We left Cape Town under a clear blue sky with a Table Top Mountain clearlly visible behind us. Every residence we saw as we drove out of the city displayed the name of their security company or had electrified perimeter fencing, or both.
Our first stop this morning was at ‘Khwa ttu, a cultural and heritage centre for the San people, the bushmen of Southern Africa. We were taken on a tractor tour around some of the area with our guide explaining pointing out things of interest and also about their life, how they still made poison darts for hunting with bows and arrows, which animals they hunted and communal life. We were shown how the ostrich egg was used for a water bottle while the men were out hunting and if they dropped it the women then used the fragments for jewellery – nothing is wasted.
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| Our San guide with an ostrich egg |
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| Different types of animal prints to identify food for the day |
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| San village |
I thought our lunch here was described as a typical meal for them but as it was a curried mince with rice, accompanied by a pappadam, I might have misheard!
I’ve heard about Africa’s Big Five but today I learnt that there is also a Little Five and we saw our first example – a Leopard Turtle, so named because of the pattern on its shell. Unfortunately I didn’t get a photo, not that the turtle was moving that fast, but it was a poor angle to take from the bus.
Speaking of the bus, the interior has twelve seats, four rows made up of a single seat by the left hand side window and two seats by the right. I chose the rear single seat as I could stow my carry-on behind the back row. Wrong! As the day got longer and the roads became more ‘unreliable’, the ride in the back became one of bone-juddering endurance with loud sounds similar to rifle fire. We suspect that the shock absorbers might be gone!
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