St. Lucia Estuary

The beach at St. Lucia.

Hanging around camp....

when we watched this vervet monkey open the zip on John's tent and steal his lunch!

A beautiful African Fish Eagle.

A Nile Crocodile.

A huge hippo pod.

Smiling for the camera.

Another Fish Eagle.

A hippo tooth as compared to my foot.

Friday, December 1^st.

I was woken up at 3:30 by Stephanie coughing non stop in the tent beside me. I couldn't get back to sleep so I took my computer and went down to the bar area and typed for a bit. Colin showed up at 4:30 and thought I had been there all night!

I went back to the tent about 5:30 and David and I packed up our stuff, took it to the truck, took the tent down and then went and had breakfast. We left camp about 7:30 and drove for three hours before stopping at a service station for a rest stop. Shortly after we set off again, we got pulled over by the police who told Colin that he had tried to pass someone at the speed bumps and that he was speeding. After a bit of a lecture he let him off and we continued on our way.

We drove to Santa Lucia where we are staying for the night. We stopped in the town for a few supplies and to check out this holiday town. Then we drove to our campsite, Sugarloaf, in the Ezemvelo KVN Wildlife Reserve. We set up camp and got organized. Henning and I went for a walk along a boardwalk to the beach. There were numerous signs warning us to watch out for hippos that are in the area, because this is not a fenced area and to stay out of the croc infested water. The beach was really big and beautiful like yesterday but it was really windy and we were getting exfoliated so we went back to camp. We sat and talked to the group before heading back to town and a dock where we met our boat for the afternoon boat cruise. We were on a two tiered launch that went 10 kilometres up the river against very strong wind and current. We saw two crocodiles, dozens of hippos and a few African Fish Eagles. I talked to the captain of the boat for a bit and he told me that this reserve was the first reserve created in the world, a few months before Yellowstone. He said although the lake is over thirty miles long and a few miles wide it averages only a metre deep. He said that there are over a 1000 crocs here and 800 hippos. He said that hippos cannot swim or float and are usually in shallow water where they can walk along the bottom. He also told me that because the area has had a long lasting drought, the estuary has become landlocked for sixteen years and has changed from a saltwater environment to a brackish one to a fresh water one. We talked about the changes that makes for the wildlife, the plant life and the fish. One of the biggest changes is that the mangroves are dying out and are being replaced by reeds which might clog the entire lake system. He thinks that the drought is almost over and that with some good rainfall years it will push out again to the sea and the process will revert.

After the cruise Jay and Colin picked us up again in the truck and drove us into town to a local restaurant. We are eating out as a kind of last dinner before some of the group leaves, and I suspect to give Jay a night off from cooking. We had a great meal with a couple of drinks and had a great waiter who I had fun with. I had seafood platter, with a fillet of dorado, garlic calimari and three large queen prawns which unfortunately were server splayed but still had their skin on. When I paid my bill I told him how much I enjoyed him and his service. He told me that it would be nice if his manager heard that, so I took him over to the manager and told him that he had a hard working, charismatic, entertaining waiter. His manager agreed.

We left and found that it had been raining. David and I were very thankful we had closed our tent. I sat in it and typed this and then went to bed.