Greetings from Randomland

Yesterday morning, two women stopped at the base of an empty escalator, blocking the way.
"Excuse me," I said, politely.
They both turned and looked at me as though I'd spat on them.
"Could I get past, please?" Politely, again.
They mustered up some more outrage, but moved as little as possible. I slipped past and climbed the escalator. When I got to the top, I heard one shout, "You kno-owww, there are STAIRS if you want to WALK!"

***

On the train home, an eight-year-old boy restored my faith in humanity by running up and down the carriage, chanting, "Snot-snot-snot-snot-snot-snot-snot-snot-snot-snot".

****

Tonight, after leaving a civilised booze-up that was showing signs of turning messy, a guy approached me in the street.
"I had Portuguese chicken!" he said with a grin like an old sneaker.
"Well, that's just great."
"It was so good! It was Portuguese!"
"Fantastic, mate. Glad you enjoyed it."
"And spice-eeeee!"

****

And it's only Tuesday.

Listen to Felix

Felix says, "Go look at red's holiday snaps. Or I'll eat you. ~purrrrr~"

Doom: solver of all problems

The front wheel hit the puddle and instantly, the windscreen turned brown. I jumped out to sluice it with bottled water (the windscreen wiper reservoir was, of course, empty) and the smell hit me, curling my nose hairs and crimping my mouth. Something must have been using the puddle as a wallow and Livingstone was completely covered in what can only be described as a thin solution of shit. The smell was so bad even the flies vanished.

It had been a long drive from Swakopmund and we were running late, largely because I’d managed to slam the hatch on Livingstone’s tray cover while the pins were still open and bent them. Yes, I know. I’m great like that. Most game lodges start their afternoon activities at 4 or 4.30 and by the time we screeched to a halt in the parking bay, it was already 4.20. We had just enough time to dump our dust-covered bags, jam on our hats and climb into the safari vehicle.

Ongava is a private reserve on the border of Etosha National Park and I chose it thinking that even if Etosha turned out to be a fizzer, we’d be bound to see something in Ongava: they have one of the largest rhino conservancies in Namibia. We bumped along four-wheel drive tracks that wound through grassland reclaimed from mopani and thorn veldt. Zebra, springbok and blue wildebeest cantered out of our way. Giraffe browsed the thorn trees in the distance and kudu, eland and waterbuck (which weren’t native to the area, but had been introduced presumably because they were pretty) grazed nearby, placid as cows.

We were sharing the safari car with Frans, our guide, a gay couple from South Africa and a husband and wife team from the UK. Frans was a nice bloke and knew his birds and animals, but getting the information out of him was a challenge because his English left a bit to be desired. The gay boys were an odd match: Andrew was Storm Boy grown up – about my age, tall, rangy and tanned – while his partner David was about 50 and the classic dapper arts-scene lad with a neat grey goatee and a penchant for natural fibres. The Poms, on the other hand, were perfect for each other. Michael was a smart-arse sports coach and his wife Ruth, chinless but good-natured in the face of rampant chauvinism, took full advantage of her husband’s secret horror of insects. As you would.

Frans stopped the car and pointed at a bull rhino the size of a mini bus grazing about 200m away. His horns looked sharp and he was crusted in dark grey mud. “That’s Derek,” Frans said.

Immediately, Michael the Pom and I both asked, “Where’s Clive?” Sadly, there wasn’t a Clive. There was a Tony, though. The three big bulls had been named for the three directors of the company that owned the reserve.

Twelve rhinos, a sundowner and no lions later, we made it back to camp for dinner. We had enough time for a quick spit and polish and a look around our safari tent.

If this is tent living, I’m all for it. It had a board floor, twin beds under mosquito nets and a stone and canvas bathroom through a door at the back. The shower was open to the sky and the toilet roll holder was a hollowed gourd.

The only catch was finding a way of not being carried off by the mozzies while you were using the bathroom. We drenched ourselves in Peaceful Sleep and waited to be collected for dinner. After dark, no-one walked alone because there were no electric fences around the camp. The lions just wandered through whenever they fancied, so the guides went armed after twilight. Cameron, the manager, came to fetch us. He bore a remarkable resemblance to Richard Attenborough in Jurassic Park.

Dinner was served in an open-sided boma with a thatched roof. Lanterns on the table attracted insects of every size, including emperor moths as big as my hand. David, the South African guy, was sitting next to me and looked delicately affronted when a big cricket landed on his bread roll. “Doom,” he said, poking it off with his knife. “When you go home, fill your suitcase with Doom. It could solve all the world’s problems.”

