Ingenuity at its finest

I remember being petrified when we left the Johannesburg airport just over five months ago, and to this day I don’t call it completely irrational. I had heard how crime-riddled South Africa is, and when the OMer who collected us from the airport pulled into a gas station parking lot I waited for the van to be assaulted and my purse to be ripped away. I walked smack up against Todd towards the shop, expecting at any moment to ward off pick-pockets who would, doubtless, assume that my obvious great wealth would be contained in its entirety in my small yellow handbag. 

Many people here (I might even go so far as to say most) have at least one story that begins with, “when my car was stolen...” or worse, “the first time my car was stolen... .” House break-ins are not that uncommon either, so we don’t leave our “valuables” lying around when we leave the flat. When we get in the car, my purse goes out of sight as we’ve been told leaving things like handbags, GPSs, and laptop cases out in plain view is great incentive for a “smash-and-grab,” which is exactly what it sounds like: someone smashing your window and grabbing what they see.

Before we got here I never found myself praying that the car wouldn’t be stolen and praise the Lord, we have not had a single crime-related problem since we arrived :) I’ve calmed down a lot and don’t get nearly as nervous to walk around a shop by myself. Yesterday was a good example of just how far God has brought me. I thought about it as Todd and I went our separate ways at one of the malls. I needed to go to the drugstore and grocery store, and Todd had some banking business to handle. What would have at first taken us twice as long to do we now feel comfortable enough to accomplish using the divide-and-conquer method. Progress indeed. 

On this particular solo shopping adventure, I ran into something that...made an impression. I went to the drugstore first, which is like Walgreens or CVS. I like it (except when I’m looking for chap stick which was almost impossible to find). The main reason I like it is the rewards card it offers. I don’t go to the drugstore very often, but the rewards card has come in handy multiple times at the cinema, where we use it to get our movie tickets half off. Good job, Africa :) 

Anyway, I'm getting off track. I got what I wanted at the drugstore and then made my way to the grocery store, just down the hall (malls here include grocery and drug stores along with the normal mall-ish vendors. Sometimes I think it’s a great set-up, and other times I wish I could just stop at the store without having to park and walk all the way through a mall. The grocery store we usually visit, Spar, is in a strip mall, though, so it’s quite convenient).

As I entered the grocery store, a PicknPay, one of the attendants approached me and said something I didn't quite catch. He gestured me over to a little counter and I was afraid he wanted me to put my bag from the drugstore in some kind of holding place to be picked up when I left. I wasn’t excited about leaving my stuff with someone else, but if that was the policy...

I shouldn’t have worried. This is all the guy wanted to do: 

It cracked me up inside. Never, in my entire life, have I ever had a bag sealed around my wrist. Ingenious? I think so. Having neutralized any shoplifting threat I posed, the attendant released me to go about my business. Just another day in the life in Africa ;)

The Kind-of-Jurassic Park

It wasn’t hot or cold as we began our trek up the side of a little mountain. It was rocky, though, and the trail narrowed considerably at times. It was very wild. So wild, in fact, that you didn’t need to muster much imagination to envision a large snake popping up out of nowhere, or some big, fiendish “cat” sunning on a boulder. It was peaceful, and still, except for...

BEEP, BEEP-BEEP!!!

rrrrRRRRRRRNNNNNNDddddd

CHOP..CHOP..CHOP..CHOP

In case my attempts at city-life-based onomatopoeia are lost on you, I'll go ahead and let you know that we weren’t really in the sahara, or kalahari, or anything close to traditional “African” safari-land. We were at Groenkloof Nature Reserve, a park situated right outside the city of Pretoria. As in, there were several points on our otherwise remote-looking hike when you could see the smoggy city skyline, and the hum-to-roar of the interstate was an omnipresent reminder of our true location. 

But despite the ambience, the park was great! It’s nice to be living in the city but still have this rural oasis for hiking, biking, and sightseeing. It’s not the only one of its kind in Pretoria, and not the first one we visited, but so far, it’s my favorite for one very large reason:

Giraffe.

