St Lucia

My first weekend at Thanda was spent in a nearby "Beachside" town called St Lucia.  It is about 1.5 hrs drive from the reserve.  Due to the awful weather we left early Friday morning to start our weekend of much needed R&R.

St Lucia Town is little more than 1 main road, loads of restaurants and cafes and a few stores.  There is of course a long strip of markets selling wooden carvings, beaded jewellery and artworks as well as fresh fruit and veggie stands.  It is very much a town catering towards the tourist.

One of the many Markets

St Lucia is also the main access point to the iSimangaliso Wetlands Park (http://www.isimangaliso.com).  A huge park which spans from Durban in the south up to Mozambique in the North and west all the way to the Kruger.  The iSimangaliso Wetland Park was listed as South Africa’s first World Heritage Site in December 1999 is 332 000 hectare and contains three major lake systems, eight interlinking ecosystems, 700 year old fishing traditions, most of South Africa’s remaining swamp forests, Africa’s largest estuarine system, 526 bird species and 25 000 year-old coastal dunes.

After an early dinner on Friday night we boarded our Safari truck for our very first night drive with our local guide Sakhile.  It was a dark night but with the 2 search lamps were able to spot a good range of animals including Zebra, Honey Badger, Bush Baby’s (kind of like possums), Owl,  bark spiders, chameleon, tiny little frogs about the size of my big toe nail,  hyena, porcupine, bush bucks, and wort hogs.  It was great to drive through in the night when all the nocturnal animals were our looking for their dinner.  It was however very difficult to take quality photos.

We were then up early Saturday morning to head back into the Park for a full day Heritage Tour we again had Sakhile as our driver - a local guide with extensive knowledge of the park and area.  We saw Buffalo, Kudo, Hippo, bush and reed bucks, more spiders, Antelope, Nayla, more tiny little frogs, Zebra,White Rhino and Black Rhino, both of which are on the endangered list - there are only 2 black rhino in the whole park and we were so lucky to have seen 1 of them.   

A pair of White Rhino

We had a chance to go swimming and snorkelling in the Indian Ocean, we swam but nothing worth snorkelling for.  We then had a Braii (BBQ) cooked by our tour guide/driver with a pose of vermont monkeys watch and hoping for food, the cheeky things have no respect or fear of white people especially women so when it was just the 4 of us ladies at the table the dam things came over and stole a bread roll off Ali’s plate, as soon as our guide came back (black african guy with dread locks) they all ran away.  We had a free night on Saturday night, had some dinner at a great restaurant and was in bed by 10pm, absolutely exhausted and in need of sleep in preparation for our Sunday Hippo and Crocodile boat tour. 

Our lunch or spiced sausage and sweet banana

We climbed aboard or covered pontoon style boat with our captain and tour guide Anthony and set off on the hunt for hippos and crocs.  We weren’t too sure if we would see any crocs as they don’t like people or boas very much and tend to shy away, Hippos on the other hand didn’t care either way if we are there or not.

We must have seen close to a hundred hippos over the morning all with their heads popping out of the water – a hippo spend its days fully submerged other than its face as its skin is very sensitive and will burn in the harsh sun, they can also stay submerged completely for up to 12 minutes so you never know where they might pop up in the river.  We were fortunate to see a pair of young hippos play fighting right in front of us – very cute.

Playing Hippos

We were also lucky to come across a small croc – about 2m who was quite interested in our boat and came quite close, lifted his body so he was right on top of the water and showed off quite a bit allowing us to get some great photos of him.  He followed us for a little while before becoming bored and swimming away. 

Curious Crocodile

It was nice to spend some time out on the river, hearing all about the wetlands and ecosystems, seeing all the different birds, feeding the crabs and watching the hippos play.

St Lucia was a great place for a weekend away but certainly not somewhere I could live permanently – I’m not sure how the locals do it.

We headed back to Thanda that afternoon to find the rains hadn’t stopped over the weekend and that the park had flooded in several areas.  We all prayed and hoped for sunshine for the coming week.