe vera bushes, a lot of fences made out of piles of dried bushes and sticks to corral animals, we saw bright colored schools and many locations with both bright colored homes and homes that have not seen any color.

We also saw many of these mounds in the hills along the road.  These are ant hills.  In the picture above you can see there are many across the hill. In the picture below you can see the anthills a little closer.  Some are as big as a bush and some bigger!  I didn't get to see the ants up close.  I imagine they are either very large ants that can carry me away, Indiana Jones style, or they are small, but smart ants that build bigger homes to intimidate prey.

Our destination for the day was the Hogsback forest.  Th Amatola forest there is said to have inspired J.R.R. Tolkien's (he was born in South Africa) Mirkwood forest in The Lord of the Rings (which is why we went, because we are big fans of the trilogy).  The nearby towns have played off of the Rings theme and called some of there businesses and towns, Hobbiton and Lothlorien with fairies and elves. The trailer we are standing by in the picture actually says "The Lord of the chain rings," because each year a three day bike race is held.

There were no signs to explain why there was a working bathtub at the top of the trail, but I'm guessing it is for people who start at the other end of the trail and end up here.

So interesting to see the different living things on the other side of the world.

Of all the names to choose from for this very large, very old tree, the powers that be named this one: The Big Tree.  Apparently it is a popular name because a fellow hiker asked me if I'd seen "The Big Tree" in Knysna (nice-na), South Africa.

Why Grandma and the boys chose this pose is beyond me, but I caught the smiles before the grimaces and grunts!  Grandpa graciously offered to drive the van to the end of the trail, so we didn't have to hike back to the trail head.

All along the way we listening for the rustling of leaves and the movement of branches in hopes to spy monkeys in their natural habitat.  We got very excited by The Big Tree when we heard rustling, but realized with a little fear that the rustling we were hearing was being made by a bigger animal than a monkey.  As we listened to slow heavy footstep approach, we froze . . . and then sighed as we realized it was an exotic. . . cow.

But later on in the hike we did hear monkey rustling.  We also heard baboon calling, which is a bit more nerve wracking than little monkey -oo-aa-oo's.  Spencer wasn't very excited at the prospect of being trampled by baboons, but we persevered and were treated to little monkeys playing in the tree tops.  I have to say that it really is a little more unnerving being out in the open with monkeys than watching them from behind bars, but that also makes it more exciting!  We had a great time peering from tree top to tree top with our mouths open in delight.  Thankfully nothing fell into our mouths.

Right before we reached our destination, which was the waterfall, D.J. and James decided to race ahead when they heard the water.  As I was trying to keep up with them, my head snapped up when I heard them scream.  Thankfully I heard laughter after the screams, the loudest laughter coming from Grandpa, the culprit of a surprise attack.  He got them good, as they say.

How fortunate for us that in one vacation we get to see two "Madonna and Child" likenesses. One in Brugge and the other in the Hogsback forest.  I thought the Madonna and Child referred to the waterfall itself, but I was informed that the rock formation halfway down is the Madonna and Child. It looks like a Mama facing left, holding her child up to her face.

Since it was close to the end of winter the waters were low which allowed Mark to find this carving in one of the stones along the river, another Madonna and Child likeness.

This is the actual Hogsback mountain in the distance, seen from the end of our trail.

As we started our drive back to the flat, there were people along the road coming home from a day of work.  Grandpa was driving as fast as any other car on the road.  Spencer thought it was hilarious that since our van was big and white, many people thought we were a taxi, like so many other big white vans are.  One man started wandering on to the road, whether with intent or with inebriation, we'll never know, but the scream from me and Grandma was the butt of many jokes there after.  Which just doesn't make sense to me as we were obviously the only ones who cared about that poor man!

After the near-hit situation, one of our favorite moments of the whole vacation came when Mark yelled: Look! Stop the van!!  We looked to our left and saw a herd of giraffe.  A HERD OF GIRAFFE!

We spent a good 20 minutes watching these beautiful, graceful animals, run, climb, walk and eat.  We are not sure if they were a part of an animal reserve or not, but to us, they were in the wild, along with some zebra and wart hogs.

This giraffe was our favorite because his coloring was so striking.

We stopped for dinner at a pub and restaurant, which was the first to be built on the Eastern Cape in 1820.  It's called The Pig and Whistle.  They are famous for their chicken strips and special sauce, which every body except me ordered, because if I'm going to eat somewhere, I'm not going to choose chicken strips.  I did taste them however and they were quite good!

