Into Africa
By Karen Bunting
Sitting silently in the open-topped Land Rover, I watched as two cheetahs charged out of the bush at a herd of nyala, hoping to separate one nyala from the others. Cringing at the thought of witnessing a kill, I turned my gaze to the breathtaking savannah grass as it shimmered in the waning sunlight. Cleverly, a frightened creature targeted by the cheetahs galloped straight into a watering hole, forcing the befuddled hunters to pursue another victim. Thinking the worst was over, I peeked just in time to see a crocodile emerge and nip the backside of the nyala, which eventually swam to safety on shore and then disappeared into the Bushveld. This encounter with African wildlife was but one of many that made our family trip to South Africa in 2003 unforgettable.
My first exposure to the majesty and grandeur of Africa was in 1989, when my husband, Clark, and I traveled to Kenya for a 10-day safari and a four-day respite on that country’s eastern coastal island of Lamu. Our safari included visits to Samburu Game Reserve, where we saw giraffes eating the tops of acacia trees, and to nearby Lake Nakuru, a strongly alkaline Rift Valley lake that is world-renowned for its thousands of resident pink flamingos. At Samburu, which is about 200 miles north of Nairobi, a large male baboon’s attempt to steal my bananas was thwarted by Clark’s threat display, which succeeded only because he is 6 feet 4 inches tall. From a hot air balloon in the Masai Mara, located along the border of Tanzania and regarded as Kenya’s most famous and popular game reserve, we observed the northern migration of more than a million wildebeests, accompanied by zebras and gazelles.
In the Masai Mara, we also found ourselves in a real-life equivalent of Born Free when our Land Rover stopped just feet from a pride of nearly 30 lions, so close we could hear them growl and purr. After dinner at the Keekorok Lodge, I headed off to our room, only to discover that the path had been blocked by hundreds of zebras, wildebeests and gazelles, which we carefully navigated through to reach our cottage. Clark and I were so taken by everything that Africa had to offer that we vowed to return some day with our children.
In July 2003, we ventured to South Africa with Kaitlyn and Ryan, then 15 and 12. Our first destination was Londolozi which, in Zulu, means “the protector of all living things.” Described by Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s former president, as a model of conservation development, this intimate game reserve, situated between the Drakensberg mountains and the eastern seaboard of southern Africa, houses only 48 guests in about 37,000 acres of wilderness and is world-renowned for its leopards. During our first game drive, as if on cue, a magnificent young female leopard appeared, jauntily chasing butterflies. She moved effortlessly and rested nearby, where we gazed into her eyes.
Londolozi has a tremendous variety of game, including giraffes, warthogs, nyala, zebras, bushbuck, impala, elephants, buffaloes, hippopotamuses and kudus. A major fence that used to separate private game reserves from nearby Kruger National Park was removed in 1994, enabling breeding elephant herds, buffaloes and other animals to cross that boundary for the first time in 36 years. The “Big Five” were easily spotted during our game drives, which included many lions and elephants. One morning, we watched two elusive white rhinos crunch their breakfast. On our last afternoon game drive, our vehicle became engulfed by about 300 Cape buffaloes, which snorted loudly in our faces as they slowly passed. Choosing to stay at the cottage and read a book instead of join us that afternoon, Ryan was surprised when a large, male baboon catapulted over his head and landed on the roof.
These “close encounters” with wildlife, though occasionally startling, were riveting and almost spiritual for me. King George VI once observed that “the wildlife of today is not ours to dispose of as we please, we have it in trust, we must account for it to those who come after.” Our next stop was Phinda Private Game Reserve, a posh ecolodge in the middle of impoverished, but naturally blessed Maputaland, situated in northern KwaZulu-Natal.
Phinda has seven unique ecosystems and lies between the Indian Ocean and the World Heritage Greater St. Lucia Wetland Park. Here, we initially stayed at the exquisite Rock Lodge, with suites suspended from a rocky cliff and featuring private splash pools. In addition to the extraordinary cheetah incident, which occurred during our first game drive, a night drive revealed a lioness with her month-old newborns, hyenas and bush babies. A morning riverboat cruise provided sightings of glorious birds and camouflaged crocodiles, and culminated in a surprise gourmet bush breakfast of scrambled eggs, tropical fruit, champagne and pressed coffee.
