Thoughts of leaving Richards Bay anytime soon are becoming illusions as the weather relentlessly blows winds from the wrong direction, not allowing us an opportunity to raise sails and continue on. It doesn’t look all that bad here in the marina, but that’s obviously no indication of what it is like in the real world.
There are about seven boats here that want to go south. So far, nobody has come in after us, and we arrived four days ago, and I’m already getting antsy. I’m not getting much sympathy from the other crews, as most of them have already been sitting here for over two weeks. Four of the seven are solo sailors, one on a beautiful Najad, somewhere around fifty feet or so. I don’t know how solo sailors get around on such large boats. Being at sea, I get, but getting to customs docks, getting into marinas, maneuvering in tight spaces trying to grab a mooring buoy, I don’t know. But every single one says it’s no big deal.
So we’re all waiting, and it looks like we won’t move until the 27th. Christmas in Richards Bay. We’re in a small marina with a restaurant and a bar, plus an extensive haul-out section, where boats are taken out of the water, then propped up on a dozen posts or so to keep them horizontal, enabling people to work on the bottom of their vessels. Mostly cleaning the barnacles off and painting the bottoms with anti-fouling. And then there are boats that sit on the hard for months, getting complete retrofits. The whole haul-out section is lined with small workshops for facilitating these activities.
The marina is quite isolated. On the first day here, I went to a small shopping mall, a forty-minute walk along some rural roads, but on return was told, in no uncertain terms, not to do that again. Apparently, all sorts of people are living in the bushes, just waiting for some ignorant tourist to walk by.
Steve is trying to get a rental car for a day or get a car and driver. The latter seems much better value to visit the Hluhluwe–Imfolozi Park, the oldest proclaimed nature reserve in Africa. I am not so keen on going. I have this ‘unfound’ fear that it will be such a disappointment. I imagine lines and lines of cars, their inhabitants all trying to get a glimpse of that lonely giraffe or wildebeest. Traffic jams everywhere, no fun.
Totally unfounded. Excellent day in the game reserve. I couldn’t believe it, nine hours in the park and we saw about twenty other vehicles. We left the marina at three thirty in the morning and arrived at the gate two minutes before five. The first vehicle in that morning, the park opened at five. A green bushy scrubland environment with narrow asphalt roads, and dirt tracks, some only accessible with 4×4 vehicles. We hit almost all of the park’s infrastructure in a 2001 Land Rover defender, 4×4 for sure, but blew the water pump along the way. Still made it home in the end, stopping every 20 km or so to fill up the radiator.
After we entered the park, we saw no animals for quite a while, short of a massive slug in the middle of the road. But then, after we spotted some Impalas, the first of hundreds, or maybe thousands, we faced off with an elephant and her young over who would cross the road first. From then on, elephants, giraffes, cape buffalos, and more impalas. A cheetah, lazing near a small waterhole, gave us fifteen minutes of entertainment before disappearing into the shrub. We saw quite a few families of warthogs. Mom, dad, and generally three little guys following along. Greater Kudu, three of them, and as a highlight for me, a Nyala, what a beauty. And I have actual pictures to prove it.
The big five are cape buffalo, lion, leopard, elephant, and rhino. We never saw a lion, and I think counting on seeing a leopard is a castle in the sky, but how about those rhinos? I saw more of them in one day here than all of them combined in the past. First, a big poser on the side of the road, then six huddled together, getting some afternoon sleep. Then, in the same frame, two rhinoceros, an elephant, and in the foreground, a family of warthogs, mom, dad, and the three kids. I thought, how pachyderm can you get, warthogs probably aren’t, but they sure look it. A few zebras and wildebeest completed the day’s experience. What a great day!