Saturday 23 June 2007- Day Twenty Two

Driving in South Africa is and exercises in extreme patience. Today a group of five of us (all girls) set out for Krugersdorp Wildlife Preserve. I’d estimate that it took about two hours to get there (it should have only taken about one hour and fifteen minutes). Not to bad when you consider that none of the roads are marked with either street names or directions (north/south, east/west). Some of the highways just disappear and become dirt roads only to reappear after several turns (specifically the R24, the road the preserve is on). Really, I think it was just luck and a pray that got us to the wildlife preserve.

Krugersdorp is a large rural area with amazing views of the mountains and the sparse vegetation. It is also barren and creepy. We decided that once we got the preserve we would eat at the Caravan Lodge. This had the potential to be the worst decision of my life. The five of us walked into the lodge and each of us separately had the feeling of ‘I have to get out of here before I am killed and eaten’. It was like we had stepped onto the set of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes.

There was a family of three children (visitors I suppose) and a husband and wife team who owned and worked at the lodge. The children were all very blond with huge eyes and translucent skin. They looked at us like they had never seen people before. So we quickly put in our orders (grilled cheese and chips and one tuna sandwich) and went out on the porch to avoid the hostile stares.

The porch turned out to be no less creepy than inside the lodge. One cute monkey quickly became several hissing monkeys. Fearing an attack we went back into the cannibal lodge. Again, all of us separately had the feeling that we should leave without getting our food. Yet we stayed. The husband and wife kept staring at us like we were some kind of unwanted visitors. The husband kept hovering over one of the girls and the wife kept talking to us with her wild, darting eyes while rocking methodically back and forth.

After five or six minutes of uncomfortable conversation she left us to check on our order. In the interim, I began looking around the gift shop. It was filled with the stuff that you can buy at any gift shop in South Africa but these were covered in a significant layer of dust. Out of nowhere, the woman arrived with out food and we immediately left and ate our lunch in the car. I’m pretty confident that I probably ate cheese but I can’t promise that the girl that had the tuna actually ate fish.

The rest of the park, while no less creepy, was enjoyable. We saw lions, giraffes, ostriches, hyenas, zebras and several deer-like species. There were also hippo pools but the unanimous decision was to leave the park before night fell.

On the ride home (much shorter because we stumbled onto a short cut) the driver and I (the navigator) saw what we though was a statute until it began moving. It was a black man with dreads covering his face and draped in a thick black blanket. As we approached in the car he was perfectly still but as we got closer he began to sway and he slowly lifted his head and gave us the creepiest snarl/smile. I thought fro sure that I was the only person that had seen this guy and that he was some sort of grim reaper come to collect my soul (I love that show Dead Like Me). Luckily the driver also saw him making the possibility of hallucination that much more unlikely. We made it back to the outskirts of Joburg by nightfall.

The whole day was like Deliverance meets South Africa.