Port Elizabeth, South Africa
The "Addo Elephant Park" is a South African National Park larger than The Netherlands. Why the knowledgeable guide thought that Holland was a fair message of size was a bit of a surprise to me, but I guess it's kind of like measuring distances in terms of football fields. No matter though. The good captain eased Silver Wind into the very industrial port of Port Elizabeth at the very southern coast of Africa at 8 am on schedule yesterday. This area was a hotbed of the ANC. So it wasn't a surprise that all new housing replaced the old townships. The white part time guide who is a full time geologist pointed out that blacks "have many superstitions about water so that they can't swim" to explain why the new housing was so far from the more desirable beachfront property. Nice to hear how things have changed down here.
Nevertheless, we finally got to see the real fairly impenetrable African bush and after about an hour's drive entered the Addo National Park after crossing the Cape Town to J-burg railway, the route of the Blue Train among others. Besides being compared to flat northern European countries, Addo is unique for South Africa in that it encompasses a number of kilometers of ocean so that besides the big land animals there are killer whales and great white sharks within the park. We were transferred to four wheel drive open buses and drove up and down valleys along pretty good roads. The guide in the park, a naturalist local who was obsessed with turtles, pointed out quite a few of them and told us--as is often the case in which all "reality" is orchestrated--that seeing the big and exotic animals is very rare after the recent rains. Of course, his radio was set loud enough that I could hear the other guides telling him where to go so that we'd see everything in the correct order. Disney World's so-called African Safari this is not, but there is a bit of show business. But of course, this is the real thing.
So--in the correct order--we caught sight of some very ominous jackals. Jackals, for heaven's sake. So, now I was a lot less cynical. I just saw jackals in the wild. Whoopy! Then we came across a bunch of meercats. These seems to be roving around (see detail above) and did not appear to be working to a script, like the recent TV program. My brain was now overloaded. I just saw meercats. Then after a bunch of worthogs (which became the inspiration for my craving pork chops for dinner, which I did enjoy) we came across a bunch of elephants. So in two hours, we saw the daytime animals with the help of the knowledgeable guide and his VHF radio.
We got back to the ship and sailed at 4 pm northeast up the Indian Ocean coast of Africa where tomorrow afternoon we will arrive in Maputo, Mozambique. This will be my 134th country visited, but who's counting.
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