Feb
7
2009
Greetings from Crocodile Bridge. The drive here from the Satara campsite began a little after 7 am.
It is late afternoon and we are waiting for a night game drive. By this point in the trip there is an unspoken rule. Nobody bothers to call out "impala!" when we pass one, or ten, or forty. We just silently point for anyone who may be interested and scan beyond for something more challenging to spot.
This is the southern tip of Kruger National Park ("the Kruger" locally.) Across the fence is Mozambique and a language I sometimes understand better than South African. This is also the final night of the safari with Epic Enabled.
Wi-Fi out here in the middle of nowhere is thanks to Alfie, owner of Epic, accessed via a laptop borrowed from him. Microsoft's "Buy a Macbook" campaign is working beautifully. My new Dell Latitude laptop has finally given me the blue screen of death 14 consecutive times.
Maybe it's the heat but I'm feeling confused.
We saw Black Monkey Orange Trees - or so I was told.
But there is no such species as a Black Monkey. So it must have been Monkey Oranges that were black or maybe they were orange. No, the shiny smooth baseball-sized fruits were green. So maybe the tree was orange or the bark was black? No, green also with gray bark - more of a bush than a tree really.
"Who's on first. I don't know's on third?"
So, just give me a Sausage Tree any day. At least I can identify the fruit as reminiscent of a German deli and the inhabitants as baboons.
Baboons were out in force today. They set up roadblocks and checkpoints at strategic locations.
While the adults held their ground as imperturbable primate pylons this year's young skittered, swaggered, and rolled like tumbleweeds between and over them. The long line of traffic skillfully wove through them. Never over, but occasionally under them as a demanding baboon hitched a ride for a handout.
Thankfully no driver broke ranks and paid the junk food "mordida." They would have been guaranteed a demonstration of the proverbial "biting the hand that feeds them" and the rest of us hostage to tire-biting and other tantrums.
