Taking over from Dad writing the blog for Day Four… I promised not to write any teenager-y stuff, and under no circumstance ever include the words ‘awesome’ ‘cool’ ‘MSN’ or ‘texting’, or the phrase ‘I pooped to the max’. So here goes.

Our fourth day in Phinda dawned bright and early with a six a.m wake up call. Naturally the initial stumbling around in the cold trying to find some trousers is never hugely enjoyable, but once you manage to wake up enough to get out of your room the landscape and weather is just spectacular.  Phinda Vlei is much more personal than Forest Lodge – there are only six rooms, so there’s less people for the staff to deal with. As a result, everyone knows you by your first name and you get to know some of the staff quite well… In particular, the manager Sean was great (he found Hannah’s lost panda with no trouble at all, which was very commendable). So, after a quick cup of coffee and a homemade biscuit or three, we set off on our morning game drive with John, determined to catch the dominant male lion.

The beginning of our drive was uneventful, with the usual Nyala and Impala breaking the otherwise animal-less landscape. However, later on John stopped the truck and said that they were going to try and find a large carcass which they smelled in the woods. Once they had left, we watched Dad try and persuade us that he did have directional smelling powers and also watched him stand up and search for animals (facing the wrong way to a crossing elephant which our companions, an Italian couple, had spotted). I think the Radio Game was also present at that particular time, with such gems as ‘Cheetah pooing on the vehicle’ and ‘Polar bear up ahead’. Naturally this is a family joke and, in the nature of all anecdotes, you really had to be there.

John and our tracker, Mr T, didn’t find the carcass so we moved on.

Later, we were driving on a fairly narrow road behind another truck when we spotted a medium sized elephant crossing up ahead (even a medium sized elephant is enough to ensure a change of trousers if it gets annoyed). It was shortly followed by a lot of elephants crossing our road, in front and behind us. We stayed where we were, slightly apprehensive that we would be stuck there forever, however it was a great sighting – but not as amazing as the bull elephant which looked us right in the face, prompting a bout of swearing from Mum, who suddenly realised that, despite the skill of John, we can’t reverse down a road faster than an angry, enormous elephant.

Everything was fine, as usual.

(Note: I’m having doubts about my length of writing, as Dad caught sight of the laptop and made a very strange face when I told him that I haven’t even done the morning yet. Still, if you have to read three pages of blog, you have to read three pages of blog.)

Later that morning, we were up in the marshy area (the north of Phinda) and, as we stopped for our morning cup of coffee, hot chocolate, Appletiser, Ginger Ale and biscuits we spotted a few giraffes on the horizon. I counted seven, Mr T, on the other hand, counted seventeen. As we were drinking they moved towards the waterhole we were parked by… not even daring to breathe, we watched them attempt to drink (splaying their legs out) before getting back into the truck very fast (we didn’t want to scare them away). We moved around the lake, still watching the giraffes, who were totally relaxed about us being there. Soon a couple of zebra joined them, also drinking, and followed by a baby warthog who promptly stuck his bum in the air (a strange method of drinking, you may think, though effective). There were three males who stood incredibly close to the vehicle, watching us for a while, then decided to leave and they ran down the mound we were on (their run is incredible, more like a speeded up lope/limp. A lomp).

Back at the lodge we gorged ourselves on another fantastic breakfast before contentedly doing nothing until 3.00.

The afternoon game drive was a low-speed lion chase – John was determined to find the male (as were we) so we set off. The beginning was, as usual, uneventful, so John stopped the truck near to where the lion had gone in to a block of land and not come out. Then, he and Mr T walked on foot to try and find the lion… Turns out the lion was just around the corner and our tracker nearly trod on him. Apparently the only thing they could see was a giant pair of eyes, looking at them, and then a growl like a helicopter starting. To quote Red Dwarf, ‘it’s brown trousers time’. Upon their return, and following some shaky, high pitched laughing, they drove the truck into the middle of the bush to try and get a good view of the lion.

Really, it is incredible what these Toyota Land Cruisers can drive over – many trees were run over during our game drives and the Land Cruiser has taken it all in it’s stride. The tricky bit while looking for the lion was the fact that it was on one bank of a steep drainage ditch and there was some pretty big mechanical-sounding crunches which did nothing to a) make us feel any better or b) interrupt the gigantic male lion from having a lovely snooze (cue Mum, ‘Look at the size of his feet!’ Later… ‘He’s got massive feet!’ ‘Wow, look at his feet, they’re gigantic!’… You get the gist). Eventually we did manage to perch, alive, on the opposite bank to the lion, who seemed to be in the process of getting up. We were all very excited, and then he gave a huge sigh and flopped back down again. This routine carried on until we got fed up (which took a long time) and then we headed on.

After meeting some pretty docile white rhino we stopped by a waterhole for our sundowner – the usual alcohol and hot chocolate… Beautiful sunset, as usual, and the customary biltong, nuts and dried pineapple were great favourites with everyone. Dad and Hannah, the biltong addicts, polished that off, while me and Mum (sorry, Mum and I, must remember not to be to teenager-y and get my grammar wrong) had some dried pineapple (not too much for me because I feared being labelled “a pig” for the rest of the holiday).

