January 29th 2023

Ignore this if you’ve already read it! somehow i managed to bin it but thankfully have managed to restore it from the Bin.

I am finishing this post from Cape Town. We spent most of December back in the UK, pleased to see family and friends over the Christmas period. We were relieved to escape the particularly cold and dreary winter weather in the UK and return to the warmth and sunshine of a South African summer, although as I write this Hugh is back home for a week for his father’s funeral. His father, Stewart, had his 100th birthday in September surrounded by family and received a birthday card from Charles and Camilla. He fell asleep peacefully for the last time on January 5th and we were glad that we saw him in December whilst we were home.

Monday 7th November to Thursday 1st December 2022

Checking in to South Africa was surprisingly easy. Natasha, the local Cruising Association rep, was waiting on the Q-dock (Q for quarantine) to welcome us as we arrived after our long sail from Mayotte, and to guide us through the formalities. The next morning the Immigration Officer arrived at the Q-dock at 8.30am, before we were even up and dressed, and Hugh filled in the forms with her over a coffee at the nearby Dros restaurant. We got a lift over to Customs to fill in some more paperwork and then onto the Mall to get cash out from the ATM and to buy South African SIM cards. 

It was three days before we could move from the Q-dock around to the comforts of the Zululand Yacht Club. All the pontoons at the Yacht Club were full as the World ARC was in town ( a rally of eight large yachts circumnavigating the globe in only 15 months) as well as all the international cruisers who had arrived before us. Whilst the staff at the ZYC tried to shift boats around to make more room we enjoyed the fine dining experiences available around Q-dock, especially at the Dros restaurant, and visited the nearby Boardwalk Mall for some retail therapy. You can stock up with all sorts of lethal weapons at the Security Hyperstore there, shop at Woolworths and finish with a coffee in the Wimpy. 

The Zululand Yacht Club well deserves its reputation as ‘the world’s friendliest yacht club’. We attended a welcoming evening in the bar where all the new arrivals (French, Danish, English, Scottish, American, Australian, French Canadian, New Zealand, Estonian and South African) were presented a bottle of local fizz and invited to make a short speech amidst much jollity.

There is a resident hippo that can be seen ambling around the yacht club and troops of monkeys hang out looking for food to pilfer. One morning we woke to find that a monkey had got in through an open hatch, peeled and eaten the banana that I’d been looking forward to for my breakfast, leaving just the peel behind. There is a weekly braai (barbecue), regular social events, cheap food and drinks in the club, a laundry, hot showers and even a small swimming pool. On top of that the cheapest berthing fees we’ve come across at around £7 a day.

With lots of fellow yachties around we socialised with old and new friends, went out for meals, and managed several outings to the Mall, including a Ladies shopping trip. There was as usual quite a bit of work to be done on the boat, most of which was taken on by the incredibly helpful Jacques and his team. He went up the mast to repair the non-functioning masthead fittings as well as to try to replace the broken anemometer cable. Unfortunately this proved to be more difficult than anticipated and we’ll need to get the mast taken off in Cape Town to complete this job. We had the boat cleaned inside and out, the hull polished and the barnacles scraped from the bottom. 

After a week at the yacht club we set off with friends Laura and Dick on safari to the Hluhluwe (pronounced Shush-Louie) – Imfulozi Game Reserve. Three days and two nights, staying in the rather dated but comfortable Hilltop Camp.

We drove around the game reserve in our hire car and also did several guided tours in safari trucks. We saw herds of zebra, cape buffalo, elephants, lots of impala and nyala, warthog, glimpses of the shy red duiker and the elusive large-spotted genet, and stopped the hire car to avoid running over dung beetles rolling perfectly spherical balls of dung across the road.

Male impala, above.

It was particularly exciting to see several white rhino, including one with her baby, and a solitary young giraffe that appeared to be looking around anxiously to find where the rest of the herd had gone.

We were up at 4.15am to join a guided drive as the animals are most active around dawn. On a night drive our guide shone a spotlight into the undergrowth as he drove, and giraffe and zebra were caught in the powerful beam. We stopped by a waterhole where zebra, impala and nyala congregate together for safety overnight, taking turns to stay awake on guard watching out for predators like lions who hunt at night.

We enquired about joining a 5.30am hike in the bush, but there was a strict upper age limit of 65 which, I know our readers will be amazed, we didn’t qualify for. This was a red rag to a bull as I had been rather undecided as to whether I really wanted to get up that early again, but now I was determined. We were told to speak to the chief guide, Welcome, who advised that, at our age, we wouldn’t be able to run fast enough away from a lion or charging rhino, or climb a tree to escape them. I was dubious too but not prepared to admit it. We argued that our lives were full of risk and danger sailing around the world and we wanted to experience everything in the years we had left on earth. He explained that if we were injured he’d lose his job for breaking the rules, lose his income and his pension and be unable to support his family. We relented and agreed we didn’t want to put his livelihood at risk (or get attacked by a lion for that matter) at which point he decided we could indeed join the tour and then he spent the next five minutes persuading us to go. 