If you visit a “nature reserve” in the southeastern United States, whence Todd and I hail, you might be lucky to see a deer, really lucky to see a coyote, and insanely lucky to see both. I have family who have seen an actual, real-life black bear, but that’s not normal. My mom danced around a snake once, but we don’t speak of that *hi mom*.  I think when we use the term “nature reserve” back home, we mostly mean a place you can hang out around the flora and fauna, but you have to leave your gun at home.

However, at a South African nature reserve, you can count on a handful of African animals to be milling about, and it’s kind of an exotic feeling. I imagine it’s about as close to being at Jurassic Park as most people can be.

I had a pretty good idea that we wouldn’t see too much wildlife when we started our hike up the mountain. We would need to be in flatter, grassier places, preferably downhill, as that’s the way water tends to run. When our hike afforded us a view of the valley below us,Todd and I would scan the horizon in search of black and white herds, or large concentrations of bok (springbok, impala, kudu, etc., we just call them all “bok”), but what we really wanted to find was a giraffe! Not all the parks in Pretoria have them, so this was my chance!

The tracker in me (ha!) kept an eye on the ground,  but I’m not sure what I was hoping to interpret from the various droppings we stepped in. 

“I wish I knew my poop,” I said to Todd at one point, trying to deicide what manner of beast would have left that particular mess.

“I think you’re tracking a horse,” came his expert opinion. Well, the park does offer horse tours...

I had to face that I have absolutely no idea how to tell the difference between zebra, horse and giraffe droppings, and it would probably serve me better to keep my eyes out rather than down. As we neared the end of our hike, winding around on a rocky trail overlooking the road the 4x4 vehicles take for sightseeing, we looked out over the valley, and that’s when we spotted them.

At least six huge silhouettes. They were incredible! I wanted to scamper right down the uncharted side of the little mountain and take whatever fate would befall me (which would be me, falling), dead set on getting some close-ups. But Todd (the two words I use to describe him when he knows best and therein ruins my fun) thought it would probably be wise to keep going on the trail a bit farther. He thought it would meet up with the main road eventually, at which point we could backtrack to the sighting.

I was panicked. I’d waited all morning and come out here with the express intention of seeing and stalking giraffe, and here I was, this close! I kept looking down towards them every time there was a break in the trees. At one point, I noticed they had started walking, single file, to who knows where! Todd finally gave in and we took what appeared to be a bok trail down the side of the hill, hoping not to meet with a ravine. 

It didn’t take us long to realize that the giraffe were heading towards us, just as we were racing headlong down the hill towards them! We got really close...like probably 10 yards away! They stopped and stared at us, the giant horses they are. We followed them around for probably 20 minutes. They weren’t in any real hurry, and didn’t seem particularly bothered by us, snapping pictures and whistling at them to get them to look our direction. At one point, Todd tripped on some rocks which startled the whole little herd and they comically skipped back a few steps.  

The coolest thing they did, though, was gallop. Have you seen a giraffe gallop? Or more interestingly, have you heard them gallop? They didn’t do it but for a couple of seconds, but while they did they sounded like massive horses, running in slow-motion. It was so cool. Totally worth sneaking around in shoulder-high grass to get pictures of them watching us curiously. 

To get back to my Jurassic Park metaphor, the giraffes are like the brachiosauruses, the great tall things that eat plants and are majestic to watch. The zebra are like some other little abundant herbivore; they can be the stegosauruses. The ostriches are like the velociraptors. They’re super intimidating, ugly, and mean. 

While there are much cooler car safaris you can take in other parts of South Africa, where things like elephants, leopards, hippos and lions pop up, there’s something really...adventurous about walking around with giraffe :) 

Giraffe are so cool :) 

Here's Todd for a proximity reference. See how close we are‽

The zebra. Todd got a bit closer than this, but frankly, zebra are so much less interesting when there are giraffe to be had.

They're like donkeys, really. 

This is a velociraptor shot we got at a different park in Pretoria earlier this year, but it's just to remind you of the evil disposition of the ostrich. We saw one lone ostrich at Groenkloof,  but he was too far away to capture photographically.