Frans took us into Etosha the next morning. We had wanted to go for a whole day, thinking that with such a big park, we’d miss things, but they talked us out of it. Etosha is famous for its huge salt pan and the numbers of animals that crowd around its waterholes. The photos I’d seen had kudu, giraffe and zebra all drinking together in the middle of the day. Unfortunately, two weeks before we arrived, it had rained after a long dry. When that happens, the animals vanish into the bush because natural waterholes appear and they don’t have to crowd around the ones fed by National Parks’ bores. We drove through the park for a whole morning and saw two-thirds of bugger all. One black rhino in the distance, a couple of jackals, a chameleon and an osprey struggling not to choke on a whole mongoose were about the size of it, apart from a few antelope and zebra. The waterholes were deserted.

We grouched back to camp and had an afternoon nap. Ah, we know how to book holidays, we do. After all, we turned up in Cape Town in about the only month where the white pointers can’t be arsed jumping out of the water. Perhaps we should start a crappy travel agency – miss the stuff you wanted to see, every time, guaranteed! Yes, I do have a degree in whingeing. How did you know?

Crawling out later in the afternoon, the waterhole by the camp boma was packed with zebra and waterbuck.

A masked weaver was building a nest in a mopani tree overhanging the pool, obviously hoping that it would be good enough to attract the ladies.

Female masked weavers are merciless little bitches. A lad will spend three days weaving a lovely little home for her, but if she doesn’t think it’s up to scratch, she will nip it off at the point where he attached to the tree and all his hard work crashes to earth. Harsh. Very harsh.

Bloke piked on the afternoon game drive (uni assignment) and it turned out to be quite a good call. As we got into the safari vehicle, it started to rain. There were four heavy waterproof ponchos tucked behind the seats, but having learned from Victoria Falls that it’s better to be drenched in drizzle than your own sweat, I left them to the Poms and a Danish couple who were joining us. I was sitting up the back and because I was on my own, I shoved over into the middle and barely got a touch of the rain. The others got sweaty and looked like twits.

Michael the Pom wasn’t interested in seeing anything but lions. Frans would say, “Over there - giraffe” (with a hard G).
“I want a lion”.
“Over there – rhino.”
“I’ve seen lots of rhino.”
“Over there – yellow mongoose.”
“Well, at least it’s the right colour…”

There were plenty of jackals pootling about and Frans said they were always behind the lions. When we stopped for sundowners, there were some barking nearby. I wondered whether we were in front or behind. Whatever the case, I was willing to use Michael as bait.

That night at dinner there were several groups of new guests, a good half of whom fell into the “I love Africa apart from all the bloody living things” category. One elderly couple was English. He had been stationed in South Africa in the air training corps during World War II. I suppose he was settling a few ghosts and they had decided on a side trip to Namibia instead. A dung beetle landed in his bread and butter plate and I thought the poor old chap might pass out. He didn’t look much better at breakfast the next morning because sleeping in a tent was a bit beyond the pale.

Bloke stayed behind again to study, so I went rhino tracking on my own with Jack, a Zambian guide with corn-rowed hair and a white-white smile. We headed for the rhinos’ favourite spot on the reserve’s western plain, with Jack telling me about life as a guide. At Ongava, they worked six weeks on and two weeks off, he said. It’s a tough job of 18-hour days: up in time to do wake up calls at 5 and still going at 9 or 10 when the guests get packed away for the night. There’s supposed to be a siesta time for a few hours after lunch, but I don’t think the guides get time for a cat nap. To become a guide, you have to do a one-year course, learning off-road driving, animal behaviour, first aid and all the usual customer service skills for the hospitality industry. And did I mention they get paid bugger all? Auntie Redcap says, don’t forget to tip your guides.

After about 40 minutes of driving, we spotted Derek and hopped out of the car to follow him on foot. Jack unloaded a rifle and set off in the lead. Naturally, Derek caught a whiff of us and bolted, never to be seen again. It’s amazing how something that weighs three tones can disappear so effectively.

We followed his plate-sized spoor for about 10 minutes, then gave up and went back to the car. Further down the track, Jack spotted a female and her two calves out in the open. One of the calves was about two, but the other was only about nine months old.

Rhinos have poor eye sight, but their ears are good and their noses better, so we parked and walked quietly towards them, sketching a wide circle to keep downwind. A few springbok bounded away and a hyena watched us from the tree line, but the rhinos didn’t realise we were there. The baby was very alert and knew something was up, but mum and the older calf took no notice and kept cropping the grass. We got to within about 15m of them, so close we could hear them snorting as they ate.

