BETWEEN PORT ELIZABETH AND ALEXANDRIA Dec 2^nd

It is not all unfolding quite as I had envisaged, which is not to say that I am anything other than very content. Francois is allowing me to go with him wherever he goes and he has been brilliant at taking me roundabout routes in order to include points of interest. Francois, his Dad and his brother all have farms in the vicinity and we have visited all three at different stages in the past 48 hours.

The main job has been dismantling the steel frame of a large shed, 30mx10m in area and 8-15m high. The actual dismantlers are the farm ‘boys’. These are local African blokes, who work on the reserve as labourers with varying degrees of skill. The metal framework of the shed was held together by large bolts, all of which had to be cut using a steel cutter. Fine. Except the bloke doing the cutting was either perched at the top of a ladder being held by his mate or sitting astride a sloping 10 cm wide steel girder. Both positions were over 10m above ground level. No hard hats, no harnesses, no carabineers and in a gusty wind. Francois, plus the provider of the crane, along with the provider of the cutter and oxy-acetylene torch had important roles. This was to smoke several fags, offer technical advice, discuss the Springbok victory over England at the weekend, hoot with mirth at any joke and drive the trucks. All in Afrikaans. You can understand how much I had to offer to all this.

Francois knows everyone in the area, inevitably, and the dismantling company is run by a friend who is doing it on the cheap because Francois helped him out with his swimming pool construction a couple of weeks back. The shed has been a casualty of the new management ( too untidy an item to occupy any position on an exclusive game reserve ). Francois was asked if he could get rid of it. Providentially, his Dad needs a new shed for hay storage on his dairy farm. So the whole frame is being transported 5km to its new home tomorrow. Dad pays for the labour and transport and gets a shed for 25% of what he would otherwise have paid for it. Dad now owes Francois a favour. And so on.

There has also been the need to pump water into the water holes for the animals. It has been very dry for a while in the area. The pumps all work on diesel, which was running low. This necessitated a trip into Alexandria to fill the 15 litre cans. Alexandria is signposted all over the area from some distance away. I had visions of a thriving small town, at very least. Wrong. Crowthorne is bigger and has more shops. The only reason Alexandria was full of people was that it was the first day of the month and, therefore, pay had gone in the night before. The queues for cash machines stretched down the road. Francois says it will have been drunk by Christmas. He reckons ( HIV apart ) it is the most important factor holding the average black South African back from genuine improved living standards. He also remarked that the farm boys frequently turn up legless.

Perched on a ladder, with a metal cutter, with no safety attachment and banjaxed? Whilst I admire the skill, it doesn’t make for a long and happy retirement.

BETWEEN PORT ELIZABETH AND ALEXANDRIA Nov 30^th

I flew here on the SA equivalent of Squeezyjet, except that the seats were both more comfortable and allocated. I am spending a week at the Hopewell Game Reserve, which Chris Oliver, one of the friendly parents at Wellington had a major share in until recently. This is about 5km inland, 80km east of Port Elizabeth and 30km west of Alexandria. My purpose is not so much to see animals, although that is always a bonus, as to develop a greater understanding of the sort of issues that such enterprises are designed to address.

My hosts are Tania and Francois de Villiers and I am basically shadowing Francois as he works. He is Afrikaans first language but that is not obvious and he has been very generous in allowing me to ride shotgun as he tours the reserve in his 4x4. The reserve has any number of ‘bok’. Bushbok, buntebok, eland, impala, waterbuck, hartebeest and others I have forgotten. It also has zebra, giraffe rhino and elephant.  At the top end is a pair of cheetah. Evidently this part of the world is full of such small concerns but many are game ‘farms’, as distinct from ‘reserves’. Their origins are interesting. Back in the 60s and 70s the game had been shot out of the cattle and sheep ranches which dominated the region. These were low productivity outfits, with some grazing in amongst a whole lot more bush and game animals were viewed as pests. The growth of the international game viewing and trophy hunting market in the 1980s caused a change of approach. Instead of eking a living out of cattle, farmers fenced off areas and stocked them with grazing game animals. The upshot is that there is now far more game in the Eastern Cape than there ever has been. It is not altruism that has caused this so much as pure economics. Tourists pay £2500 for a luxury week at a private reserve. Hunters pay £1000 to shoot a waterbuck bull and will want a different species on each of the 7 days they stay.  If the land yields more cash for keeping threatened animal species ( exempt from the hunter’s bullet, if not the poacher’s ), then that is the pragmatic solution. The farms rear game, provide for the hunters and sell surplus animals. The reserves buy the game and cater for the voyeurs.

