In some wondrous Christmas miracle, I still have internet. The result? Got confirmation that Tom and I have had our flights changed and will be staying in SA until this coming Friday rather than leaving Sunday. Still no confirmed lodging yet, but it’s good to know what country we are going to be in this week.
On a different note, went out to dinner with David Bunn and Jane Taylor, the couple who were our guides during our time in the Limpopo province and in Kruger National Park (which leads me to think I didn’t blog more on this subject…hm…).
David and Jane are, quite possibly, the most interesting people on the planet. I say this with the utmost sincerity. The are South Africans born and bred, but both have PhDs from NU in English. Jane is a well known play write and author. David is a researcher who studies biodiversity, oral histories and cartography in the very northern portion of South Africa where his research camp is located. We stayed at this research camp for a few nights before we entered the park.
The camp is in the most secluded, remote part of the world I’ve ever encountered. To get there we drove 6 hours from Jo’berg on a big bus. Then we met Jane and David in a small village gas station a few km’s before the tar road turned into dirt. Here, we switched into smaller vans and SUVs. Then we drove another 2 or 3 hours on this dirt road which, although rough in spots, was still wide and quite passable. Then we turned off this road onto what can barley be described as a little one-lane village road which passed through a few hut settlements. We drove past these settlements and road conditions quickly deteriorated. It began as dirt and grass, became rocky, then sandy. There were ups, downs, twists, turns, water, cattle and darkness. So nearly 10 hours after we left Johannesberg, we arrived at this research camp. To our surprise, they not only had electricity, but running water (even hot, which was heated by external propane tanks) and a hot meal waiting for us.
Wow that was a big tangent. So anyways, David and Jane are amazing and are doing incredible things. They told us more awe inspiring stories about refugee research and lion tracking while we stuffed our dropped jaws with pizza and pasta.
The next two days we’ll be spending time with this great group of people I’ve gotten to know and love before we go our separate ways.
We’ll probably need to find a place to live in Cape Town during that time too.