We stood and watched for a good 15 minutes before we walked back to the car. There is nothing like being out on foot in an African park. You just feel too safe in the safari vehicles and I love the thought that there could be a lion behind any tree. I also added a fair bit to Poo Boot Tour of Africa II. I stepped in rhino and springbok and wildebeest and zebra and Ford knows what else. You could have started a crap library with the contents of the tread on my Blunnies.

We tried again with a herd of eight rhino grazing about 200m away, but they disappeared as quickly as Derek had. We tracked through trumpet thorn bushes until Jack lost the tracks. Altogether a pretty successful effort at rhino tracking, I thought. But then Jack had to go and tell me the story of the nature walk he’d done a couple of days ago.

He’d had two women out with him, both of whom were the skittish, screamy type. They thought they were going to see some nice birds when Jack noticed a jackal running back and forth across the track in front of them with bones. He stopped and bent down and saw a huge pair of pussycat paws under a bush not 20m from them. Without telling them why, he told the women to back up very quietly. They pulled back about 100m, only to see a big male walk out of the bush, across the road and into the bush on the other side. He disappeared and then let out a classic king of the jungle roar. Jack said his guests were just beside themselves because they thought the lion was following them. Big girls’ blouses - I was green with envy.

We left Ongava at lunchtime. Our final stop before heading back to Windhoek for our flight to Joburg was a cat sanctuary in the Watervale Plateau.

The bar with no name

Sorry for the delay. If everyone's bored now, please tell me and I'll skip the rest of the travelogue. Not sure when I'll manage to finish it anyway - it's Festival and Fringe time and my evenings will be a little occupied for the next three weeks.

Leaving the lodge in the desert, we drove out along the same dusty road, bypassing Solitaire because the Yanks and their guide were in front of us and we saw them stop there. We didn’t want Carl II to force us into some sort of weird convoy all the way to Walvis Bay. There were enough signs along the highway that said, “Achtung!” without having Carl II sticking his head out the window and yelling it back at us as well.

Unfortunately, this meant 250km of desert with no Diet Coke and a windscreen that was plastered with the innards of bugs. The colour range of bug guts always astounds me. Yellow, white, purple, red, green, orange, mustard, brown – it’s a veritable rainbow of tiny little offal.

The road between Solitaire and Walvis Bay was like the road from Windhoek to Solitaire: long, dry, dusty and empty, yet dwarfed by the blue bowl of the sky. A five strand fence stretched for a year and a day: thousands and thousands of posts and wire enough to reach the moon.

We crossed the Tropic of Capricon and the land around us turned rocky and bleak. Grey hills rolled down into zigzag valleys with a few scrubby trees. It changed gradually until we were driving through sand hills that looked like the dunes at the end of our street. Strangely, we never lost mobile phone reception on the trip. I think the Namibian telcos have bred mutant oryx whose horns act as mobile phone receivers.

We pulled into Walvis Bay in need of a pit stop for Livingstone and for ourselves. While one of the service station attendants filled Livingstone’s tank, another washed the dried bug goo off his windscreen and yet another presented me with the key to the ladies’ room. It was attached to half a broom handle by a most dubious-looking piece of cord. I really needed to wash my hands after I returned it, not before.

After hamburgers of distinctly non-cow origin in a greasy spoon, we went looking for flamingos. Ooh, this was going to be good. I’d been hanging out to see flamingos and if we were going to see them at all, this would be the place. According to the travel schtick, 30,000 flamingos live in the Walvis Bay lagoon. Naturally, they’d all gone to the pub or Mardi Gras or something when we visited and it turned out to be closer to 100.

Flamingos are a bit like the royal family, really, managing to be stately and ridiculous at the same time. They neck and stalk around each other in the shallows, stirring up the silt and its resident shrimp by performing a shuffling dance. Their legs are nobbly chopsticks and their necks and heads look like under-rim toilet cleaner bottles, but in the air, they are beautiful: miniature gliders with flashes of pink and black on their wings.

From Walvis Bay, we drove to Langstrand, or Long Beach. Weirdly, we were staying at the same place as Brad and Angelina stayed during the great birth countdown. Of course, that’s not why we stayed there. The location was right and I was attracted by the name. Yes, I realise that represents a whole different sort of shallow. Bite me. Words are important. Even the biggest curmudgeon has to admit that The Burning Shore is a pretty cool name for a hotel. And it was right on the beach. I just hope the villa that Brad and Angelina stayed in had air con, because our room certainly didn’t. Christ, it didn’t have a door or even a complete wall between the sleeping area and the bathroom, which provided for just a little too much intimacy as far as Bloke and I were concerned. Toilet doors keep the divorce rate down, as far as I’m concerned.