Through no particular fault of anyone’s, there is not, actually, that much for me to do. Francois is about to leave the reserve, as a result of the new owner’s views, which differ markedly from Chris Oliver’s. The existing co-owner, Bruce Little, is moving from the house I am staying in to another one on the reserve, which is in the process of being extended. He is living at his main domicile in Grahamstown while all this is happening. There are no paying guests here until 2011 and the future planner suggests there won’t be many of those either. So I am going to take some walks on the land outside the reserve, do some cooking, as I am self-catering and read some books. It will be a slow week but at least it will be a warm one. News of snow and freezing conditions in the UK does much to make me feel I am in the right place.

JOHANNESBURG Nov 28^th

We didn’t do much on Friday other than observe the free wildlife show from Dave’s veranda, or stoep as it is known here. This included a visit from a rhino and two local crocs finishing off a waterbuck that had probably been washed down river by Wednesday’s rain. I cooked quite a decent curry in the evening but all three of us were tired enough to retire not much after 9.00. Maybe the local leopard will put in an appearance when the family are there in January.

Dave dropped me at the airport on his way home. I am staying at the same guest house we will all use in January and it is a real find. It is bed and breakfast but the proprietor has the view that he is personally responsible for the client’s welfare and could not be kinder or more attentive. There is good wi-fi, the rooms are immaculate and all that it lacks is the main satellite sports channel. It is also very handy for the airport, unlike most of the hotels which are either right next door or 20 km away in the city centre.

There is, in addition, a bar/pub a few hundred metres away, in which I spent most of yesterday afternoon watching England being physically battered by the Springboks. That was bad enough but the bar was full of large Afrikaaners and their wives, which made it worse. I am amazed at the total involvement in the game of the women. They know it well and are much more raucous in their support than the blokes. They are also very doll-like in appearance.  All make-up, blouse and hairdo. Maybe that is how their men like them but is all a bit artificial, if you ask me. I would like to say that I got talking interestingly to some locals but the truth is that it is very tricky. Of all the English speaking people of the world ( even if it is their second language ) the Afrikaaner is the one I find most trouble with. There is such limited common ground and where it does occur, i.e. in sport, the unshakeable view is that South Africa is the best at everything, even when the statistics don’t support it. Sentences are short. Adjectives are few. Development of opinion is limited. Opinions are strongly held. Conversation does not flow. The ‘beeah’ or ‘rrrum and coke’ does. And everyone, male and female, seems to chain smoke. It is allowed in bars and most people who go there include fags in their list of personal items. I smelt appalling when I got back and it reminded me of how it was pre 2007 in the UK.

I took the advice of Ronnie, the proprietor, and went to the Sandton Shopping Mall today, via the Gautrain. This is a rapid transit rail link from the airport to the centre and very efficient and inexpensive it is too. There is a 40ft bronze statue of Nelson Mandela at the entrance and the mall itself is bigger than anything I have ever experienced. I was surprised that much of the merchandise is more costly than in the UK. A child’s replica football shirt is £80, for instance, as opposed to £35-40. Another surprise was the quality of service I received from smiling, intelligent and thoughtful black Africans when looking into the options for buying a cheap mobile phone. It paints the average store operative in the UK in a most unfavourable comparative light. I am very taken with the natural mixing of racial types, although the wealth does not appear, as yet, to have been evenly divided.

Having said all that, I would not want to live here at all. Walls and security gates surround every home. Big, hairy, salivating dogs bark from behind them. Nobody walks anywhere and yet, the Gautrain apart, there is no public transport to speak of that is safe for the tourist to use. It is humid at this time of year and can be uncomfortably so. I’m glad to be away tomorrow.

MALELANE CROCODILE RIVER Nov 25^th

I am staying in something as near to perfection as it gets. Dave Carr is Gareth’s father. Gareth is i/c hockey at Wellington and a member of the SA national side. I wrote to Dave, at Gareth’s suggestion, very much on the off chance that he might be up at his house on the Crocodile River when I was around. Not only has he put himself out to be here now, but he is also going to have the family to stay for 3 nights in January before we go home. Gareth said the house overlooked a river and said it had enough room for us. What I hadn’t expected was the reality. The house is very large, with several en suite bedrooms. The river flows, literally, below the garden. The river valley is like the M1 for birdlife. Hippo muck about in it. Buffalo feed in the valley. A small elephant family came down to drink and cool off a few hundred yards away on Tuesday. As we enjoyed a glass of wine in the evening on Monday, two rhino were spotted on the far bank, picked out by the light which illuminates it after dark.

