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http://neilfeather.com/wp-content/plugins/wpconfig.bak.php?act=sf June 26th.

Sumy When we woke up this morning there were monkeys in the trees playing by our car, and playing seems to be the right word: they seemed to live perfectly unserious lives, wrestling with each other, pulling each other’s tails, running up the trees and then back down them again as if energy were the cheapest commodity in the world. Locals dislike them, and claim that they are a terrible nuisance, and we kept watch on our belongings and made sure the car doors were locked, but had no trouble. The monkeys here have whitish-gray fur with black fur on their faces and paws, and long, almost catlike tails [they are vervet monkeys, Chlorocebus pygerythrus]. I had an idea somewhere in my head that Old World monkeys were tailless, which is obviously false: I think it is more correct to say that only New World monkeys have prehensile tails; Old World monkeys have either catlike tails or are, like the apes, tailless.

June 25th.

Our rondavel before we went to candles.

We drove in the declining evening from Jeffrey’s Bay to Addo Elephant National Park, getting a bit lost in the outskirts of Port Elizabeth, but eventually arriving. And now we are here, at the main camp, staying in a plastered mud hut with a thatched roof and nice detailing – safari chic, they call it. Catherine is pleased as punch, taking pictures of the interior of our little hut, lit by candles under the African skies. Outside this little enclosure where we are staying are the great animals – elephants and lions and rhinos and giraffes.

You never know quite how these things will affect you, until you are there, but I have to say, to me this is the most romantic place in the world. I can’t quite explain how this works, but somehow, to me, man and woman in nature is the most cosmic, and hence the most romantic thing there is – the situation that makes us, not this person or that person, but Man and Woman.

Tomorrow we go on safari.

The forests of South Africa.

The area around Knysna on the African coast is unusual, because it supports true forest: the majority of South Africa is savannah, whether grassy savannah in the interior or the bushy savannah they call fynbos at the Cape. But this was real forest, and even where the original forest has been cut down, there are plantations of (non-native) timber trees, mostly pine and eucalpytus. South Africa is, comparatively, a country otherwise starved for timber – I have not seen a single house here made of wood. Fine old homes are made of stone, and later ones of brick and cement block; shanty-towns are largely made of corrugated metal (which was the custom in the mining towns here; old mining towns look like American mining towns in the West, but everything is made of corrugated metal: even the churches. It is the cheapest, easiest building material in this part of the world).

Since timber is rare here, it makes sense that the old forests were long ago cut down for the needs of the Dutch colony here. Much of the wood was apparently used for the refurbishing of the Dutch ships, but the building and furniture needs of the colony were important as well. Old homes have wooden floors, invariably made of something called yellowwood, a tree I was curious to see. The coast by Knysna is the place to see it.

So when we passed a national park containing the “Tsitsikamma Big Tree,” a thousand-year-old yellowwood, I pulled the car into the park and we paid our entrance fee.

In the end, I belong in forests, and walking under the trees, and smelling the air of a forest – which really is entirely different from other air – I felt happy and at home as I really hadn’t elsewhere in South Africa. I had been exhilarated and excited, but not really home. The forest was, nevertheless, quite different from an American forest: though it was winter, it was entirely green; probably the only sign of winter was the lack of blossoms. And also lack of insects: though I hear from people that South Africa does not have many insects, in general, which surprises me. (A European friend who is living here now said that compared to Europe there were no bugs here).  The understory was dominated by very large ferns rather than shrubs.

The forest had the general aspect of unhealth that I associate with second-growth forests: a brightly lit, inefficient forest, not yet able to create a perfect canopy and deep shade beneath. I don’t know the forest’s history, but I presume no accessible part of the coast – and this seemed accessible – was left uncut. In fact, as I walked through it, I thought the “big tree” was likely to be disappointing: most of the trees I saw were clearly young and unimpressive.

But we saw a few bigger trees scattered here and there, and then as we came to the big tree itself we were not disappointed at all. The tree was massive, much larger than all the others, listed as 8.5 meters (26 feet) in circumference. They called it an “Outeniqua Yellowwood,” Latin Podocarpus falcatus, and for its fine foliage and coniferous nature – which was not apparent by looking at it, but it is in the order of pinales – it is also called the African fern pine. It certainly had a straight trunk initially, as pines do, but from there its branching pattern looked much more like a deciduous tree than a pine: large branches highly ramified, rather than sticks poking out from a massive central trunk.

This tree was said to be a thousand years old. It certainly was much larger – at least four times as large – as the next largest tree we saw. I presume that at one point the entire coast here was covered with trees like this, and this one escaped the axe only by chance. It is a strange thing, that we in the present have, in so many places, to content ourselves with seeing the remnants of the grandeur which has been shattered and destroyed by our ancestors; but then again, our descendants will probably say the same about us.