The really weird thing is that the place wasn’t overly expensive – in Aussie dollars, anyway. It could have been the “look at moi, look at moi!” toilet facilities. But I would have thought that B&A would have picked somewhere super top shelf, unusual or remote, and this place didn’t qualify in any sense. It was actually quite vanilla. The whole area is making the most of the association, though. For example, quad biking in the nearby dunes is popular, so naturally there’s a quad bike company that weaselwords itself as “Brangelina’s preferred quad bike supplier”. Oh, Virgil! VIR-gil! Look at thi-as! We-elll, like I always says, if it’s good enough for Brad Pitt, it’s good enough fer the likes of us!

There was a chair in our room covered in what I thought was zebra-print fabric. I sat down in it and realised it was real zebra. It was prickly, so I got straight out. Under the chair, a piece of reddish hide with black dapples had been laid out like a mat. I have no clue what it might have been when it had feet and I don’t think even its mother would have recognised it in its current state.

About 15 minutes down the road was Swakopmund, a seaside town with a very German feel. The road from Langstrand was long and straight, with dunes on one side and the sea on the other. It reminded me of the Adelaide to Victor Harbor road for the sheer number of roadside memorials. In one spot, there were four small white crosses. In another, a child’s memorial: a rain-clotted, sun-greyed teddy bear hung from a larger cross in a pathetic parody of Christ.

A ship had been wrecked on a sandbar just off the beach. It rusted and listed in the waves, perhaps not worth the trouble of salvaging or maybe just left there for picturesque effect. North of Swakopmund, the coast was known as the Skeleton Coast for the number of its shipwrecks, so maybe they thought to extend the attraction south.

In Swakopmund, we went to a beach bar called the Tiger Reef for a sundowner. Bloke parked Livingstone on the street and a car guard rushed up to put his card under the windscreen wiper. It’s a peculiarly African thing: you park in a shopping centre or on the street and a guy watches your car. When you come back, you tip him. They’re usually very friendly sorts who will help you load your shopping and take your trolley away afterwards.

The Tiger Reef was a tourist trap where I didn’t trust the hygiene enough to ask for ice. It had no floor, just sand, and was tricked out Survivor-style with palm fronds and driftwood and lengths of rope. It also seemed to be dog central. At least six dogs ranging in size from Jack Russell to husky were wandering about, peeing on all the doggy landmarks in an effort to cancel each other out. The bar opened directly onto the beach and from the gloomy interior, the surf and sand glittered.

A small but persistent spider kept crawling out from under the table and up my arm and couple of Brazilian backpacker girls propping up the bar didn’t seem to understand that silicon bra straps are not invisible when worn with boob tubes. Back in Langstrand, we shared seafood and white wine at a beachfront restaurant as the sun set over the sea.

The next morning, we tottered aboard a boat loaded with German tourists to see the local marine wildlife. Dolphins played in the bow wave and pelicans skimmed in, clacking their beaks for sardines. We motored past the poetically named “guano platform”. Mm-mmm, guano. It was simply a wooden platform built out to sea for the local cormorants (yes, they’re also called shags – stop snickering). Thousands of the birds roost there, joined by pelicans and gulls, and some poor bastards have to go out to scrape up the cormorant crap to use as fertiliser. Next time some government minister’s flack is giving me grief, I must remember to think, “At least I’m not a guano collector!”

Past Poop Central was the inaccurately named Pelican Point. I don’t know whether there were actually any pelicans on Pelican Point because it was completely covered in seals. They weren’t nearly as nervy as the seals in False Bay near Cape Town, so I guess there weren’t any 6m white pointers mooching around waiting for seal sushi to swim by. We pulled up near another boat in the tour operator’s fleet and a seal slid off the back of the boat and into the water, making a beeline for us. A minute later, it jumped onto the back of our boat and was shuffling along the deck. His name was Piccolo and he had been trained to come in for a snack. Rudi, the young captain, fed him sardines and the rapidly-reddening German girls squealed and posed for photos.

At beer o’clock that afternoon, we decided we’d have a look at a little place at the end of the only pier in Langstrand. There were no signs and it looked abandoned, but we suspected it was a bar because from time to time the night before, we’d noticed people staggering out.