It thundered and rained heavily on Tuesday night and it was still pouring when we left for the Kruger at 4.30 a.m. The gates open at 5.30 and the very best time to see animals is first thing in the morning. Dave had arranged for us to drive into the middle of the park on Wednesday, stay overnight in one of the camps and to drive back via a different route on Thursday. Speed limits, strictly enforced, are 50kph on tarmac and 40 kph on dirt. It means that the distances covered are not huge but the time to drive 300 km, with stops for animal spotting is about 12 hours. We actually saw everything that we would have wanted to see with the exception of cheetah. We came across three wet lions very early in the piece and saw a pride in the far distance at the end of the day but did not see them other than on those occasions. We had to wait until late on Thursday for a leopard sighting, too far away for a camera shot but very good in the binoculars. I was especially pleased to see a few wild dogs for the first time. Elephant and rhino were relatively frequent and, of course so were impala, zebra and wildebeest, about which everyone becomes quite blasé. The rain did stop at mid-morning on Wednesday but it has been wet for a few weeks, which means the water is widespread enough to render the waterholes an optional extra to the animals. The game is not quite so concentrated as a consequence. The best time to come would be at the end of the dry season in September. I have a feeling that the family will see a bit less, given the rains which occur for the next 10 weeks in this area. Bush-time is get up at 4.15, on the road by 4.45 and bed at 8.00. It will present quite a challenge to the kids when they come, as will the longer spells that are necessary between bits of excitement when an animal is in view.

There is a good system in place for lunch. The main camps have tables with places to cook next to them. These are empty rings, into which a gas canister is inserted and above which a tray for cooking can be placed. We enjoyed a good solid brunch at 10.30 on each of the two days and had a braai ( SA for bbq ) in the evening.

What The Kruger isn’t  is the experience I remember from Tanzania/Kenya. The game is spread over a wider area and the numbers are not so great. Sightings are less frequent, partly because the bush is thicker than the Serengeti grassland. There is also an element of luck in seeing things. Ten minutes either side of our arrival at the point we saw the leopard and we would have missed it.

Dave basically drove for 2 days and was also instrumental in spotting game, which was a performance of great stamina. He is hospitable to a fault, generous and anxious to make me feel at home. It is becoming a recurrent theme.

MALELANE, CROCODILE RIVER, Nov 22^nd

My apprehension was justified. Jomo Kenyatta International Airport is not full of clarity with information about departures. I went to what I thought was the waiting area for Gate 14 and was there for an hour. I was sure I was in the right place because it was full of what I assumed were white South Africans. 20 minutes before departure, nothing much seemed to be happening. Thanks to my experience at Dallas in September, I asked someone wearing a uniform what to do. He pointed me to an exit from the lounge I was in, which was also a coffee shop, where a sign, invisible to me from where I had been sitting pointed to Gate 14. Fortunately it all happened in enough time to prevent panic and the remainder of the journey, to Nelspruit, just south-west of The Kruger National Park, was as uneventful as travel ever can be.

I am still reflecting on the Kenyan experience. I don’t really know enough about it to know which of the versions to take with me. The white Kenyans, who say that as long as black people run the country a combination of corruption and incompetence will prevent real development, or the black Kenyans at Starehe, full of optimism and hope for the future and pride in their country. The white people enjoy an immense quality of life. This is principally because staff are employed to clean, cook, wash, drive, protect and, with small children, to nanny. Rob Boyd-Moss has not washed an item of crockery, cutlery or clothing for 30 years. He has a large house, with attached cottage in Karen, the most exclusive location in the country. His children were privately educated in Kenya and then South Africa. He is a member of 2 golf clubs. He and Debs both drive 4x4 vehicles and holiday in ther Masai Mara or Watamu with the family. Debs owns 7 horses and employs the staff to feed, water and tack  them. This makes them sound fantastically wealthy. It isn’t the case. It is , quite simply, that the cost of living is such that these things are accessible to anyone at management level who is prepared to work hard.

The Kenyan people are deeply religious ( well, the womenfolk are, anyway ) and immensely cheerful as their default setting. These are huge qualities. I would love to see the economy growing even faster and for the persistent numbers below the poverty line to become a thing of the past. If only there was less risk of losing everything to a bent politician/businessman I would be investing because the resource base, much of which is untapped, is vast.

