There were beautiful plants, too...

So far, I've pretty much focussed on the animal life and our adventures on holiday, but there were beautiful plants everywhere, from formal, well-tended rose gardens to roadside wildflowers to delicately-leafed acacia trees sporting vicious-looking 3-inch long thorns. And the skies! There is nothing to compare with the intensity of the blue of the South African sky, especially when dotted with a flotilla of surreal-looking clouds. The Karoo boasts the most spectacular skies I have ever had the privilege to observe.

A sudden Midlands thunderstorm, however, brings its own spectacular sky.

La Provence in Colesberg, where we spent our first night on the road, had some pretty roses in the front garden...

But Tamakwa Country Lodge in the Midlands (http://www.tamakwa.co.za/) had a lush, lovely rose garden at the entrance.

Each Sunday Tamakwa offers a decadent high tea and on an overcast early afternoon we stopped in to sample their offerings...lovely!

When we stepped back out, after stuffing ourselves with strawberry jam tarts and caramel custard, we found the roses fairly glittering with the results of a gentle rain shower.

While Hubby got the car, I spent a little time with the camera, taking advantage of this rare opportunity.

Fern Hill, our hotel in the Midlands, had a beautiful park-like setting. This was the view from the window of our room.

From the tea garden at Fern Hill we could watch the birds flit through this tranquil water feature.

In America we call this a Blue Gum Tree, but in South Africa it is known as a Jacaranda. Fern Hill had an abundance of these delicately-leaved lavender-blossomed beauties.

These papyrus guard the entrance to the Jacaranda Tea Garden at the Fern Hill Hotel. They are the tallest papyrus...more than 12 feet (4 metres) tall...I have ever seen!



In the Midlands town of Howick, at the end of a narrow walkway bordered by little craft shops, we found this sweet little oasis.

Big Bertha earned her stripes...and a new nickname, "Dirty Bertie,"...on roads like this one. In fact, this was one of the better ones. The greenery in the Midlands was lush and thick at every turn.

Flowers grow wild along the side of the roads, the tar roads as well as the dirt roads. Here is a heap of roses growing on a fence along a main road.

Sunflowers found growing beside a railway bridge abutment

Even calla (arum) lilies grow wild in little swales by the side of the road.

And there is the bouganvillea...

The grounds of the Dargle Valley Pottery were one of the greenest, lushest sites we visited...and it was down one of the darkest, narrowest, most poorly marked roads we encountered!

A field of yellow blooms at the Lion's River Trading Post.

We found a dense copse of blue hydrangea at Mill Cottage in the Midlands.

And an even thicker copse of hydrangea at the Fort Nottingham historical site,...which is way out in the countryside on a really rocky dirt road...outside a quaint little half-timbered building sporting an engraved brass plate identifying it as the consulate of Madagascar!

There are many marshy spots in the Midlands, and dams (ponds, to Americans) are in abundance. Here a little Red Bishop perches on a reed, guarding his nest.

Outside our room in St. Lucia there was this huge tree, a vlamboom (flame tree) thick with blazing red blooms.

Outside the little convenience store in Cape Vidal we discovered this pair of trees, one wrapped completely around the other via these tendrils. The host tree did not appear to be suffering from its partner's embrace.

I've seen a lot of acacia trees since I've been here...they are very common...but these blooms are the first of this kind I have ever seen.

South Africans are familiar with the thorny acacia trees, but I had never seen one like this until my first visit to South Africa. These thorns are long, vicious and really, really sharp.

Isn't this a stunningly beautiful country?

It was a sultry, sweltering night...

We left Durban on Saturday morning, the 10th of December, and headed straight for St. Lucia, a World Heritage Site located on the shores of the Indian Ocean halfway between Durban and Swaziland (http://whc.unesco.org/pg.cfm?cid=31&id_site=914) . To say it was hot and humid would be an understatement of immense magnitude…Durban was hot and humid: St.Lucia was sultry and sweltering…and lush, and green and tropical.

The three hour drive to St. Lucia took us through miles and miles of sugar estates (sugar cane farms). Waves of rolling hills covered with the tall cane grass rippled with the shifting winds, clusters of trees and farmhouses standing out like so many oases in a desert of green. We passed the hulking red heaps of the sand mines at Richard’s Bay, and soon found ourselves on a narrow paved road with wide green verges cut through the middle of a eucalyptus paper forest…a forest planted by one of the local paper companies. We emerged at a bridge from which we could see a dock and a tour boat and at the other side of the bridge we found the little town of St. Lucia.

The air conditioning in the car and our hotel room provided welcome respite from the heat, but, surprisingly, it wasn’t as bad as I expected (I don’t handle humidity all that well). As long as there was a breeze, it was tolerable and so we set about to explore our environment. The room was lovely, with a fully functional mosquito net, designed as a decorative curtained canopy, draped over the bed. Fortunately, with the aircon, we didn't need it...we just closed up the windows and turned on the cool air. After settling into our hotel, the "Hippo Hideaway," we headed back to that bridge, camera in hand, and took an afternoon boat ride on the St. Lucia Estuary.

I like birds. Since I am allergic to the lovely creatures, however, I can’t keep a pet bird, so I must content myself with viewing the wild ones, many of which visit our large back garden at home. Hubby, bless his heart, is mostly bored with my bird-prattle, but knowing how much I enjoy looking at the creatures, booked St. Lucia because he had heard there was abundant birdlife there…and he heard right. The cruise up the Estuary showed us Egyptian geese and Goliath heron (a fairly rare bird, shown at right), white egrets and cranes, any number of stilt-legged shore birds probing the muddy beaches with their needle-like beaks. We watched a pied kingfisher hover and dart for its food and observed the majestic African Fish Eagle, a dead ringer for the American Bald Eagle, roosting high in the branches of a waterside tree. But the cluster of rocks we saw in the distance, something dismissed originally as uninteresting lumps of stone, turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip: a pod of hippo!

