At the weekend we headed to Richards Bay, crawling through the KZN Midlands in driving rain and zero visibility, avoiding pedestrians, crossing cattle and oncoming cars trying to overtake. Elize’s brother Hendrik and mum, Oma, looked after us a treat and we were not allowed to leave for St Lucia without Hendrik’s prize Toyota Land cruiser- lucky us and thank you again Hendrik.
St Lucia is an estuarine village nestled in the south end of the St Lucia Wetlands Park, now renamed Isimangaliso by the new government as some money squandering pastime. St Lucia comprises the 3 freshwater lakes – St Lucia, Sibaya and Kosi Bay, with pristine beaches and dunes. It offers excellent fishing, bird watching and diving, with the odd hippo, croc and fish eagle thrown in. It was pronounced a World Heritage Site back in 1999, as it encompasses 5 different ecosystems and since then KZN Wildlife Parks have been restoring the area to its indigenous self – cutting down the old pine forest and allowing the plant life to run wild providing fodder for hippo, zebra, various antelope species, elephants and rhino, who in turn feed the odd leopard and croc. The village itself is simple housing thousands of Joburganian tourists in the summer months and 400 local inhabitants in the winter. It is not unusual to see hippos roaming the streets at night, window shopping, a sight we were treated to! As we were having two hippos ambled down the high street, browsing the window of a hardware store before heading off down a street called Hippo Hideaway – I kid you not!
From here we explored the local area for 4 days: spending a day at Cape Vidal, an untouched beach with some rock pools to snorkel in and surf to play in; an afternoon learning about the estuary and lake, bird and hippo watching; and a last rainy day at Hluhluwe-Imfolozi – South Africa’s oldest national park where the white and black rhino breeding program was started back in the 1950s. Somehow you never tire of seeking out and watching this amazing wildlife. In spite of the rain and low cloud we were treated to some beautiful bird-life, including a tawny eagle and guinea fowl chicks, a hyena lazing by the side of the road, baby wildebeest, impala, one of 100 red duiker and even wart ”hoglets”, in addition to a smattering of giraffe, antelope and of course rhino...what no elephants!
From St Lucia we ventured further north onto Sodwana Bay where we had planned 3 days of scuba diving. In spite of cloudy days we had relatively calm seas and good visibility – a blessing really as the sun would have been unforgiving had it been shining. The diving was a challenge at first especially for Nick as it was only his 10th dive and he had never “drift dived” before. We were treated to beautiful reef fish, tree coral decked with a myriad of little red fish looking like a Christmas tree, dolphins dancing on the waves, plenty of moray eels, green and loggerhead turtles (one of whom chased me out of her cave!) and a manta ray gliding through the deepest blue - so graceful it was stunning to watch. Sadly on the second day after our third dive Nick suffered a small sinus problem that caused him to spit some blood so the dive shop, rather over-cautiously but quite correct, would not let him dive again until he had his chest checked out. The dive shop were great though and really looked after him.
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