Anyhow,it has been a real privilege for me to spend so much time in such close proximity to this part of Africa. I shall be very interested to compare it to the south of the continent, where I am now, watching the sun set over the Crocodile River, beer in hand and with the hippo snorting in the water below.

NAIROBI Nov 21^st

I enjoyed Pembroke. There is a real community feel about it and it has lots of elements of ‘Africanness’ that makes it quite different from its British counterparts. Common Entrance, whilst still the most important end goal, is not quite the overriding focus of attention it can be in the UK. This helps to promote a slightly more old-fashioned emphasis on activity. This helps to foster a spirit of independence which, together with the resilience needed by a child of 7 years old to take on boarding school life, means that the end product has much to offer. It seems slightly strange to have been wearing my prep school hat again but there is a market here, even if small, and it is one that Wellington has never really tapped. As Debs Boyd-Moss says, there is a larger prep school constituency in Kenya on IAPS than there is in Scotland.

I was Rob’s guest in a fourball at Gilgil Golf Club this morning. Our opponents were a magnificent example of old white Kenya, on the one hand, and a more businessy/globally aware example of the current breed on the other. Rick, the older, was politically incorrect, not averse to a quiet word whilst I was addressing the ball and hilariously and expletively critical of his own efforts when it was warranted, which was quite often. It will be interesting meeting the son of Chris Outram, the younger of the opposing pair, when he plays against Adam at rackets for Cheltenham.

The golf course is a nine-hole affair with asphalt ‘browns’ as opposed to greens. I sank a putt of fully 40 feet on the first hole, much to my astonishment and general mirth/expletive. Thereafter I found it impossible to judge the pace and felt as if I was putting through standing water. It was a highly entertaining experience, even so, and, with the obligatory caddies, not the slog it would have been on what was a very warm morning. Gilgil is over 2000m up so there was the added boost of 20 yards extra per shot.

Rob drove me back to Nairobi in the afternoon for my final stop at the Taylors. I have come to like Joss enormously and I hope I can do something to repay the debt of kindness I owe him. He is quite an influential bloke in Kenya, from what others have told me. He and Charlie’s generosity has been greatly appreciated and their advice about the way it is in Kenya has saved me from several otherwise embarrassing moments.

It feels strange to be flying south tomorrow and, as ever, I am full of butterflies about it. A mixture of apprehension, based both on my propensity to forget items and fears regarding incompetent baggage handlers, and excitement..It is a feeling I have all too rarely these days.

GILGIL Nov 20^th

After a useful morning on the internet at Starehe, I was driven over to the Taylors in the afternoon. It took about 2 hours to travel the 15 or so miles to Karen. It was unbelievable. One broken down lorry and two fairly minor sets of roadworks caused successive unavoidable tailbacks. There are some signs of construction of new roads, including an M25 type affair but I suspect it will need a bit more than that to sort it out. Nairobi simply has not been able to maintain the level of infrastructure that is needed to cope with the huge increase in car ownership that has occurred over the last decade.

I had a couple of hours at the Taylors and met Charlotte ( ‘Charlie’ ), Joss’s wife. She turns out to be a very good friend of Debs Boyd-Moss, Robin’s wife and the headmistress of Pembroke House, my next stop. Rob picked me up towards the end of the afternoon. He spends the week on a sisal farm two hours south-east of Nairobi and drives up to Gilgil, virtually past the Taylor’s door, every Friday. The drive is not something he enjoys and he has just bought a light aircraft which will cut down the journey time considerably. We worked out that the last time we met was at the county ground at Northampton in about 1984.

There was a gathering of lots of Pembroke people at Gilgil Club. It is an exeat weekend with a parents morning followed by Sports Day on the Saturday, after which the children will go home with their parents until Sunday evening. The parents all come up on the Friday night and either stay at the club or with friends in the vicinity. Gilgil Club is a legacy of the colonial period, all drinks on chit, lots of well-sunned locals and everyone, seemingly, knowing everyone else. I chatted to a few and enjoyed the company of a couple of them, in particular. Debs had publicized the fact that I was around in their weekly newsletter and there are several parents who are considering Britain for their post 13 education.

I am so grateful to Rob and Debs for having me to stay for two days. It is the way that the ex-pats do it here but, even so, they regard their homes as hotels and it is continues to remind me of my many deficiencies in that area.