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Ralph & Angela's travels
Royal Natal National Park, South Africa 8th-14th July 2006
"There's a baboon in our tent" was one of the more unusual comments Angela has uttered in our 21 years of marital bliss, so it was with some haste that I left the car and ran back to the tent. I was just in time to meet an adult male baboon coming out with a bag of bread rolls.
The look of guilt on his face changed to one of threat and I rapidly remembered some previous campfire chat about baboons having the largest canines of any African mammal, so I resigned myself to having steak and salad that night and gallantly allowed him to pass.
Thieving baboons are one the only downside of Mahai camp in the Royal Natal National Park (royal because Liz and Madge came here with their parents in 1948 apparently). The location, nestling below the Amphitheatre, an appropriately named rock wall 5km long and rising to 10,000 feet, was spectacular, the facilities excellent, the staff incredibly friendly.
Our most memorable walk was a 10 mile hike in to the Tugela Gorge below the Amphitheatre, a mix of Protea grassland, cool forests with frost underfoot and then a terrifying vertical chain ladder climb to get in to the top end of the gorge itself. With winter being the dry season in this area, the only sign of the Tugela Falls (940 metres and 2nd highest in the world after Angel Falls, Venezuela) was a thin ribbon of snow and ice way above us. The other major excitements on this walk were being asked by an Afrikaaner if I was an American (now I know how Jeff feels but at least I can say no) and then later watching 2 nubile blonde Afrikaan girls jump fully clothed in to an icy cold rock pool in the gorge as they concluded that it was preferable to coming back down the chain ladder, and from my vantage point I fully applauded their decision!
As the campsite emptied after the weekend we were left with one half of the site to ourselves, the "Billy No Mates" of camping. Fortunately we were able to share a beer or two with Kevin Smith, a US biologist working for the North West University on a project to monitor the health of frogs and tadpoles in the mountain streams here. Apparently exported South African laboratory frogs may be responsible for passing a deadly fungal disease to native frogs in countries as diverse as Spain and Costa Rica. Remember you read it here first.
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