On Sunday, we met Paul, Jen and the beautiful Jill at the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge and walked to Brooklyn.  Boy, it’s busy on a Sunday.  Bikes, people, strollers.  However it was a fantastic day and we got great views.  Here’s the two of us at the middle of the bridge  with Jen and Jill on the left.  Statue of Liberty in the background.  The classic Brooklyn Bridge shot.

Sunday the 4th was the Atlantic Antic 2009 on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.  They shut down maybe 20 or 30 blocks of Atlantic Ave and it’s just one huge street fair.  Food, shops, drink, everything there is outdoors for the day.  A really great New Yorky experience.  We drank beer, we ate food, we went to the old fashioned bus exhibition (!).  Jill was very keen on going on the bus.

Then we ate bacon at a place which smoked its own bacon.  Mmmm pork products.

We said goodbye to Jen and Jill and Paul and headed back over to Chinatown where we had dinner for about 25p and it was the largest amount of food I’ve ever seen.  Since we were playing at being tourists, we just had to go to Times Square and look at the lights and take pictures and so we have the classic “thumbs up in Times Square” picture below.

A selection of the rest of the pictures are in this Windows Live photoalbum.  I guess it isn’t as good as Flickr or whatever but seems to work for me.

View Full Album

Today we got up at five (uuurrrghhhhh) for a car journey to Sossusvlei, which isn’t actually a dune but a dried up lakey thing at the end of a dried up river. We took a covered car (phew – an open top jeep like the ones we usually go in would be exceptionally freezing at five in the morning) to the entrance to the national park where all the dunes are. I forget the name…Namib Naukluft Mum says.  Then, after getting a permit ahead of lots of old people in an open jeep (‘they’re only going somewhere to die anyway’) we started towards Sossusvlei.

It was very windy. By very windy, I mean VERY VERY WINDY ARGH OH NO WIND.

After taking a lot of pictures, we stopped at Sossusvlei and decided to climb Dune 21, which didn’t look too monstrous at about 94.341 metres high (since dunes are dynamic it’s very hard to get an exact measurement). We started off, and by halfway we were being blown horizontal by the wind and we had sand in every place it is possible to get sand. I was cleaning sand out of my ears. I’m still cleaning sand out of my ears. It was incredibly tiring, since every step you take you slide half a step back, but we managed to get to the top.

Looking at the little notes Dad found necessary to put at the bottom of my typing (in case my teenage brain can’t remember what happened yesterday), he wants me to mention the Dead Vlei… I personally think it was just a lot of dead plants, trees, etc, but maybe that’s what it was and Dad just has a fascination with the cardiovascularily challenged.

After another brilliant lunch we split up. Dad and I went quad biking and Mum and Hannah went on a scenic drive. More from Hannah about the drive later…

Quad biking was ‘the bizzo’ as Dad would say. We went with a woman from Hull and her husband. The quad bikes are semi automatic and have a sign on them saying STRICTLY NO UNDER SIXTEENS. RIDING THIS BIKE WHEN YOU ARE UNDER SIXTEEN INCREASES THE CHANCES OF INJURY OR DEATH but we chose to ignore that, along with the ALWAYS WEAR PROTECTIVE GEAR AND A HELMET sign. Whoops. Unfortunately we got the bikes behind woman and her husband, who were slow, and on the very very jarring rutted bits it’s not fun being stuck behind someone… After a slightly wobbly start Dad and I got more confident, zooming along (as much as we could) and even waiting for the other people to get a bit further ahead so we could get up to gear five (the fastest speed). I think we have a fascination for fast machines. Dad broke down (leaving me to talk to everybody else) but Dad managed to fix the quad bike. When we were back at the shed where they keep the bikes, we realised Johannes (one of the two guides) had broken down. Since we were driving in very tight circles at that point, Dad and I were ready to play the heroes and we immediately leapt into action, racing along the road ’til we found Johannes and helped him fix his bike. All’s well that ends well. 

Dad also spotted a couple of bat eared foxes. Unlike the ‘bat eared fox/Nyala’ which he ‘saw’ in Phinda, these were actually real. Mum and Hannah doubt this.

Hannah’s Bit:

Meanwhile Mum and I had gone on a scenic drive to the petrified dunes.  They weren’t just scared they were totally petrified…aeeeeeee.  Whilst puzzling over over the many possibilities for the fairy circles we didn’t realise that by going to the petrified dunes we were going to end up <in a movie voice> in our doom!  Neste our driver was driving over a huge dune when we got stuck!  Everybody had to get out of the truck and Mum and I had to try and dig the truck out of the sand.  We were pushing and pulling it.  Eventually I sat down and drew some sand pictures.  It took about an hour by which time most of the dunes were littered with sand pictures.  Finally the truck was pushed out of the sand and after a few meters it got stuck again.  Coincidence?  I think not.  Once again it took a long time to get the truck out of the sand and by then it was nearly dark.  The guide did some really crazy driving up and down dunes when we saw at the bottom that the jack wouldn’t fit on the van.  Coincidence, I think not.  Then we drove home in the dark and…we saw an Aardwolf (rather dazed by the light).

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.

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.

So, off to Cairns now to stay in Palm Cove and lie on the beach. More from there.

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

The jungle was really interesting to see. There are huge plants and ferns with razor sharp thorns. There were rattan vines which were nearly 100m long.

It’s very hot, and even at 11.00 pm it’s hot and humid.

I am already missing you all.

Lots of love, Izzy