It was indeed a bar and a very cool, non-touristy one at that. It didn’t even seem to have a name. As we got to the end of the pier, a woman tottered out the door, listing as badly as the boat stranded further up the beach. Inside, there were about eight patrons and the barman. We settled in and the crooked drunk staggered back inside, climbed back onto her bar stool and promptly fell off without a sound. One of her friends filmed the action. Eventually someone else wheeled her away before she could knock out any teeth.

The cricket was on the bar telly. Ah, cricket: the great conversation starter. We ended up talking to the barman and a few South Africans on the other side of the bar. It wasn’t a beer bar, this one. It was the sort of bar where people did shots, then doubles with mixers in tall glasses. I think every bottle of Jaegermeister that had ever been emptied there was still on a high shelf. There were dozens. We started shouting rounds as the sun went down.

One of the Saffies took a real shine to Bloke and invited him to visit his game farm outside Waterburg. “Come to my bush camp!” he said. “My fiancée doesn’t like going there. She wants a bed and a shower. I don’t get there often enough. You can shoot anything you like and only pay for the taxidermy,” he wheedled. A very generous offer, considering the usual cost of shooting things that can’t shoot back in Africa. What a friendly chap he must have been. That, or a serial killer.

Another man sat smoking a pipe in the corner. He had been pretty much everywhere, including Australia, he was proud to tell us. His main claim to fame seemed to be that Brad Pitt had once told him he was crazy. He didn’t like to eat breakfast at home and every morning he would fire up his Harley, wearing nothing but his jammie pants and a pair of kangaroo skin slippers (and presumably his pipe) and ride to a friend’s house for a fry-up. One morning, he passed Neanderthal boy, who flagged him down and said, “You’re crazy, man!” He seemed pleased with this.

As the sky got darker, we realised that if we didn’t leave that bar, we’d still be sitting there at dawn and there’d be nothing but crème de menthe left to drink, so we called it a night. In any case, we had a long drive ahead of us the next day, five hours’ north to a lodge on the border of Etosha National Park.

Ridin' across the desert

At Windhoek’s tiny airport, we picked up a four-wheel drive ute for our trip across the desert. We christened it Livingstone and hit the road for Okapuka, a game ranch just outside town. Bush seemed like a better option than a generic city hotel.

We arrived in time for sundowners and dragged our bags into the thatched chalet. The lodge grounds were sprawling and beautiful, with blue mountains as a backdrop. The tips of the tree branches were crowded with the miniature haystacks built by sparrow weavers.

Walking down to the thatched-roof bar, one of the ranch’s trained suicide wasps zoomed in to give me a whack on the ear. Ever been stung by a wasp? Hurts. Someone brought a spray bottle of yellow stuff and told me to spray on more every time it dried. It smelled strangely like Pine-o-Cleen. I can’t tell you how sexy and cosmopolitan it isn’t to find oneself in a slightly kitsch African-themed bar (complete with a stuffed vulture on a dead tree branch and stuffed hyena in the corner), spraying one’s ear with Pine-o-Cleen.

The ranch did have some more pleasant animals than wasps. Warthogs appeared after sundown to tear up the lawn and the next morning one of the guides took us out to see the rest of the property. A herd of white rhino snuffled the grass just a few metres from us, completely unconcerned by the car, and the guide whistled up a pair of Nile crocodiles from a dam by throwing stones into the water and calling, “Come-come-come!” Giraffe wandered about, browsing the thorny trees and there were springbok everywhere.

We set off again mid-morning for the Namib. The roadside got dryer and dustier as we drove and kopjes and rocky mountains reared up from the flat. We were navigating with the help of a borrowed GPS, which for some reason had the voice of Dr Evil from Austin Powers. Dr Evil managed to hold himself in check until we came to the Spreghtshoote Pass, a narrow part of the road that wound through the mountains. Then he just couldn’t help himself: he tried to kill us. He suddenly shouted, “Turn left!” when a left turn would have taken us over a cliff. When we didn’t take his advice, he got all stroppy and whined, “Turn around when possible. Come on, throw me a fricken bone here!” Nice try, Dr Evil.

As we drove, huge sand dunes appeared in the distance and a wash of sand in a hallucinatory pink. Heat haze shimmered and dust devils blew up among the scraggly trees. We were headed for Solitaire, the gateway to the Namib and Sossusvlei. You couldn’t really call it a town because it appeared to be just a lodge, a service station with a shop and a tiny tourist information office. Wrecked and rusting vintage cars were arranged in the dust around cactus and rocks. The sun glared off the pale sand and the heat was fierce after the chilled car. Everything we owned was covered in a fine film of desert that had filtered into Livingstone’s covered tray. Apparently, if we were German, we would have packed our bags in black plastic.

