This past weekend started off with some fun news: Adrian is flying to visit us from Aug. 30 – Sept. 12! We’re going to make plans with him for a couple of special trips. Maybe we’ll go with him to the Reed Dance, the biggest celebration in Swaziland usually held at the end of August or early September. Supposedly all of Swaziland’s 50,000 young (virgin) maidens gather reeds nearby, then parade in front of the king—naked in the olden days but now just bare-breasted—so he can choose his next wife, number 14 or 15. Though rumor has it that the king chooses his next wife ahead of this beauty parade, it’s not rumor that to officially become engaged, the maiden must bear him a child. Then she can become his wife.
We had already decided to stay in Swaziland this past weekend, so we reserved a drive in Mkhaya Game Preserve (the only one here we need to book ahead). Swaziland owes the creation and survival of 3 of its major wildlife sanctuaries—Mlilwane, Mkhaya and Hlane—to Ted Reilly, son of an Anglo-Boer soldier. He persuaded Swazi King Sobhuza II (the previous monarch who accumulated 80+ wives and ruled the longest in world history) to set aside land for the animals, despite pressure from farmers to keep it for agriculture. Ted Reilly opened the Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary in 1963, and eventually Hlane and Mkhaya Game Preserves for tourism and animal management. His ownership of the 3 parks, success against poachers, and good relations with the king have continued to surround his family with controversy. But without his vision AND influence on royalty, Swaziland may never have had game parks at all.
Rather than leaving our car at the entrance to Mkhaya (where, sorry to say, it might have been stripped while we were in the park), we followed a ranger in a truck, forded a low river, and entered the main compound. As we waited to start our ranger-guided drive, a bus loaded with French tourists pulled up then filled 2 trucks on their own. That was the largest group of Westerners we’d seen since we arrived in Swaziland. Then we boarded our vehicle and headed out to the savannah.
As you see from our Mkhaya webpage on our site, we mainly saw groupings of 3 animals this trip: giraffe, elephants, and rhino. In fact at the water hole we visited in the morning, it almost seemed as though National Geographic or Animal Planet had directed a script for the scenes. When we arrived, over a dozen giraffe gathered around the water, drinking and casually conversing. A few minutes later, an elephant herd, complete with teens and babies, lumbered into the area and displaced the nervous giraffes. In a little while, the Movie Director must have cued the rhino mother and child, because they quietly, slowly crept toward the water, causing much elephant discussion and discomfort. Soon only the two rhinos were left at the water hole.
We learned interesting factoids from our ranger:
· Rhinos take mud baths to keep their skin flexible and minimize the ticks--a bit different from the goals of a human beauty treatment.
· Though in a head-to-head battle, an elephant would defeat a rhino, with babies in their herd, elephants err on the side of caution and respect vs. an over-protective, cranky mother rhino.
· The name "white" rhino was misinterpreted from "wide" rhino, which is really the flat-lipped species, as distinguished from the hook-lipped "black" rhino. Moreover, a white rhino mom keeps her baby in front when running for protection because they live in an open savannah and she wants to protect the baby’s back. But the black rhino lives in high-grass and bush so the mother clears the path for her baby instead. The ranger used the analogy that a black African mother carries her baby on her back, and a white man pushes a baby carriage in front.
· The horrifying reality is that rhino horns are still a major target of poachers (for Chinese aphrodisiac), and only 2% remains of the rhino population as sized in 1960.
· A clever pharmaceutical company should market Viagra as a more potent alternative! They could get great press by saving the rhinos at the same time as winning huge Asian business!
On Sunday, my cutting Rick’s hair was the major event for the 1st part of the day. Then we walked around Emafini to meet our closest neighbors—like a typical Sunday in 1950s U.S. The closest neighbor is a Finnish couple, Yuka and Susannah. They have 4, 3, and 1 year olds, all blonde, blue-eyed and beautiful of course. The parents and oldest child Sarah Maria speak English well, in addition to their native Finnish. We carried on down the hill to visit Patrick and Katherine Ward and their 3 year old precocious daughter, Ella. We stayed for a couple of drinks, and learned how Patrick (his parents Liz and Mark who own Emafini moved from Rhodesia in the 1970s) met his Virginia-born wife while he ran a charter-boat the British Virgin Islands. We hope to invite them, his parents and brothers over for wine and hors d’oevres maybe when Adrian is here in a couple of weeks.
This was one of the few times I felt like an ex-pat, not purely a tourist. We have now been here a month and are no longer the newbies at the office.