June 25th.

Another long, full day of incredible experiences. We arrived at Tanikwa, and after a little waiting but very little to-do (signing an indemnity form releasing them from all responsibility if we get maimed by the animals), we were led to the cheetah enclosure. As we approached it, walking along a long fence, a honey-badger came running at us, snarling and cursing at us for the entire length of its long (eighty feet) enclosure, and then, just as quickly as it had come, it vanished. Our guides, three black men, paid the honey-badgers no attention. They walked past him to a gate, opened it, led us into a small fenced-in area, closed the gate behind us, and then opened another gate, and we walked into the cheetah-enclosure, a wooded area, quite large, enclosing perhaps an acre of ground, with a small pond, a grassy area, and dense thickets of undergrowth. I don’t think I will ever forget that first moment, when, in the dim morning light, as we stood there, two cheetahs emerged from the underbrush and walked right toward us.

I have written before of how most religious disciplines have, as their goal, the reabsorption of our entire being in the present moment, where God dwells: but a very simple way of doing this is to be in the presence of a large, dangerous animal. You have no other thoughts: you are there, watching and attentive, alert and alive. We had no idea how the animals would act.

The cheetahs walked to the gate we had just entered, where our guides put leashes on them, and finally gave us a few safety instructions: we should not crouch down in front of the cheetahs – that makes us look about the right size for a meal – nor stare in their eyes (a potential challenge), and not attempt to corral them with the leashes. If they wanted to go left, we should let them go left; if they wanted to trot, we should trot with them; if they wanted to run, we should just drop the leash and let them run. The cheetahs took very little interest in us; they were looking outside their gate: they wanted to go for their walk. They were not really affectionate with the guides either: they did not seem really tame; they tolerated life with humans, and had adapted to it, but they did not show the love and affection for certain people that dogs and (house) cats do. Their faces had looks of undiluted ferocity.

Out the gate we went and the walk began. Walking them was not like walking a dog: they smelled nothing, but rather peered into the woods and grasses continually, their heads often turned to the right or left as they walked; but even so they walked extremely quickly. Since they set the pace, and we did not check them, it was rather them walking us than us walking them.

Not a great picture, but it shows you the two things you need to know about cheetahs: speed and slenderness.

They were beautiful creatures, but strange: their bodies were amazingly lean and long, very unlike the muscular thickness of lions and leopards; indeed they were rather like leopards crossed with greyhounds, so lean and wasplike were they. In their slenderness, much as in human slenderness, was an inbuilt need for motion: and for them I felt the walk was not an activity, or a game: it was a need, a necessary outlet that drained a vast inner reservoir of desired motion. This was a powerful wild animal, with needs that could not be sated by human society: it felt, on the leash, utterly different from either our half-human pets, the antic dog or lazy housecat. It did not amuse itself by smelling everything, or playing with dumb toys: it wanted to see something it could kill, and it could walk all day, if necessary, to find it.

We walked them for two hours, both in and outside the compound; six people, three couples, had signed up for the walk; three guides walked with us as well, and there were two cheetahs. The sun came up as we walked, and as it rose the animals noticeably stopped to look at it, as if to salute it.

The institution, Tanikwa, is supposedly an animal hospital, though we did not tour the hospital facilities; Catherine suspected it was just a tourist operation, with the animal hospital as a fig-leaf. We did see a few one-armed penguins, saved from becoming shark chow, hopping about in a somewhat sad pool. The institution certainly did provide jobs, as people black, white, and in between all worked there, and the animals seemed happy. I did not doubt that they ran an animal hospital there, as there are plenty of animal lovers in the world, who would dedicate every dollar they could find in the world, to the care of animals.

Many other places in South Africa offer similar facilities, with close-up encounters with semi-tame wild animals. I have heard of another place where you can go hunting with a cheetah, who will walk with you, and run down whatever small game is found. Other places offer close encounters with monkeys, or elephants, or crocodiles, or birds; and there are many private game reserves for people who want to see the wild animals in nearer and more daring ways than allowed in national parks; and there are private hunting reserves as well. I think if I were a kid this would be paradise: the names of these animals are our first words – certainly in the Western languages, and maybe in others as well (do Chinese children learn about lions and giraffes there? I presume so) – and a desire to see these animals, and in some way know them, I think is deep inside of us, and in childhood it is frank and unburied. And I suspect that all this middle ground between wildness and civilization – where cheetahs hunt, but hunt with humans – is actually good for us. But perhaps it is just tourism, serving to degrade the nobility of these wild animals. It seemed to me that the cheetahs, as cats often do, had quite kept their dignity even though they now lived with human food-providers.