Our lodge was about 20km away, on an old sheep property. It was a bit like Fawlty Towers – surly staff, a grumpy owner who was somewhere between Basil Fawlty and Bernard Black and a strange obsession with pineapple on the dinner menu – but it was in the middle of the desert and it had incredible views. Buff dust and gravelly stones stretched away as far as you could see, broken up by kopjes of red boulders and pale blue mountains on the horizon. Our room opened directly onto the desert and a family of ground squirrels tore between a network of holes, fluffy tails streaming behind them.

We were the only guests apart from an American couple with their Namibian guide, a German-speaking guy who gave us nasty flashbacks to Carl, our control freak Cape Town guide from last year. The grumpy owner took us out on a sunset drive, telling us to keep an eye out for the cheetah that lived in one of the kopjes and sometimes appeared at dusk.

The next morning, we set out for Sossusvlei, which has some of the tallest sand dunes in the world. We were on the road well before dawn, with only the stars and our high beams for light. The desert is densely black at night, but occasionally an oryx or a ghostly tree would appear by the road. Twice, African wildcats crossed the road in front of us.

We were the first car to reach the gates, which were due to open at sunrise. As we waited, the sky behind us turned peach and dusky purple. The dunes turned out to be spectacular. They stretched for nearly 70km, towering either side of the road, deep red and heavily shadowed in the morning light. Resculpted by the wind every day, they had sharp, shifting ridges that curved like snakes’ spines. The usual pale sand stretched up to the foot of the dunes, scattered with rocks and startled-looking tufts of yellowed grass.

We decided to climb a dune that didn’t look too taxing. Another group was halfway up, so we assumed it was all right. Bloke got all the way to the top, but I decided once again that discretion was the better part of not getting dead and stopped halfway up. It was high enough for a spectacular view of the dune fields.

That's Livingstone at the bottom

For such a dry and harsh environment, there were quite a lot of animals around. Solitary oryx, small herds of springbok and ostriches prowled about, picking at the grass.

At sunset, an electrical storm blew up for the second night in a row. The wind howled off the desert, laden with grit, and orange lightning forked from the thunderheads. I certainly didn’t envy the Americans’ guide that night – there had been a mistake with the booking and he had been given a tent instead of a room. Naturally, the surly staff refused to let him have one of the empty rooms. He appeared at breakfast the next morning looking slightly ruffled, but announced he had survived desert storm.

After breakfast, we hit the road again with Livingstone and Dr Evil, bound for the coast to wash off the desert dust.

It's a wide open road (full of bugs)

Remember that scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where Kate Capshaw's ditsy nightclub singer is rushing around their jungle campsite being growled at by lizards and accidentally picking up bats? No? She comes rushing back to Indy and says, "This whole place is completely surrounded by living things!"

I'm starting to get that same feeling myself.

Yes, the bit behind the fence wire
reads "prosecuted or EATEN".

There aren't really any of these around. It's a sign on the fence that separates Palm Haven from the property next door. The owner was going to get some lions, but he must have changed his mind. A sign like this would make an excellent alternative to a monitored alarm, though, don't you think?

Most of what's surrounding us doesn't have teeth quite that big. Frogs, spiders, moths and a stunning range of supersized bugs - you name it, we've got it. There are a few types of frog here, though none are more than a handful. There are flat ones, little stripy green ones and a brown, toady one. The dogs and Gilgy the cat are all obsessed. Gilgy likes to chase them, but he knows better than to eat them. The dogs never learn and end up frothing at the mouth after one solid lick. It doesn't make them sick, as such, but a floor covered in cappucino de pooch isn't overly pleasant.

Gilgy seems to have been quite restrained with his hunting while we've been here. Probably because of the amount of steak and bacon he cadges from us at the table. Apparently last year he was forever bringing back rabbits from the veldt and taking them apart on the lawn. He'd just leave the ears and a few clumps of bunny fluff. Which does beg the question, what's wrong with rabbit ears? Bitter? Too chewy? Just not worth the effort?

The bugs are interesting, though. There are big black horned beetles; huge grasshoppers in various shades of acid; millipedes as long as a pen and thick as a finger; black-and-white bumblebees the size of Clinkers that wobble about, merrily oblivious to the fact that they shouldn't be able to fly.

Here's one I prpeared earlier. It's quite small, I'm told.