During our third and fourth days at Phinda, we were housed at the Forest Lodge in cabins made largely of glass and set deep in the woodlands. Our first afternoon drive brought forth the icon of Phinda, an enormous and majestic black-maned lion that silently padded past our parked Land Rover, perusing his vast kingdom while we froze to avoid his gaze. That evening, exhilarated by this experience, we followed flickering lanterns to our five-star bush dinner of fresh grilled fish, sautéed vegetables and mouth-watering desserts in a secluded grove illuminated by a roaring fire.
Cape Town, one of the most breathtaking places on Earth, was our final destination. The highlight of our five-day stay was a guided journey to the Cape of Good Hope. In Simon’s Town, more than 3,000 jackass penguins entertained us by dancing on the rocks and splashing each other like children. The spectacular drive south along the Atlantic coast toward Cape Point was a stream of postcard images of rocky points, crashing whitecaps and turquoise water. We ate lunch at the Two Oceans Restaurant, hiked along the Atlantic coastline and then descended to the sandy intersection of the Atlantic and Indian oceans, where we stood transfixed by the grandeur of Cape Point. The two oceans swirled together in a kaleidoscope of blues, and the white sand was blindingly bright. As our van headed north, a pair of ostriches appeared out of nowhere and charged straight toward us, a male in hot pursuit of a female.
The unexpected continued when, later that evening, a formidable storm dumped torrential rain on the Victoria & Albert Waterfront, the heart of Cape Town’s working harbor, and covered adjacent Table Mountain with snow for the first time in seven years. Fortunately, the weather cleared in time for a farewell excursion to Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, which is set against the eastern slopes of Table Mountain and showcases only plants indigenous to South Africa. I steeped myself in glorious proteas, birds of paradise, lilies and flowering succulents, marveled at the iridescent sunbirds and wished I could return to Africa again someday.
Karen Bunting is a retired attorney and a homemaker who serves on nonprofit boards, loves to travel and lives in Potomac.
Cabin Fever
By Kathleen Wheaton
The cabin on the bank of the American River where my husband, two teenage sons and I go every August is off Highway 50 in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California—just down the street, we like to say, from the same U.S. 50 that begins in Ocean City and runs west past the U.S. Capitol as Constitution Avenue.
Our boys have been going to this place every summer for as long as they can remember; my memories, too, are from time out of mind. My father, who is 75, recalls helping his father build the cabin in 1941. Little has changed since then. There are the same quilts and daybed cushions smelling of mice and pine sap, the same Edwardian children’s books, the same aluminum tubs for laundry and baths, the same walls adorned with yellowed Helen Hokinson cartoons and topographical maps of the mountains that are visible through the windows.
These days, there’s a telephone—installed in the 1980s at the insistence of my father and uncle when my widowed grandmother continued to spend her summers at the cabin, often by herself. But there has never been TV, and the canyon walls can’t be pierced by cell phone or Wi-Fi signals. We hike and fish during the day; evenings, we play cards, sing if someone has brought a guitar, read (bookshelf space ran out around 1967, so it’s a good place to catch up on Graham Greene, early Updike and Daphne du Maurier) and watch the ink-black sky for meteors. We enjoy each other’s company in a way we always intend to in our real lives—if only there were more time.
When I first brought my husband, David Welna, to the cabin, we’d been married for several years, but had been living in South America. My grandmother was in her 90s, small and white-haired but still a woman to be reckoned with. It wasn’t a very relaxing vacation; our boys were little and had to be watched every minute because the river was high from the previous year’s heavy snow. There were many repair jobs to do on the cabin, which had been buffeted over the years by the kind of blizzards that defeated the Donner Party. As we were packing to leave, my grandmother took me aside.
“Do you think David likes it here?”
“He seems to,” I said.
“That’s all right, then. You can keep him.” She was joking—sort of. She didn’t ask if the boys liked it; hers wasn’t a generation that wondered what children liked—also, she’d never seen a child who didn’t like it there.
I haven’t, either. The best computer graphics can’t compete with creeping up on a real garter snake, finding a real arrowhead or the heart-stopping moment when a real trout strikes your line. We’ve considered alternative summer excursions, but even at 17 and 14, the boys won’t hear of it. David says it’s the one place where he feels truly away—down the road from Washington as far as it’s possible to go. For me, going to the mountains means heading toward something—a past that’s still present.
