Zoo(m)

I've got a new camera - this won't make much difference to the quality of the blog pix, because I have to resize them down - so several extra millions of pixels won't translate into much, given that I don't print photos either and I only ever look at them on a tiny laptop... But the new camera has a much better zoom, which certainly does make a difference.

Thanks to bro Garry for the acquisition consultancy.

Above: invasive snooping at the zoo.

Polygamy

A rather large cultural difference in SA is that polygamy is legal - it's considered to be a part of traditional African culture. President Jacob Zuma famously has three wives, which gave rise to considerable speculation about how he'd deal with the "first lady" issue when elected - he solves this problem neatly, in SA at least, by arranging for them all to appear with him at public events (generating a whole new genre of gossip columnage along the lines of "which wife was best dressed/ had the best seat/ got the most attention/ was most gracious to the hoi polloi?" etc.) Zuma also has an unknown number of children - up to eighteen according to the papers - from at least five different women (he had two other wives, one dead, one divorced).

In the SA Sunday Times today there's an article on a Mr. Milton Mbhele who took the notion a step further by marrying four wives on the same day - there's a nice photo of them in nearly-matching white dresses. Milton met these ladies at various times and has built separate houses for them - and fathered seven children with them (along with another three from other relationships). He frankly admits that having a single mass wedding was partly for economic reasons - it was cheaper than having four separate events (which presumably would have included a lot of the same guests, at least on the groom's side). Mr. Mbhele is a bank manager and can presumably afford to maintain four wives, even if four weddings would have been a stretch. The article mentions that Mbhele paid the traditional bridal price - lebolo - for each of his ladies: ten cows, eight cows, seven cows and seven cows respectively.

Mbhele is quoted as saying that he loves his wives equally and that there's "good competition" among them - "But it is healthy competition. From cleaning the home to respecting me, they are all so well behaved." Only one of the wives is quoted, the new Mrs. Zenele Mbhele, who said of the arrangement "We get along well. We visit each other often." The Sunday Times reports this item with no hint of criticism - in fact, it's only news because the four weddings took place at the same time - but it seems to me that, legal or not, there's something fundamentally very wrong about this whole concept, just because it's so unequal. It's impossible to imagine a female bank manager saying of her four new husbands (who she paid 32 sheep for) that they compete healthily in cleaning their homes and in respecting her - and the four men being perfectly happy with this - and with the bed-time rota. The tradition of polygamy here always seems to mean that men can have multiple wives and not vice-versa - so there's a rather massive sexist double standard built in.

(I should mention that on the same page of the Sunday Times there's an item saying that prisoners in Verne Prison in Dorset, UK, managed to get drunk and start a fight by consuming a hand gel intended to stop the spread of swine flu - the gel happened to contain alcohol - so I suppose every culture has its traditions that are resistant to change....)

Nambiti

After Cathedral Peak, I went to a game reserve - my fourth in nine months, which is right on the edge of being too many, but I won two free nights at the excellent Nambiti Plains Lodge in a prize draw, so I could hardly say no. The game-viewing routine was the standard offer: up at dawn, off on an open land rover for three hours or more, then breakfast - then nothing to do for six hours except eat lunch (or swim in the pool if you can stand the temperature - nights here are still cool even though the days are hot, so unheated pools stay cold; you're not allowed to walk anywhere, for obvious reasons, and this lodge didn't offer bush walks because they're still waiting for their rifle licence) - then back on the land rover at four o'clock for another three or four hours of bouncing around on bad roads (why, I wonder, is the suspension on land rovers so awful? I know they're heavy-duty vehicles but you would've thought a tourist-friendly version would exist by now... or perhaps risking back injury is part of the authenticity of the experience); stop for a sundowner, back to the lodge in the dark, then dinner, then sleep.

I still enjoyed much of this, and we saw quite a lot of animals; but I shared the land rover with a British family who were on their first visit to a reserve, and their enthusiasm ("WOW, a giraffe!! Isn't it HUGE!!!") made me realise how quickly I've got used to seeing wildlife in its "natural" habitat - and that I'm starting to understand the extent to which the game reserve experience is carefully managed. Nambiti has only been a game reserve for four years - it was farmland before and it's still littered with abandoned buildings - and it's still being stocked with wildlife to get it up to its "carrying capacity" - the ranger showed us the "release platform" where dozens of impala and wildebeest are trucked in and unloaded on a regular basis - "lunches for lions".