Everything seems to creak or buzz or hum, especially in flight. There are a few types that make a noise that could pass for a small motorbike. The other night, I found something in the bathroom that could have been cockroach or cricket, but I couldn't work out which and couldn't be bothered opening the window to turf it. It woke me up an hour later with its singing, so I suppose it was either the rare Pavarotti roach or a particularly massive cricket. I think I'm one up on one of Bloke's workmates, though. One night last week, every time he opened the door to throw something out (frog, spider, moth the size of your hand), something else would fly/jump/scuttle in.

And naturally, everything has made it its mission to bite you. The mozzies must be pretty bloody sturdy if one managed to bite me through denim. Twice. On the bum. Typical. I do like the name of the bug spray in our room, though. It's called Doom. And the Saffie Aerogard equivalent? Peaceful Sleep. I can't decide whether it sounds more like the bottle of stuff a vet keeps for putting down kittens or a less popular Soylent Green substitute, but it's the only one that really keeps the mozzies away. Hey, what's a little toluene between friends?

I don't think Peaceful Sleep works on snakes, though. I have yet to see one on this trip, but they're certainly around. Richard shot two cobras yesterday. One was only small - only about three feet long - but the other one was a good seven or eight feet. Cobras aren't the only type of snake around, of course. Don't forget the boa constrictors and black mambas. Everyone has a black mamba story to tell. They're particularly aggressive snakes and just a wee bit poisonous. My favourite mamba tale is the one where someone saw one stretched all the way across the road (did I mention they're quite big, too?) and ran over it. Quick as you like, it flicked up and struck at the closed passenger window. Handy hint for beginners: drive with your windows up.

Or just walk and don't worry about it. I went for a walk up the driveway yesterday, hoping to see the family of warthogs that has been lolling about in a wallow by the road. It was a nice stroll - just me, the thorn trees and a long red road.

Oh, and of course, the bugs. Don't forget the bugs. No warthogs to be found, unfortunately. They must have been pigging about elsewhere. I did see a dead chameleon, though. It had faded to a pallid green against the dust. I wonder whether that was its natural colour or whether it was the just last colour it had been before it dropped dead?

In other news, I have a new feather in my hat. Real, not metaphorical. It's a wing feather from a lilac-breasted roller, a very pretty bird with feathers in purple, blue and turquoise. It was actually my second attempt at a hat feather. I'd already seen one in the grass, striped brown and cream, and tucked it into the band. I saw Richard afterwards, spraying weeds, and stopped to chat. "By the way, what sort of feather is this?" I asked. "Oh, that? Um, chicken."

I think that makes me a loser.

The green, green grass

The Soutpansberg Mountains, seen from Palm Haven

The road from Johannesburg could hardly look more different from last summer. When I was here the first time, the country was baked red, the grass tawny like a lion's hide. This year, South Africa is having a true wet season and the roadside and veldt have been washed green. Wetlands and muddy wallows have appeared by the highway, followed by white wading birds. Fields of corn stand tall. Even the red stone kopjes by the road have acquired a green tinge.

Bloke retrieved me from the muggy airport on Thursday night, whisking me past taxi touts who wore white shoes with extended toes. The touts were the only airport workers who smiled and made eye contact. The plane landed through rain and the showers kept on for the whole four-hour drive to Louis Trichardt, ranging from a miserable drizzle to solid cloudbursts. The labourers riding home in the open trays of trucks and bakkies were rugged up in balaclavas and thick jackets. I suppose it was about 19 degrees - cold for Africa.

After half a dozen toll gates and a pit stop for a cold hamburger and chips soggy with oil and crusted in sweet salt, we finally turned off the highway. Palm Haven is at the end of a long red drive and rain turns it into a network of puddles and thin streams. A brown water bird stood stubbornly in one of the pot holes, soaking its feet and staring us down. Who knew plovers played chicken?

Driving through the first gate always feels like entering Jurassic Park and the rain in the headlights make the illusion stronger. The gate posts are heavy logs and eight-foot electric fences guard both sides of the road, more to keep uninvited visitors out than to keep a T-Rex in. An electric gate close to the house completes the secure zone.

By the time Bloke dropped my suitcase in his room, it was nearly 9pm, or 5.30am Adelaide time - 24 hours since I'd left home. I managed to buck the jetlag, staying up til 10 and waking with the birds the next morning. I don't hold out much hope that the return trip will be as free of misery, but this time I'm definitely keeping away from those bloody No Jetlag pills. Christ, it was like herbal ice last time - they left me so wired I got seven hours' sleep in three days and was on the verge of a psychotic break.

