Thanksgiving Safari

Unlike the voyage between Brazil and South Africa, where I often enough had the time and comfortable enough conditions below deck to write about the Brazil stopover, this last voyage between South Africa and Australia was not as conducive to working on a computer.

Not only was the boat heeling at 30 degrees most of the time, the hull was often pounding through wave after wave and dropping with a heavy thud into the troughs behind them. Sitting at an angle on the narrow bench in the Nav Station, trying to type on a keyboard that wanted to slide left, then right, then left again didn’t inspire as much devotion to story telling as I might have otherwise felt.

This story of my Thanksgiving Safari, then, will be picture heavy and word short. The story of my Christmas and New Years here in Australia will have to wait until I get to Singapore in a few week’s time.

The heavy toll the sea took on our boats during the sail to South Africa dictated that our seven days in Durban would be busy ones. Due to this and other personal demands, Carrie and I realized on Thanksgiving morning that our only chance to see anything beyond the marina would be over the next 24 hours. Rather than find the best restaurant we could for a Thanksgiving dinner that night, as we’d long planned, we decided to see what kind of a safari we could privately arrange in those 24 hours.

The closest game reservation to Durban was a 45 minute drive away. When we called to make a reservation for one night, we were told that the only available accommodation was either camping or the honeymoon suite.

A few hours later a cab driver dropped us off at the honeymoon suite; a thatch-roofed cottage buried in the bush a few miles from the Welcome Center and only restaurant.

It was beautiful and certainly seemed like something we'd expect to find in Africa. It did have running water, though lighting was only candles or gas laterns. Carrie was happy enough with this.

A few odd sounds as the sky darkened did cause a bit of anxiousness but…

…we were happy enough in our ignorance.

I built a fire in the pit but it wasn’t long before we noticed the abundance of two-inch long millipedes and their penchant for climbing anything they could, which meant they’d eventually fall, often onto you. Carrie draped herself in a blanket to ward them off.

Millipedes climbed the interior of of the cottage walls as well, so Carrie never shed the blanket, even during our Thanksgiving feast (pickup truck delivered and slightly cold, as earlier arranged with the restaurant).

Carrie spent the night in a chair underneath her blanket, too wary of the millipedes that would periodically drop on the two beds (a honeymoon suite with two beds did make one wonder about the nature of South African marriage). In the morning, we found grazing animals all around us.



Our cab driver returned at 8:00 a.m. as arranged and, after we treated him to breakfast at the Welcome Center's restaurant, he gave us a private tour of the range and all the animals to be found.

By lunchtime we were on our way back to the marina, where Carrie and I spent the remains of that afternoon and the next day, Saturday, engaged in final pre-race preparations. She worked on her field of expertise, the bow...

...and I worked on mine: below deck engineering. Inevitably this means dealing with malfunctioning heads.

The next morning, the race to Australia was on.