We didn't manage to see the lions, because they'd made a kill the day before so they were digesting slothfully somewhere - and our rangers couldn't get off the vehicle and track them... because they didn't have a rifle. But we did see three cheetahs, twice, and we noticed that they had plastic collars around their necks. The ranger was a bit unclear about why this was - "the ecologists are tracking them, studying movements and things"... but then I thought... hang on a second... if somebody knows where the cheetahs are, all the time, why don't they just tell us (over the standard land rover radio) rather than make us bounce around on these rocky tracks for seven hours a day? Why not tag the lions, too, before they're shoved off the release platform, so we can find them when they hide? In fact, why not tag everything and visit them in ascending order of interest, so that the guests have a truly satisfying bush experience?

I joke, cynically, but a wildlife enthusiast friend of mine says that a popular lodge in the Kruger has been caught engaging in exactly this sort of malpractice - to their immense shame they were found with tracking and GPS devices on board the land rovers. But this seems to me to reveal an odd sort of paradox - if we have the technology to locate these animals, why not use it? What's the fine moral or aesthetic line between actively managing the "stock" in a game reserve and being able to find it when you want to? There's a tacit consensus that the tourist expects the drama of having to hunt for a lion and perhaps not finding it - and any intervention which alters the odds is somehow cheating - in fact the experience becomes or stays a lot more like gambling. It also perhaps means (taking my cynicism up a notch) that the tourist is more likely to come back and try again to see that elusive lion, or leopard - as in any reward system, a certain level of failure increases motivation.

Having said all of that, I should also say that I still got a thrill out of seeing eland galloping past the collared cheetahs (too big for them, said the guide, but they jumped up and seemed to consider giving chase for a moment - and I'd love to see a cheetah take off from a standing start... so I'll undoubtedly be going back to a game reserve, gambling on seeing something really exciting, managed or not) - and the lodge itself was excellent - great food, sumptuous accomodation (with the biggest mosquito net around the bed I've ever seen - a tented room within the room) and perfectly pitched attention and friendliness from the staff and managers - and this is perhaps one of the best reasons for going to a game reserve: the game drives are often uncomfortable and sometimes frustrating, but for the rest of the time you feel relaxed, well-fed and pampered - and that you fully deserve this indulgence.

Cathedral Peak

Last weekend I discovered a very positive new aspect of SA - walking in the mountains. I stayed at the wonderful Cathedral Peak hotel in the Central Drakensberg, a four hour drive from Joburg. The hotel has a large number of rooms but is very well organised - first thing in the morning guides take small groups of guests on walks of various lengths and difficulty, and you can also ask for printed instructions and go off on your own - though you're asked to sign a register saying where you're going in case you don't come back. This seems to be safe, as long as you don't break a leg or step on a snake - the hotel is inside the fenced and guarded Kwazulu Natal Wildlife Protected Area, and apparently the only people you're likely to meet on the mountain paths apart from other hikers are marijuana smugglers coming over the border from Lesotho - you're advised to ignore them, and then they'll ignore you.

Grass (or "veld") fires seem to be a feature of the landscape all around SA at this time of year - I saw a live one from the motorway - a thin line of fire, not very high, which leaves most of the trees unaffected but scorches the ground. Apparently for many plant types this is a requirement of their life cycle - Protea seeds, for example, are only released with the heat of the fire, and then grow easily in the carbonised soil. On my first walk last weekend we spent quite a lot of time crossing a zone that had had a fire a couple of weeks ago - leaving an other-worldly landscape of black earth, blackened plants, and bright green shoots of new growth. Against the backdrop of the magnificent mountains, this was an extra dimension of wonder.

Spring

After a very mild winter (by my standards - no snow at all and endless days of blue skies and sun; South Africans however complained constantly of how cold it was), spring has arrived - you can tell because the temperatures have gone up to the high twenties during the day, plants are bursting into leaf and flower, and a few clouds have started appearing now and then, working towards an eventual storm or two and some actual rain - summer weather. The first of September is in fact the official first day of spring, marked in my office by gifts of fruit.

Last weekend I went to the wonderful Walter Sisulu Botanical Gardens, which was packed out with well-equipped picnickers setting up tents and cracking out cans of beer from coolers. If you walk away from the main lawns, however, you find yourself in various wonderlands of cacti, tropical vegetation (product of an aerial irrigation system), miniature forest, and even a path up the side of a steep rocky hill to get a closer view of the nests of some black eagles; the eagles themselves seem to spend all their time floating effortlessly above, coasting the thermals.

On the way out out the gardens you can even take a few plants with you, as long as you buy them from the shop rather than dig them up. The plant life in SA really is extraordinary. A new discovery for me is the "common" coral tree, which is a type of flame tree - the flowers appear first, before any leaves, bright red against the bark. Spectacular.

Above: coral tree flower; unknown tree; big leaf; unknown red cactus; scarlet ibis; flamingo having a bath.