With the break in the drought, Palm Haven looks different too. The veldt beyond the garden fence is green and dotted with tiny yellow wild flowers. Even the thorn trees look somehow more lush. They probably have a better crop of thorns. In the distance, the Soutpansberg Mountains have been lost in thunderheads most mornings, emerging blue and hazy later in the day. Misty rain, or perhaps rainy mist, leaves the fence wires strung with water beads. Distant rumbles are either thunder or the Cheetahs and Hawks from the airbase out on manoeuvres.

The paradise flycatcher, with his long fiery tail, still flits back and forth across the garden, but there are other, less obvious birds that I didn't notice last time. I found a sunbird peering from a thorn tree just beyond the fence and was dazzled by the metallic gloss of his feathers. A pair of golden weavers is tending a new, gourd-shaped nest in another tree and in the afternoon, tiny blue birds appear to drink from the round brick trough just beyond the fence. I've been flicking through my copy of Newman's Birds of Southern Africa and scanning the trees with my binoculars. That makes me a bird nerd, doesn't it? But I don't have an anorak or one of those geeky little trainspotting notebooks, so perhaps all is not lost.

Palm Haven's owners, Richard and Angela, are as lovely and welcoming as ever. Richard is struggling back to strength after a wasp attack last week that nearly killed him. He disturbed a nest while he was pruning and the wasps came barreling out, stinging him on the face and arms. He stopped breathing on the way to the hospital. He's on the mend slowly, but he tires more easily than he will admit and the pills make his hands shake unless he concentrates hard. Despite last week's trauma, everything continues to run smoothly and nothing is ever too much trouble for Angela.

Life isn't being made any easier by the fact that South Africa is in the middle of a power crisis. Everybody here is worried because for the past few weeks, there has been load-shedding, which is really a weasel word for power cuts of up to five hours every day. And when the lights go out, the wheels fall off. There are the obvious things like no traffic lights (which are called "robots" here, for some reason) and being wrapped in darkness in the supermarket, but then there are the things that no-one thought of, like the few hundred tourists who got stuck in a cable car halfway up a Cape Town mountain recently.

South Africa used to sell power to Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe, but last week they pulled the plug. Thabo Mbecki has admitted the government ignored warnings ten years ago that there would be shortages unless more power stations were built. Apparently the problem has been made worse by the fact that the existing turbines haven't been maintained properly. The government promised there would be no cuts over the weekend and there weren't. I think they sensed there would have been mutiny if the lights had gone out during the day/night cricket match against the West Indies.

The trade-off for being able to have the lights on was shutting down the country's gold, diamond and platinum mines all weekend. The shut-down has cost something like six billion rand a day, or at least that's what they're admitting to. More than 480,000 people work in mining and while this time the bosses are paying them during the standstill, that can't last. There are already rumblings that unless the problem is fixed, South Africa hosting the 2010 World Cup could be in jeopardy.

The power crunch has come after a water crisis a few months ago, when purification shut down in some areas. People are worried that South Africa is going the same way as Zimbabwe: to hell in a handbasket. The jokes have already started. For example, what's the difference between the Titanic and South Africa? The Titanic went down with its lights on. Naturally, it was the main topic of conversation on Saturday night, when people from the base came to Palm Haven for an Australia Day braii.

I don't really hold with all this patriotic Strayaday rubbish. I've had a good old whinge about it before, so I won't bore you with it again. I wondered whether I'd feel different spending the national day overseas. Nup. Not really. But at least it was devoid of drunken yobbos and people who thought it was fine to substitute Australian flags for items of clothing. The barbecue was pretty tasty, though. I have to admit that a Saffie braii makes an Aussie barbie look pretty darned lightweight. It's all about the wood, baby. You have to have a taste to make sure it's just right, then let it burn down to the perfect ember base before you start cooking. And of course it's a huge meatfest: boerwors, ribs, lamb chops, Mozambique prawns - you name it, it was dead and gettin' grilled like a French stockbroker.

There was one type of meat that some of the guests wouldn't touch, though: my kangaroo biltong. I made a batch before I came and brought it in vacuum sealed. Richard says it tastes just like venison biltong, which can be any antelope from springbok to kudu and is quite expensive here compared to the usual beef variety. I wonder whether it's more expensive than ordinary biltong at home? I've seen it in the Central Market for $60 a kilo.

Anyway, venison or not, more than a few people were a bit leary of having a taste. "Oh, I couldn't! Kangaroos are so cute!" one of the pilots' wives said. I pointed out that kudu were pretty nice-looking animals too, but she said there'd never been a movie made about a kudu. What's that Skip? Bambi would make good biltong? Sure he would, Skip - with the right spices.