Eastern Cape - Sometime a few hours before dawn, a troop of hyenas and jackals did their damnedest to disrupt my sleep. I marvelled at their cackling and whooping for a while but then the red wine consumed around the braai-fire the previous evening kicked back in, so I went back to sleep.
At 5.30am, however, I could sleep no longer. It’s impossible when a gazillion birds are flip-flapping with abrupt little wingbeats all around your tent and filling the Eastern Cape early morning with loud, implacable cheeriness.
There’s something about dawn in the bush – particularly when it’s rained the night before and you didn’t get wet – that makes everyone a morning person… regardless of how curmudgeonly you might be on waking back in “the real world”. Everything is fresh, clean and new.
Even the plates from the braai the night before were being cleaned – for free, by a small army of striped fieldmice – only one of which was sufficiently alarmed by my sudden emergence from the tent that he fell into the cooler-box whose lid he’d succeeded in partially dislodging. His fellow cohorts went on gnawing the mealie cobs as I tipped him out.
First good deed done for the day, I went to “my” waterhole to watch the sun come up. Whereas dusk the previous evening had exploded on the hot afternoon with all the fierce oranges and sullen dark greys of an impending thunderstorm, the morning light was all subtle blues and pinks, until shades of green from the spekboom and other vegetation slowly emerged.
Oh yes, I thought, these people have definitely got it right.
“These people” are the managers of the Addo Elephant National Park. Situated about an hour’s drive from Port Elizabeth airport (rather than a marathon trek from Gauteng), I’m already getting the feeling that this could be South Africa’s best-managed, friendliest national park.
I spent my first night at the Spekboom Tented Camp, which has only five two-person tents but, from the moment I entered Addo, I suspected that my national park experience was going to be very different from those at other state-run game reserves (of which there are only two that are larger than Addo).
In the first place, everyone greeted me with a smile and helpful advice that was designed to make my experience – I use the word repeatedly and advisedly – a pleasure.
Checking in was quick and pleasant: I know I was a visiting journalist but I was at the back of the queue and everyone ahead of me was treated with exactly the same courtesy and competence.
Then I found the main camp’s shop to be very well stocked; admittedly there was a lot of touristy tat but there were also the essentials for a night spent in a bush-camp.
I was especially pleased that there was a goodly selection of quality meat for the braai and not your usual frozen packets of weaselly chops and chicken portions.
Hallelujah, there was even venison wors!
The restaurant was spotless, service was more than adequate and the food was better than the prices would lead you to think. On my second night, I had a delightful venison potjie… are you seeing a pattern here?
It also had a big flat-screen TV, showing DSTV sport. It’s the kind of thing at which some people would frown but we are a nation of Springbok, Protea and Bafana fans, aren’t we?
The gatekeeper at the game-viewing area checked my permit, noted I was going to Spekboom and reiterated an earlier instruction that I had to arrive there no later than a specified time but then told me where there had been some good sightings that would still allow me to laager up in good time.
I think it has something to do with the nature of the people of the Eastern Cape.
For those that don’t know, it costs adult SA citizens/residents R40 a day to enter Addo (R20 for children) and a further R595 per tent to overnight at Spekboom. For that you don’t only get a private waterhole and hide but also clean communal facilities that include a fridge and gas stove should you opt not to braai.
Cars are parked outside the camp so you needn’t worry about your neighbours playing their radios all night long. There is, in any case, no electricity in the camp.
It is also a twitchers’ paradise: in the early morning I was treated to Red-faced Mousebirds, Fiscal Flycatchers, two Black-shouldered Kites tearing apart what could have been one of my helpful fieldmice, a Greater Double-Collared Sunbird and a gloriously vocal Bokmakierie.
Hard as it was to leave the camp, I had to get back to the main camp to avail myself of one of Addo’s most startling – in the sense that it makes so much sense that it’s incomprehensible that not all of the other major national parks do it – innovations: the hop-on guide.
These are empowered members of local communities who have received extensive training in guiding and conservation and, for a ridiculously low fee of R180 per car, will spot and identify game for you from your own vehicle. They are extremely knowledgeable and their eyes are trained to spot things you’d be very unlikely to pick up.
They have a network among themselves and share the best sightings. In this way, my guide took me to the far south of the park where we were able to watch two young adult male lions without experiencing the vulture-swarm of cars that normally accompanies a lion sighting in places such as the Kruger National Park.
For the record, the Addo Elephant National Park encompasses over 180 000 hectares, making it the third-largest in South Africa after Kruger and the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. It is, however, the only one to feature the “Big Seven” in that its southern coastal section allows visitors to see great white sharks and southern right whales during their breeding season.
The national park attracts more than 130 000 visitors a year, of which only half are South Africans.
A big attraction to foreign visitors is the fact that the entire region is malaria-free and easily accessible.
There are considerable opportunities for expansion. At present Addo looks a bit like one of the old bantustans in the sense that there are bits of it dotted throughout the Eastern Cape, including several sections that stretch from Kenton-on-Sea to the Sunday’s River mouth.
It is surrounded, though, by private game reserves and the manager of one of these believes that within the next generation it will be one giant conservancy stretching from the Kariega River to the existing proclaimed area.
There are already several concession areas that are incorporated in the park and these offer private lodge facilities that are generally in the financial realm of better-heeled visitors. Rates and contact details for these private sector-owned and -operated lodges can be obtained on www.addoelephantpark.com.
I, on the other hand, spent my second night in a chalet in the main camp that would have cost myself and a partner R1 045. It had a mini-kitchen and, having heard many horror stories about national park chalets, I went first to the kitchen cupboards and drawers.
All utensils present and accounted for; all clean and un-chipped. I tried the microwave, the kettle, all taps (kitchen and bathroom). All worked and the loo flushed. The air-conditioner worked and some thoughtful and thorough cleaner had ensured the ice-trays in the deep freeze had been filled.
I even had a dirty elephant come down to the fence just in front of my home-for-a-night to see if I was okay.
Birds and everything else aside, elephants are what Addo is all about. The place abounds with them (there are over 600) and they are to Addo what the impala is to Kruger.
With such numbers, it’s fairly easy to become blasé about elephants because… as with all national parks… you’re not allowed to go off-road.
You only get up-close-and-personal with an elephant if it decides to do so with you. This happens on my last morning when, with a group of other tourists, we go on another of Addo’s innovations: two-hour guided game-drives in open vehicles.
I got my full R240 worth not from the elephant but from watching a full-grown spotted hyena (with its own cloud of flies) making a beeline towards us and explaining to the Californian woman next to me that they were fearsome hunters as well as scavengers.
l www.sanparks.org/parks/addo or e-mail: [email protected] or telephone: 042 233 8600 - Saturday Star