My grandparents began going to the Sierras in 1934, when my grandfather was hired as superintendent on a road construction crew paving Highway 50. In the depths of the Depression, the job was a godsend. When it ended, he was allowed to keep the field office and cook shack. He set this cobbled-together cabin in a meadow and moved his wife and my toddler father there during the summer—out of the grand, but crowded, Nob Hill house in San Francisco they’d been sharing with my grandmother’s mother, grandmother, blind great-uncle and two unmarried great-aunts. My grandmother, a product of finishing schools, hauled creek water, strained it through a tea towel and spread laundry to dry on the manzanita bushes. She’d never been happier, she often said—free and independent at last. It’s the oldest American recipe for happiness: lighting out for the territory.
After my father’s brother was born, my grandfather signed a 99-year lease with the U.S. Forest Service in 1941 for land closer to the river, and moved the cabin down the granite hillside to the spot, a Fitzcarraldo-like undertaking that nearly killed him. He began constructing a comparatively grand structure next to it, with two bedrooms, an indoor toilet and a front room heated by a potbellied stove. My grandmother sewed curtains and painted chests of drawers the color of moss, and she established the protocols for housekeeping that would be followed—to the exasperation of my mother and aunt—for the next 60 summers. One woman’s freedom is another’s persnickety mother-in-law.
The ruling sensibility of the place was my grandparents’ combination of Jazz Age gaiety, a Depression-era horror of waste and a mythologized view of pioneer forebears—the iconic figure being a great-grandmother who’d crossed the Isthmus of Panama by mule while holding both a lace parasol and a baby. At the cabin, sheets were mended and patched rather than replaced, cup handles were glued back on, broken toasters were taken apart and repaired. But dinner was served in the cabin’s front room in a formal style, as if servants hovered behind the kitchen door. This drove my parents’ generation crazy—we were eating canned stew in the woods, for Pete’s sake! The chef might be Dinty Moore, but the plates were warmed and the silver was heavy.
Sitting on the front porch with his scotch and siphon bottle, my grandfather attracted us kids—my siblings and cousins—like gnats, with tales of clever blue jays, wily rainbow trout and impulsive bears, anthropomorphized versions of the creatures he taught us to observe, catch and respect. He thought we should know how to cast a dry fly, gut a fish, scare off a mountain lion, drive a nail straight—as if we, too, might one day want to escape a mansion full of old ladies and live off the grid.
Of course, we weren’t really living in the wilderness any more than Thoreau was. There was a general store only 3 miles down the highway, a source of bread, milk and stew. Lake Tahoe, less than an hour’s drive, had emergency rooms, hardware and liquor. Now it’s a city, with smog and a gang problem.
My grandmother, who died in 2000, believed in writing everything down. She filled the cabin’s guestbook with summaries of the year’s events, and encouraged us to do the same—the following summer we’d see how our printing had morphed into cursive, the embarrassing heart-dotted i’s of middle school. Now my sons look back at their childish descriptions of trout that got away and laugh—as if all that didn’t happen just the other day.
Some years ago, my grandmother sent a description of the obsidian arrowheads we’d collected to an anthropology professor at Berkeley, who wrote back that they must have been made by the Modoc Indians of what’s now the Sacramento Valley. About 5,000 years ago, he said, the Modoc began migrating up the western slopes of the Sierra to camp during the summer months. Judging by the number of arrow and spear points found, and from the bowl-shaped hollows worn into the granite by Indian women grinding acorns, ours must have been a favored campsite.
Well, sure. It’s the best spot on the river. To get to our cabin you must drive to the end of a dirt road and then descend on foot down a gravel-covered escarpment. You pass a trace of the old Pony Express trail. From there, you have a clear view upstream to where the river becomes a point on the horizon, and can look across to the deeply forested opposite bank, dark and chilly even in August, and feel that you’re standing on the edge of the known world.
For 5,000 years, the Indians came and unpacked their things on the rocks, and the women set about grinding mush for dinner, calling to their children to be careful of the rushing current and to stay out of the woods, which were full of bears and mountain lions. The Indians began summering here about the same time Troy was being founded. Fifty centuries passed. Then gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill and, in a couple of years, they were all gone.
Kathleen Wheaton lives in Bethesda and writes frequently for Bethesda Magazine.
