May 17: Daily Life

Before delving in the topic of daily life, I want to share a revelation I had today while driving. You recall the roads from hell on the 4 hour bypass from hell yesterday, well, today I had an epiphony regarding the road maintenance issue (or lack thereof) in South Africa after passing yet another of these road signs:

Instead of actually fixing the potholes, let’s just put up a sign warning drivers of upcoming potholes. Brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that? The government bureaucrat that came up with this strategy was probably promoted to head of the Department of Transportation for saving the government millions on road maintenance. No one can say they aren’t doing something about the issue. Do you think we should propose this in the States?

OK, now on to business. I have had a few requests to share more of the practical aspects of my daily life on the road with the Green Dragon, so here’s a few tidbits – but not too much, lest most readers will fall asleep and miss the species of the day.

You will recall from yesterday’s post that I got to my private little lakeside campsite in the dark and thus wasn’t able to show you my setup. First, here is what I woke up to:

After listening to my morning serenade from the local avifauna – what a way to wake up – I took a few shots of my campsite as promised:

Note, that building beside the Green Dragon is a restroom and hot shower, along with a little outdoor kitchen. My typical breakfast is a bowl of oatmeal with mixed nuts and dried fruit (usually raisins) – it’s super heart healthy and quick to prepare! However, on occasion I go Full Monty and prepare a scrumptious meal. Today, in my cast iron cookpot on my diesel (yes, diesel) cook stove I started with some olive oil, then put in a chopped yellow potatoe, then a chopped sweet potatoe and yellow onion, with a little tamari and salt and pepper, followed by a chopped green peppper and tomatoe, and topped with a few slices of vegan (yeah, I know) cheese. Here’s the preparation and final result:

Delicous! And I have enough for tomorrow as well. So, don’t think I am starving myself or eating simple quick meals. I spare nothing when it comes to good food when I am camping.

I really hated to leave my private lakeside campsite for $3 a night, but given yesterdays travel experience I thought it wise to drive most of the way to Kruger National Park today so that I can for sure get to my first Kruger campsite tomorrow with time to spare. I don’t have landscape pictures of the drive because it was pretty much Iowa again, with the addition of a big coal mine or two. So we can sum up the landscape as Corn, Cows and Coal (CCC). The one thing I will share as an adendum to my previous post on the “shanty towns” is that today I didn’t see any of these camps. Instead, I saw a few townships with government housing – for the “black” South Africans I assume – that are a vast improvement over the camps I saw in the Cape Provinces:

My campsite tonight is another little hidden gem that I discovered on iOverlander that puts me about an hour or two drive from my entrance to Kruger National Park in the middle of macademia nut county – acres and acres of macademia trees and a huge processing factory just across the river from here. If you eat macademia nuts, there’s a very good chance this is where they were grown. These hidden sites are truly amazing. You drive down a bumpy dirt road that looks like it’s going nowhere and then you go through a locked gate and, Shazam, you enter a new world. This place turns out to be a really nice lodge with riverside chalets or cabins, restaurant for the guests, and a Park-like area for campers like me. As you can see from the photo below, the camping area is a pleasant grassy patch with nice shade trees. And, get this, I have my own private ablution facility with the full works, including hot shower. All this for roughly $13!

There is just one other couple camping here so it is quite serene.

It’s time for species of the day. This morning at my private lakeside campsite on the hillside above my camp there were a few Blesbok, so I can count this as the species of the day. However, I managed to get a better photo at Mountain Zebra National Park so that’s the picture I will share below. I chose this species in part because they are pretty cool looking, but also because I probably won’t see them again as their range is quite small and restricted to the east-central plains of South Africa. This is one of the antelop species whose range has been severly reduced to the few National Parks and some game farms. This is a rather large antelope – think elk size – with a very distinctive and striking color pattern that makes them rather easy to spot. They feed primarily on grasses so you find them almost exclusively in the open grasslands and they usually occur in small herds of a few to a couple dozen, although in the winter they can come together in much larger herds. I saw plenty of these guys at Mountain Zebra and Golden Gate Highlands National Parks.

Next stop, Kruger National Park.