In the back of The Pig and Whistle was an African Gray that I made Mark take a picture of for Granna, as she owned one named Molly once.  Granna - this is an African Gray - in Africa!

That night the Elders waited for us to come home so they could get some good eatin'.  D.J. is pictured here with Elder Tonge.  He is the son of D.J.'s 4th and 5th grade teacher from JA Taylor Elementary in Centerville!  What a great connection!

Day 10: Port Alfred at the beach

After unloading all the American goods we brought for Grandpa and Grandma (chocolate, Ziplock bags, chocolate, assorted medications and supplements, chocolate, q-tips, and more), we all slept for about 10 hours our first night in South Africa, and a welcome sleep it was.  The previous night we drove from Port Elizabeth in the dark, so we didn't see any of the surroundings when we pulled into the flat.  So we were flabbergasted when we woke up to this scene:

Grandpa and Grandma showed us this scene while skyping, but it's a completely different emotion to wake up to the bright blue illuminating the flat, with rocking waves draining any stress that might have existed in your muscles previously.

We had a late breakfast and decided to go frolic in the Indian Ocean.

Well, the boys frolicked more than the adults because it was a bit chilly, it being winter and all.  But since they are made of rubber and apparently their nerves have not fully developed, they didn't care.

This is my favorite picture of wave frolicking.

In a nearby tide pool, we discovered many hermit crabs.  The boys chose what they thought were the fastest crabs and had races with them.

Keen-eyed D.J. found a star fish in the tide pool and my curious mind just couldn't resist picking it up to see the underside.

Can't leave the beach without constructing something out of sand.

The white buildings are the flat complex, Grandpa and Grandma's flat is in the middle.

We returned to the flat for a mince burger (the closest thing to hamburger that may or may not include other animal meat) with plenty of seasoning.

Grandpa and Grandma drove us to the Location.  A Location is a Township, but they are no longer called Townships because that word has a bad stigma resulting from political changes of power and poor government assistance.  Mark didn't take any pictures of the location because it just didn't feel right to do so.  Just to help us remember, I borrowed some pictures from Grandma's blog when they helped one of the branch members build a house.

This is was the first house Mom and Dad helped with. The house was built, but the family needed a door on their outhouse, so that was the project for the day.

This is the house Mom, Dad and the proselyting missionaries helped a family build.  The skeleton came from sticks and items gathered from nearby areas.

Then mud, grass, sticks and twigs are packed into the forms to make the walls.

When the family saves enough money, the walls will eventually be covered with cement and then when enough money is saved, the walls will be painted.  For Christmas every year, families paint their homes a new color.

While we were touring through the location, the sun was setting, which meant that we had to get home, since there is a curfew in the location, for safety reason.  I'm not sure if the curfew is a law or just an unspoken rule to live by in preserving life.  It was a humbling experience to ride through the location and quite the difference from seeing ornate castles in Europe.  Mark and I asked a lot of questions, but the boys were pretty quiet.  It made me appreciate life lived in all sorts of ways and how we all just do the best that we can with what we've got.

We had a little bit of time before bed since curfew was around 7 pm, so D.J. and James took to cleaning all the shells we all gathered by the ocean.  We also showed Grandpa and Grandma some of our pictures we took while in Europe until our stories put them to sleep, then we all retired for the night.

Day 9: Port Elizabeth, South Africa

It may be day 10 or 11, but my days are messed up because of travel days, time zones and lack of sleep, but I'll go with day 9 for the sake of sequence.  Our day begins in the Johannesburg airport after we tried to get some sleep on the plane from Frankfurt to Johannesburg, with a little help from Benedryl and Dramamine. One of the flight attendants took a particular liking to James (not the first person to do so on our trip) and made sure he saved the last chicken dinner for him and the last available orange juice.  The sleeping on the airplane didn't go so well for me, so as soon as we sat down at the Johannesburg airport (after being greeting with an African chanting chorus) I put my bag on my lap to use it as a pillow and I was out. I think everyone left me to "watch" the bags while they went to a nearby candy shop for treats.