Later on, when it was really pretty dark, John told us they had found the big lion walking up a road, and that he wanted to catch the male before he was lost, so we set off scarily fast. Very quickly we found him walking up a road as we had been informed. John told us he was going to pass right by our truck. That he did, walking within a metre of the vehicle… (Mum was, of course, impressed with the size of his feet. She didn’t say anything, but I can tell.) It was an incredible sighting. Then, once he got around the corner he started roaring – he sounded like a helicopter starting up and also stirred something ‘primeval’, to quote Dad, in all of us. Slightly terrifying but still amazing. I might even deign to use the word awe-inspiring, or even ’awesome’ (sorry Dad). We met the lion again that night, and again it came within a metre of our truck. Brilliant.

We decided to end the game drive then after a suggestion from Dad that this sighting was a perfect note to end our time in Phinda. Promptly Mum came out with ‘yes, then we’ll have more time for packing’ which brought the magical tone down slightly…

We got back to the lodge and packed, then went for a superb dinner and bed, talking over our ‘top five animals in order’ etcetera. Hannah was bitten again, this time on the underside of her toe (how does this happen?!), but other than that it was a great evening.

Over to Dad for the next blog entry.

After the Red Centre and “Wren” we flew to Cairns (the “Gateway to the Barrier Reef”). We stayed in Palm Cove, a tiny beach town on the 7th beach up from Cairns, which was a lot better than the city itself. Plenty of things to do, as we found, but we were rather restricted because it rained all week. (If it didn’t rain it was blowing a gale). And we were in the dry season! But, we did manage to get someplaces, like the Cairns Tropical Zoo (which was massively over scaled on the zoo map. However, we fed the Kangaroos (which had been fed so many times they just weren’t hungry for cardboardy pellets), and held a Koala (the claws hurt a lot)



We watched the dingoes sulking in their wooden tubes (oh yes, I forgot to mention, it was pouring).
Well, tropical, sorry, rainy Cairns also houses “Australia’s Number One Attraction”, the fantastic, the unforgettable, the touristy, the expensive, the one-and-only SKYRAIL! Take the 160-Aussie-dollar-ride to three stations, looking at the “abundance of different plants” (or, quoting Dad, “it’s all green to me”), and experience breathtaking views in the “only ride to Kuranda”. Of course, having been in Borneo, we expected Kuranda to be an aboriginal settlement with cultural houses and nothing much else. Of course, this being a tourist attraction, Kuranda turned out to be a small, modern town with hundreds of tourist shops (including a very nice ice-cream shop) and a road down to Cairns! Shocked as we were, we enjoyed it a lot, but may I mention that almost everywhere in Oz has “Australia’s Number One Attraction” (voted by the Oz Association of Notepads or something). Ironic, isn’t it?
Well, you might be wanting to know why we spent so long on attractions when we could have been visiting the reef? Well, the weather was on our side…… not. Unfortunately, everyday was windy and we couldn’t go.

We also went to Hartley’s Crocodile Adventures, a small park with a lot of crocodiles. Hartleys is a commercial farm, so the sign pointing to “farm tours” is a little misleading, it should really be “croc tours”. It’s very interesting here, and they told us lots of facts I for one never knew, such as temperature determines the sex of baby crocs (32C=Males, above of below 32C=Females), and that wild crocs have a very high infant mortality rate (2% crocs reach adulthood), but Hartley’s crocs have an extremely low infant mortality rate (98% crocs reach adulthood), and that the longest crocodile was 8.5 metres long! That’s longer than a minibus! Here is a picture of me having fun with the 8.5m crocodile. Flattering?



Luckily, the crocodile in the picture is made of fiberglass. But, they do have a crocodile show at Hartley’s where a man gets into a crocodile cage and tells you all about them. The crocodile (who was called “Bart”) looked pretty scary and the man in the cage had to jump about pretty quickly. In between escaping the jaws of death, he managed to tell us lots more interesting facts about crocodiles.



After all that slightly damp excitement in Cairns, we’re off to Sydney, home of the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House and the 2000 Olympics. Should be fun.

From Kuching we had to take several flights in smaller and smaller planes to get to Gunung Mulu National Park. It was SO HOT, but did we get time to relax? Never! We had a very brief swim (and I mean brief) and then we were off. The start wasn’t so good, instead of going to the lovely buffet for lunch we went to a tiny, dirty cafe crawling with insects and ate greasy food. We were so hungry we had an ice-cream after at the hotel before heading off to the first caves, the Deer Cave and the Lang Cave. It was a long walk and we saw hundreds of insects using the wooden handrail as a sort of highway, including extremely hairy caterpillars and several bright orange millipedes (one of which raised its head and looked into the lens as Dad took a picture!).

When we got there we had a 10 minute rest (I wanted to get going but our guide had a very strict schedule). Then we set off for the youngest of the caves, named after the guide who found it, the Lang Cave. It isn’t really a very big cave, more wide than tall, and has strange, jelly like formations. Hannah found a birds nest!

Then the Deer Cave, the oldest, and named because hundreds of years ago a herd of deers lived there. Now the only wildlife is 4 million bats and a few birds. It is huge, with an enormous skylight. Looking back at the huge hole that is the entrance, you can clearly see a face that the locals say is Abraham Lincoln (but we think is Elvis Presley).
Of course, because of all the bats, what comes out has to go somwhere, and that somewhere is on the cave floor. In short, there are dunes of bat poo everywhere, which smells of well, bat poo. We also saw some bats hanging on a post eating orange earwigs. They screeched when light went in their faces. Hannah is now spending her spare time doing impersonations of the little bat that was crawling along the post at the time; ”boom boom aeee.”

More posts on the two other caves (Wind and Clearwater) later.

Izzy