Greg had read about the Forest Timber Camping Decks in the Knysna Forest on the National Parks website, but there wasn’t a lot of info about them, and no review on Trip Advisor, so it was all a bit mysterious until we actually got there. There are 10 decks, including one with disabled access and 4 with permanent tents set up. Apart from us, only one other deck was occupied. Great for us as we don’t have a strong herding instinct, but a shame that such beautifully constructed decks with excellent facilities aren’t being utilised.

The decks were constructed in 2007, and each deck has space for a reasonable sized tent (ours is a 4-person with large vestibules front and back), plus room for chairs, table and gear. There is a high bench with shelving underneath and a couple of rustic bar stools, a braai, power and lights. As we couldn’t use tent pegs to anchor the tent, Greg got very inventive with tying guy ropes to the slats of the floor and to the railing around the deck. We lit the braai and cooked braaiwors, a long sausage curled into a circle, potatoes and zucchini. My timing was a bit off with the potatoes- I should have par-boiled them first – but we left them in the coals after we’d had dinner, then fried them for breakfast.

It still really surprises us how well-equipped most campsites in South Africa are. Just about every site is powered, with a water tap either at the site or close by. Bathrooms all have hot & cold water, showers and often a bathtub, plus facilities for washing dishes and clothes. Larger parks also have a camp kitchen, with sinks, hotplates and a boiling water dispenser. Compared with campgrounds we’ve stayed at at home, these are excellent. And cheap. The Camping Deck cost us less than $20 for the night.

We kept on driving east, stopping in at Port Elizabeth for some supplies and lunch. PE, or ‘The Bay’, is one of the largest cities in South Africa, with a population of just under 250,000, over 50% of them white. It’s a very large shipping port. East London, which is about 250kms further east, is the largest city in Eastern Cape. From those names, you can guess that the British were the ones who settled this area … in the early 1800s.
About 40kms east of PE is a little seaside village that we just HAD to visit … Colchester. Not much like its British namesake, just a service station and some houses tucked in behind a wall of high sand dunes. Greg’s dad is from the original Colchester in Essex, and Greg and his family lived there for a few years in the early 1960s. There is also a town called Adelaide in Eastern Cape, a couple of hundred kms north of where we are now. We’ll head there after we leave the Addo Elephant National Park tomorrow to see what’s there.

So we’re back in wildlife-spotting mode. Drove into Addo yesterday afternoon, through the southern gate near Colchester. We booked 2 nights at the Main Camp, which is at the northern edge of the park, a 50km drive. We took a few side-roads and saw lots of wildlife, so I’ll resurrect the Wildlife Tally again

Wildlife tally for Thursday 19 Feb

antelopey thingies – common duiker, kudu, red hartebeest. Different species to the ones we saw all the time in Kruger, which were mostly springbok and impala
zebras
elephant
ostrich
warthogs, so many warthogs!
leopard tortoise

New to the list – flightless dung beetles & black -headed herons

This park is so different to Kruger …. of course! Much milder climate, quite mountainous and it’s mostly coastal scrub with just a few tall trees. There is a waterhole near the main camp’s office/restaurant/shop complex with a viewing platform, and a large ‘grandmother group’ of elephants visited this morning.

elephants
giraffes
antelopey thingies – impala
buffalo
hippo
warthogs
zebras
white rhinos
blue wildebeest
tortoise
storks
vultures
New to our list today – a rock monitor who lives around our campsite. A very good reason to take a torch and wear thongs or sandals when venturing away from the tent in the dark.

We took a short drive out to Mlondozi, a popular picnic spot a bit north of Lower Sabie. Up on a hill, it overlooks a river and the Lebombo Mountains, which mark the border with Mozambique. So that’s probably as close as we’ll get to Moz. The picnic area was busy, and I guess in the busy periods it would be impossible to get into … or out of. Not much wildlife around at that time of the day, and it was hot – 37C
We headed back to camp for a swim, then went for a drive later in the afternoon, south towards Crcodile Bridge. We saw 4 more rhinos, including a group of 3. Plus a big group … oops, tower … of giraffes. 8, the most we have seen together. And on the flora side of things, we found sausage trees! Lovely large leafy trees that have red flowers in spring, which become sausage-shaped seed pods that drop in autumn. They are heavy so it’s best not to stand under one of these trees at that time of the year. The only animal that likes to eat the ‘sausages’ is the baboon. The seed pods are very fibrous.

