WEATHER: Min 12C – Max 26C
HIGHTLIGHT OF THE DAY: Getting to within 8m of a white rhino
BUMMER OF THE DAY: Can’t think of a single thing – we had as great day
BUYS OF THE DAY: A piece of woodwork bought from a local village = 10USD
WORD OF THE DAY:
ANIMALS SEEN TODAY: White rhino, black eagles, snake eagle, red beaked ground hornbill, duika, waterbuck, giraffe, elephant shrew
CAMP SITE RANKING: Same as last night – we love 2 night stays
I am alive. What the fuck happened last night? That damn vodka is going to kill me I rekon. I need to stay on the beers, but sometimes the vodka just hits the spot as beer can get a little stodgy, but I am alive, so I live for another day. The first thing I thought when I woke was my last thoughts going to sleep. Going home for 3 weeks. I was so adamant that I was going to talk to George this morning and get the ball rolling. Now with a new day upon us do things look different? Maybe, but the idea is still entertaining all the same.
We weren’t going on our game drive till 9am, but a group of us decided to get up for a sunrise, so at 6am, half of us got up and headed out to find somewhere to perch to watch the sun rise over another day. Some were more energetic than others i.e. Sean and Lisa, who went to the top of the boulders to watch the sunset from there. Me I think I was happy to just make it and watched it from the resort with Nancy. I think it would be hard to get a bad sunrise or sunset for that matter and there is just something special watching at that time of the morning. It is amazing how quick it actually rises and you could seriously miss it if you weren’t paying attention.
So back to camp and as breakfast wasn’t till 8am, I went and had a HOT shower and then back to bed for another hour to rest the eyelids. I am surprisingly feeling really good, considering we drank a bottle of vodka between us. Dave on the other hand is on Struggle Street! Mention vodka to him and he gets a little green around the gills! Hilarious, who would have thought I could drink an Irishman under the table and a young fella at that – well maybe there are a few people that would believe that.
We have a full day off the truck and exploring the surrounds of Matopo National Park. We were divided into 2 jeeps. A massive one that held 14 of us and a smaller one that held the rest. We went into the larger jeep, and to give you an idea it had 3 peg holes to be able to get you up high enough to climb in. It was a monster and it was super cool. Our guide for the day was Ian, a born and bred Zimbabwean and he was AMAZING. His family has been in the area since the late 1800’s, he grew up in the area and used to play as a boy in the national park. So he knows the area and let me tell you he knows his stuff and he is quite the story teller and just keeps you enraptured would be the word I would have to use, he was an amazing man. We were very lucky to have him in our jeep.
The jeep was open topped with a bar that went down the middle and bars at the side of each row of seats to accommodate a cover. So after driving 20 minutes to the entrance of Matopo National Park we had to be on branch / tree look out, as there was a lot of overhang on the roads and if you weren’t paying attention you could get a serious injury, a branch whack on the face or hands, a poke with some serious thorny trees etc… It was pretty cool though having to duck and weave, I just had to make sure I didn’t pull a muscle and short of 2 whacks on the hands I survived pretty much unscathed. Our first stop was a cave. We had to walk over boulders and up a bunch of stone steps to get us to the top, but it was certainly rewarding once we got to the cave. It must have been 10m wide and 10 deep and around 20m high. It was used by the local bushman that lived in the area and there are still paintings in there that are in an awesome condition, once again thanks to the urine and gall bladders, it has been etched onto the cave walls. The oldest painting in there was of a giraffe and it was 36,000 years old!!! Isn’t that mind boggling? It is so hard to comprehend that something like a picture can stand the test of time for so long, that literally generations later, we are looking at something painted by a bushman.
Now I’m no Ian but we spent around an hour in the cave, all listening as he explained the of the bushman and it is an ugly history for them and white people are to blame and it goes to as recently as the 1980’s. It is quite appalling, but in brief I will try and give a brief history. The bushman are people that have been living off the land for centuries. They are a kind race; there is no hierarchy, what they have they share and share alike. When they hunt, they only kill what they will be able to eat in one sitting. They don’t store or carry even berries, as there concern is if they store food in a cave and then something happens to them, the food would go bad, and someone or animal could have benefited from that food that was wasted. This is also why they were nomadic, every few days they would move on to minimize the impact to the environment (even back then) and they would never waste anything, there was a purpose and use for everything and if they couldn’t use it they wouldn’t touch it. Even to this day there are around 2000 bushman living on the perimeters of the desert in Botswana. Unfortunately this is not by choice they have been forced out and this is pretty much the only place that no-one else wants, so they live here untouched by today’s society. The bad side to their history, right up until the 1980’s people could buy permits to be able to go out and hunt these bushman and kill them as a sport. In the flippin 1980’s!!!! That is just inhuman and very hard to comprehend. The numbers have not really recovered and eventually they will run out of a gene pool and the race will die out, which is so sad to hear. Ian has lived with these guys and he said we have a lot to learn from them and they are probably the epitome of humanity. To sum it up he said if a bushman was to see you in the desert, he would give you half his water and both of you try to survive to the next watering hole or he would be willing to die knowing he tried his best to save you. Ian had many more stories, and besides my memory, it would take pages and pages to get all his stories down!