Sheep cluster in flocks, cattle and horses in herds, geese in gaggles…and hippos cluster in pods, like whales. We learned that because hippo young are born under water and suckle under water, like the young of such marine mammals as whales and dolphins, their groups are called pods as well. You cannot imagine how big these things are until you actually see one up close and personal. I’ve seen many of these things in the zoo and believe me, it’s just not the same. They can appear and disappear from the water in a silent instant, leaving not even a ripple in the choppy estuary waters to mark their presence. For such immense animals, they are eerily silent in their movements, although their vocalizations sound surprisingly like a man’s snores! Hippos are vegetarians and they emerge at night, when there is no sun to burn their skin, to browse on shore. “Beware of Hippo” signs abound!

"Hippopotamus" means "river horse" (in Greek, I think) and in Afrikaans they are called "seekoei," or "sea cow." It is difficult to imagine why on first glance, since they appear to be bulky, lumbering and slow, but we were told that despite their bulk, they can run at respectably frightening speeds on land and that they do not swim in the rivers and estuaries, but "run" in the water. If you have ever tried running with most of your body submerged and experienced the substantial resistance water provides, you will have some insight into the swiftness of this animal on land...if it can successfully run in the resistant water, imagine what it can do in virtually unresisting air!

The weather in St. Lucia is nothing if not unpredictable. Heat and humidity are a given, but like Hawaii, if there is even a hint of a breeze, it's just not that bad. But we arrived in St. Lucia in the early afternoon to clear blue skies and daunting sunlight, only to find ourselves racing a storm back to the boat launch site. In a matter of just a few hours the day had gone from the South African sun beating down on us to threatening rain...a threat that was realized just as we sat down to dinner...outside, of course. After fiddling with the camera a bit, I was able to get a picture of one of the storm clouds as it turned our sunny boat ride cool and dark.

We returned to our hotel room after stopping at an outdoor market to buy pineapples. My mother-in-law had asked that we bring back a few for her and, since Hubby and I both love pineapple, we picked up a few for ourselves. After a night in the fridge, they provided a cool, refreshing breakfast for us the next morning as we headed out on our next adventure: a guided tour of the Cape Vidal wilderness area aboard one of those safari trucks.

Next entry: safari truck, kudu, and those man-eating crocodiles.

I went on holiday...

So, Hubby and I went on holiday and boy! did we have a good time! Big Bertha, our Mercedes ML, made the 1800 kilometre drive to our destination in air conditioned comfort...and, to our great pleasure, acquitted herself extremely well on the hundreds of kilometres of rutted dirt roads we encountered once we arrived.

The Natal Midlands is a slice of lush temperate rainforest dropped smack in the middle of KwaZulu Natal, and it is one of South Africa's most beautiful hidden gems. Driving south from Johannesburg along the N3, you see only the barest hints of the treasures lurking behind the thickets that line the highway. Once off the highway, I was hard pressed to remember we were not rambling along the verdant country roads of my native Oregon.

We booked into the Fern Hill Hotel at Tweedie, intent on doing the Midlands Meander. Five days later…and an alarming number of rands lighter…we checked out and headed for Durban and my mother-in-law’s surprise 60th birthday party.

The Midlands Meander is a network of crafters and artisans, shops and accommodations, located in the Midlands off the original twisting, winding road between Johannesburg and Durban. More than half of the shops that dot the area are on unpaved roads, many of them deeply rutted, badly marked, sharply curved, and quite a few at alarmingly steep elevations….just the kinds of roads we bought Bertha to navigate. Weavers, cheese makers, potteries…the first photo was taken at Dargle Valley Pottery in the Midlands…sculptors, glass shops, antique shops, quaint B&Bs…and kilometre after kilometre of the most gorgeous scenery you could ask for.


En route to Shuttleworth Weaving, located well off the beaten track at the end of a long, deeply rutted road, we came across this widowbird. He flew across in front of us, long tail floating in the breeze behind him like a ribbon, and perched delicately on this stalk. A thick morning mist clung tenaciously to the hillside, giving a kind of soft glow to the landscape. It was quite beautiful.




Roses grow wild by the side of the road in the Midlands. This is but one of the thickets of wild pink roses that grew in heaps along side the roadways. Sunflowers also grow wild along the verges, their golden faces turning with the sun as it moves across the sky.


Greenfield is an immense farm…a ranch by American standards…where they raise beef cattle. But that’s not all…Greenfield also boasts a B&B, a butchery (which is open to the public), a restaurant (the absolutely best food we had in the Midlands!) and this glorious old stable which has been converted into a linen shop…and at fabulously discounted prices, too! This building was put up in 1893 and is even more magnificent than this picture can show. Last is a picture of the Mooi River Valley taken from the steps of Greenfield. A beautiful place, don’t you think?

After leaving the Midlands we cruised on down to Durban where we celebrated my mother-in-law's 60th birthday. Amazingly, despite the fact that there were more than 60 confirmed guests, we managed to keep the whole thing a secret! After a night in Durban, we were on the road again, this time headed for St. Lucia ( http://www.stlucia.org.za/ ) where we met up with angry elephant, man-eating crocodiles, and the most delicious pineapples this side of Hawaii…which are, of course, the topic of my next entry.