Last night’s dinner was blue wildebeest schnitzel steaks, cooked on a braai! The wildebeest smelt a bit ‘gamey’ when it was cooking, but they tasted very much like beef. 500g cost less than $6, and as Greg pointed out, they were probably as low in food miles and carbon footprint as we could get.
We had a HUGE thunderstorm last night. Clear sky when we went to bed, 2 hours later the lightning and thunder woke us up and we took shelter in the car for a while. This morning … clear sky again, and very high humidity.

We’re leaving Kruger today. Its been an amazing week here, but now it’s time to move on and find more adventures. We’re going to Swaziland for a couple of days and may not have internet access there. In which case, see you on Saturday when we get to Joburg

Everything Greg knows about lions, he learnt from The Lion King movie
A group of lions is called a ‘pride’, but only if they are standing on Pride Rock. We haven’t found Pride Rock yet, so that might be why we haven’t seen many lions.
He keeps looking for meerkats, but hasn’t found any yet. But they must be here somewhere ‘cos we’ve seen heaps of warthogs, and Timon and Pumbaa were best buddies.
Warthogs are much, much uglier in real life than Pumbaa was in the movie. They must have Photoshopped him.
Zazu the bossy bird in the movie (Rowan Atkinson was his voice) was a red-billed hornbill, like the one that fell in love with our car when we camped at Satara Rest Camp. We didn’t realise it at the time or we would have made sure we got a photo. We have seen a few since, but never close enough to get a decent photo.

Here’s what we saw yesterday.

dazzles of zebras
a couple of herds or parades of elephants
a bloat of hippopotamus
a tower of giraffes
impala
bushbuck
waterbuck
common reedbuck
a leopard tortoise
New to our list today – lots of banded mongoose including many babies and an implausibility of blue wildebeest.

My favourite group description is a ‘dazzle of zebras’, Greg’s is ‘an implausibility of wildebeest’. I’m really hoping to see a crash of rhinos while we’re here. Greg has added more photos to our last post, Out & about in Northern Kruger National Park, including a better pic of the crocs with the dead hippo, so you can play ‘Spot the Crocs’.

We have been befriended by a Southern red-billed hornbill. He has fallen in love with our car, or rather, his reflection of himself in the car’s windscreen. He’s quite tame, very persistent, quite vocal and I reckon if Greg spent enough time with him, he’d be able to teach him how to count to 10 by the time we leave.

Our friend Margaret commented that she hadn’t realised that Kruger National Park was so popular. Here’s a bit more info about it:

Around 19,500 square kms, covering 350km north-south and 60km east-west. The entire eastern boundary forms the border with Mozambique, and with Zimbabwe along the Limpopo River to the north. Along the western edge are several large privately owned game reserves, most (if not all) of which offer upmarket accommodation and wildlife experiences. We’re not upmarket enough with our tent, so we’ll stick to staying in some of the 26 (!!!) campgrounds in Kruger, which are able to provide accommodation for over 4000 people per night. We moved to the Satara Rest Camp this afternoon, which is in the Central part of Kruger. There are 3 guesthouses here, 180 self-contained units and a 600-site campground. And there are a couple of even larger campgrounds further south!

It hasn’t been busy anywhere we’ve stayed or driven, but during the summer and other school holidays, I’m sure it would be packed. It’s only a few hundred kms from Joburg and Pretoria and South Africans do love the outdoors. I think they are even keener barbecuers than Australians, if that’s possible. They call a barbecue a ‘braai’ – rhymes with ‘dry’ – and have all sorts of braai utensils and equipment that we’ve never seen before. We bought a beautiful cast-iron bread tin with lid (like this one here) that I’m looking forward to using when we go outback camping at home.  A braai is standard in all campsites – it might be a half 44-gallon drum on its side, some kind of large dish to hold coals with a grill above it or even just a concrete area to light a fire on. There is always something so that people can cook outside … and they do!