And so the next morning we were up early again, just before sunrise, to join the hike. Our guide, Xolani, carried an ancient looking rifle that looked unlikely to stop a charging rhino or angry lion. We set off at 6am with two other couples on the walk through the bush. It was marvellously peaceful but the only wildlife we saw was a tortoise and a hatch door spider that he prized out of its burrow. We had no problem keeping up with the guide and the others despite our advanced years. We tried to walk silently but were probably making enough noise to frighten off a lion. Stopping in a gully to rest, we listened to the sounds of the bush and meditated in the stillness. A small waterfall, the lush vegetation and birdsong added to the magic.

About the only wildlife we saw…

There were not only the large animals but some big reptiles as well. We had to stop the car to avoid running over this four foot long snake (I think a rhombic egg eater) which was motionless, sunbathing, then suddenly and alarmingly shot, at speed, into the bushes:

And there were plenty of birds too:

Above: Tawny eagle, violet-backed starling, female and two male mocking chiff-chaffs (clockwise)

Lesser masked weaver, African jacana, Cape glossy starling, Brown-hooded kingfisher (above, clockwise)

As well as those dung beetles…..

…..and extremely cheeky Vervet monkeys who hang around picnic sites trying to filch food from the picnic tables:

Our visit to the game reserve did not disappoint although we didn’t see any big cats (lions, leopards and cheetahs live in the 960 square kilometre reserve). We hadn’t seen any hippos either so a few days later we hired another car and set off for the touristy village of St Lucia, staying the night in an Airbnb. The best place for hippos and for crocodiles is the estuary at St Lucia, about 50 miles north of Richard’s Bay along the coast. Hippos sleep during the day and forage at night and the best time to see them is dusk, so we joined a riverboat trip in the late afternoon and saw several family units. They are herbivores and mostly just eat grass. During the day they sleep submerged, surfacing to breathe without waking up. They can’t actually swim but walk underwater along the riverbed. They look pretty harmless but can get quite aggressive especially if their young are threatened or they feel their territory is invaded. They can easily outrun humans and, after mosquitos, are the creatures responsible for the most deaths in Africa – more than the total number of deaths attributed to elephants, buffalo and rhinos combined. We were told of a tourist in St Lucia who approached too close to photograph a hippo and its baby and had her leg bitten off. 

The yawn of a hippo doesn’t mean it’s tired: it’s a territorial gesture that warns you not to come any closer, it shows its long, sharp teeth to demonstrate strength and aggression. As we were walking back to the Airbnb after dark, a large hippo came strolling along the road in the middle of town. We kept well out of its way. 

South Africa is a beautiful country but the situation here is complex. It has a long history of tribal warfare, colonisation, slavery, religious differences, conflicts including the Anglo-Boer Wars, apartheid etc, and I am trying to read around its history to gain more of an insight into its problems, but my understanding of the country is inevitably superficial. 

For a country of such natural riches there is visible poverty with over 30% unemployment. Since 2007 there have been regular power outages when there is no electricity for several hours on a scheduled rolling basis in different areas. The white South Africans we speak to often blame the ANC and complain this is due to corruption and mismanagement, with inadequate investment in and maintenance of power stations. Although a quarter of South Africans live on less than US$1.25 a day, visits to the Malls here demonstrate that there is also great wealth in South Africa. On our way to Durban Airport to fly home for Christmas we stopped at the Gateway Theatre of Shopping, a massive temple to consumerism with expensive designer shops. 

We had been warned not to leave the Zululand Yacht Club after dark as it was unsafe. Many homes are in compounds surrounded by high walls topped with electric fences and barbed wire. As you stop at the traffic lights, beggars approach your car. We were advised to keep hold of bags tightly and keep our phones well hidden. An American couple at the ZYC had their bank card snatched whilst withdrawing money from an ATM, the thief having viewed their PIN number, and by the time they had reported the loss to their bank the thief had made six cash withdrawals totalling ZAR 31,000 ie about US$1,800. A slick operation but obviously one that could equally happen almost anywhere in the world. 

One South African family were living on their catamaran at the Zululand Yacht Club and had been building their boat over several years. Two years earlier they had managed to sell the family farm where they lived with their two sons, now in their early 20s, raising prime beef cattle. They had been subjected to years of fear and harassment and with other white farmers being tortured and killed they felt lucky to have been able to sell their farm to a neighbouring farmer. They expected things to get worse and saw their catamaran as a route of escape. When I asked where they would go, the reply was ‘wherever will have us’. We spoke to several other South Africans also planning to leave the country.

Richards Bay is in the eastern province of South Africa known as KwaZulu Natal, the birthplace of King Shaka, the chief who united warring tribes and founded the Zulu nation in the early 19th century. He was also responsible for the deaths of many thousands of his fellow tribespeople in a frenzy of particularly brutal revenge killing when his mother died. We were flying home to the U.K. for most of December, departing from the King Shaka airport, the international airport at Durban named after the great Zulu leader.

When we return to South Africa after Christmas the next stage of our journey will be on to Cape Town, a trip of some 560 miles down the ‘wild coast’ and around the bottom of South Africa.