Our flight to Port Elizabeth was a comparatively quick 1 1/2 hours.  We walked off the airplane on the tarmac, and proceeded to a small building for baggage claim.  In our peripheral vision, we saw two people waving and jumping up and down.  Who could that be?  Without stopping for our luggage we ran to Grandpa and Grandma Wheeler and started laughing and crying.  Well, they boys were laughing and I was doing both.  The people around us were laughing as well, as we were creating quite the scene.  Mark dutifully stayed by the baggage claim so we wouldn't be without clothes and toiletries. It was a fun reunion after not seeing them in person for nine months.

Grandpa and Grandma rented a white, VW, stick shift 10-passenger van to haul us all around.  Thankfully, Grandpa was kind enough to do all the driving because we would've crashed the minute we set our hands on the wheel as it was on the "wrong" side of the car and on the "wrong" side of the road.  More than once, Mark and I squeezed the arm rests as we knew we were going to hit another car making a right OR left hand turn.  I don't think I ever got used to that.  After stowing Grandpa and Grandma's usual car, we took of to find Kragga Kamma game preserve close by.  When we drove into the smallish park we were greeted by:

Warthogs! ("When I was a young wart hog!" we sung many times)

Ostrich

Giraffe

Wildebeasts

Bontebok

Zebra

Springbok

Rhinoceros

This one got a little too close for comfort.  This is after we saw our first, fairly close rhino that Mark just had to get out of the van to get a better picture.  Crazy man.

Before we entered the park we were told that there were new cheetah kittens, a baby giraffe and a baby African buffalo.  We came upon the cheetah kittens first. . . 

. . . and the Mama keeping a close eye on us.

Not sure what is growing on this bontebok, but it is a beautiful picture (good job Mark).

We drove through a long loop of monkey area, but we were disappointed when we couldn't find any.  Finally, D.J. spotted one, high up in a tree.  That was the only one we saw for the day.

You can't see it very well, but the the middle left of this picture we spotted a mongoose scurrying away from us.

We finally got to see the baby giraffe!  It seemed so tall that it was hard to believe it was only one day old.  The most impressive thing was when the Mama started running! Watching a giraffe run is like watching waves of vertical water.

Daddy, Mama and baby.

This is one of the coolest trees I've ever seen.

You know you wanted a close up of a wart hog. Not the most beautiful animal, but striking in its own right (hopefully not striking at you, with those tusks).

At a cafe in the park, some of the cheetahs were caged.  D.J. wore an appropriate shirt as he was the first to want to get close to it.

After walking over a suspension bridge, we came within eight feet of the cheetah pack.  I knew we were protected but I got chills just being so close to them.

The similarities of monkeys and my youngest are striking.

Spencer was very hesitant about being out in the open with animals.  Grandma was kind enough to wait and gently coax him while the rest of us just left him to come to his senses maybe.  They traversed the suspension bridge to join us.

Grandpa, Grandma, D.J., Spencer, Lisa and James.  And a cheetah.

And there's Mark the elusive camera man.

The cheetah decided he was bored with us and so took a nap.  While he was purring and dosing, he opened his mouth and let out a . . . . . dainty meow.  Just like a house cat.  We weren't expecting that!

I hesitated to include this picture, but I just have to as it was a memorable moment.  That is, I can't wipe the scene from my mind, as much as I try.  At first glance you see a cavorting wart hog. Then in the periphery, you see an ostrich relieving itself.  As the whole party in the van watch unwittingly, there was a synchronized "EWWWWWW!" as we watched protrusions and expulsions as well as the clean up from the ostrich back side and felt our eyes burning as we drove away.

As we exited the park, we caught a glimpse of the baby African buffalo, the little light brown guy by the Mama.

As the sun set, Grandpa and Grandma took us to a restaurant they frequented while in Port Elizabeth, where the boys continued their consumption of hamburgers.  We discovered that when you ask for a napkin, you are asking for a diaper and the boys made fun of me the rest of the dinner.  A napkin is called a "serviette" in South Africa.  On the way to Port Alfred, we stopped to see Sister Barrus, a member of Mom and Dad's congregation.  She gave James a huge shell in gratitude for helping raise money for some of the members of the branch to go to the temple in Johannesburg.  Her husband had just passed away and Mom and Dad helped (and still help) her with all the funeral arrangements and the grieving that follows.  She also made us a traditional African dessert called a milk tart, which is sort of like a custard pie, but not as eggy. When we arrived at the flat, we talked a bit, but then fatigue gave way and we slept for 10, unmedicated hours.