Our last stop in South Africa was the port of Richard’s Bay. It is a relatively new city, created in the 1960’s to be another deep water port. We did not see the city, just the port area. Which is surrounded by a very impressive industrial area. In fact they’re working on ‘industrial tourism’ to allow people to see the plants – mining, wood products, agricultural. It would be a little more impressive if it weren’t so clear that the benefits of this activity was all going offshore and not befitting the country.
That’s not why we were there, though. We were scheduled to go to the Hluhluwe national park. My first question to the driver was ‘how do you pronounce the park name? Turns out it is ‘Shlushluey’. Big park with more animals! Let’s go!
First – our guide and our truck.
We had arranged a private tour, which was nice because we could stop where and when we wanted. Like when we saw Mr Rhinoceros and his lady friend. We could sit and watch them as they came right up to us. They seemed quite unconcerned. We could hear them breathing and the sound they made as they chewed the grass.
We saw giraffes in most of the parks we visited, but never close up. Usually they just stand like statues but these ones were goofing off a bit.
There were usually zebras around and this is how they presented themselves:
Our guide ‘spoke’ zebra and after a series of scuffy sounding grunts and barks from him they got curious and turned around
And of course, elephants. Here Momma is coming to investigate us.
But then she decided we weren’t really very interesting.
This big guy kept a close eye on us.
It was a wonderful day.
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