After a cool beverage at the trucks we left the park at 11am and headed to a local village to meet a chief and his family. We have done this before, but there was just something a little different about this visit and I think it came down to it being real. It wasn’t super touristy; it was them in their natural environment acting as they would whether we were there or not. It didn’t seem faked if that makes sense. Well we went into one of the thatched huts and met the chief of the village Npondo. He was 74 and the happiest, most energized man I have met in a long time. He always had a smile on his face, he was happy to see us and he just had a glint of a man that has lived a good life and was happy with the cards he had been dealt. He had 10 children, to which 5 of them have died due to the AIDS virus and he now has 14 grandchildren he looks after in the village. He was dressed in a leopard skin laplap, which he killed when he was a young man, and via Ian, he told us his story. He wore a porcupine necklace and has what looked like an ostrich feather cap on his head. He spoke to us for about 40 minutes, where after that he showed us a grain storage in a cave that has been used for over 200 years, and he is trying to pass on his knowledge to the younger people so they can keep the traditional alive after he passes on. He is an amazing man. When we came out of the cave, the children were performing a dance for us, and even the baby, who must have been just under 1, was bending his knees in a dance. The kids ranged from 1-13 and they were all super friendly, inquisitive and they just loved to touch our hair and hold our hands. They were just beautiful. They also had a small store where they sold goods that had been made by the village. It wasn’t the cheapest, but knowing you are buying something directly from the artist and that your money is going directly to the source, I was more than happy to buy something from them. It also discourages them from asking for money for nothing and getting the reward from their own hard work. They also did have some of the old currency for sale, so I bought a 50 million dollar note and a 10 million dollar note. To give you an idea, the equivalent on that would be 1USD and .10c respectively! Unbelievable and no wonder something had to be done on that front. The guy at the camp was telling us it would cost 10 million for a bus ride into town!
Ian and his crew supplied lunch, which was the best potato salad I have had since leaving home, with some coleslaw, green salad and some cold meats washed down with a glass of cold cordial. It was delicious and just what we needed to then head back into the park and see if we could find us some rhino’s.
Back into a different section of the national park and to start we were on the search for one of the parks most famous residents, Gumboots, which is a white rhino. This subject is also close to Ian’s heart, as poaching is a very BIG problem in the park, where people come into the park, on the chase to get the Rhino’s horn and sell it on the black market. The sad bit of this, besides the rhinos losing their horns, is they are killed, for the poachers to cut it off. The animal doesn’t have to die for the horn to be cut off, as it is like a human finger nail, it grows around 4-10cm a year. They tried a programme where the parks and wildlife went and cut all the horns on the rhinos to try and stem the poaching but this didn’t work, as the poachers still killed them but were doing it for little return on the horn as they hadn’t fully grown back. As Ian had grown up in the park, he got to know the rhinos and when they find one that had been butchered it is like losing a family member. He has also tried to make it legal to sell the horns, so it can be monitored and possibly the demand would not be as high, but this was vetoed at a meeting that is held every year on endangered spices. The numbers have dropped dramatically and from memory he was mentioning numbers like there are only 500 white rhino left in the world and that includes zoos and farms. The way it is going within 5 years the animal will be extinct and too late to save.
So with all that said, what we were about to do was pretty much an opportunity of a life time. Ian found Gumboots, so we were about to leave the safety of the jeep, trek into the bush and view / witness this beautiful pre-historic animal. There is always some rules, so besides signing our lives away before we entered the park, there were a few safety rules we had to adhere to. We couldn’t wear bright colours of red, green or blue. If Gumboots got ancy and charged us we were NOT TO RUN – STAND STILL. This was key. The rhino can run up to speeds of 55km and can reach that in 3 seconds, so don’t think you can out run it, it isn’t going to happen. We were to walk single file and use no flash photography. So with the safety talk done, we left the vehicles and only had to walk in about 10 minutes and there was Gumboots! Ian got us to about 7m of him and it was amazing! Gumboots didn’t seem to perturb that we were there, so we got around 15 minutes with him before backing off and head back to the truck. What an amazing experience to get within 7m of a wild animal in its own environment – AWESOME.
So we drove around the park for a few more hours, with several stops getting out of the jeeps and walking around, stopping at 2 water holes aka dams where we got to see some hippos and we also got to see 2 sets of rhino bones, one had died naturally and the second one had been shot in the head and his horn chopped off, and you could see the bullet hole and the scratch marks the knife had made on the skull. Just terrible. Ian was saying even the bones are worth big buck and a whole skeleton, like the one we were looking at could fetch 15 million on the black market. There were even some rhino toe nails there and he said even they would go for around $3,000 on the black market. Not that I condone any of the poachers, but the money is insane and you can see the motivation behind it. Ian had stories of vets and high profile people getting into the ring. Money has a lot to answer for sometimes, it causes a lot of trouble in the world that is for sure. Greed = bad news.
We drove out of the park at 6.05pm, which was 5 minutes late, so Ian had to pay a packet of cigarettes for him not to receive a warning. They take the park hours quite seriously and if you get 2 warnings then you are banned from the park for 1 whole year and no special favors for anyone, not even Ian.
The sun has now gone, so in the open jeep it got a little frosty, but we only had to travel around 20 minutes back to camp and to a dinner that was already prepared and ready. Today was a good day to have cooking duties, no lunch and no dinner prep for us today!
Tonight didn’t seem as cold as last night, so I had a shower after dinner and then retired into my tent to rip out yesterday’s blog. An early night is on the cards, as we have a massive 2 days coming up and we need to have our A Game ready to go.
Matopo National Park was amazing. It wasn’t like the usual parks with an abundance of wildlife, but it was spectacular in so many other ways and I really enjoyed my 2 days here. It was also nice to not have many other vehicles on the roads making us feel like we were the only people in the park which was a surreal feeling in itself.
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