PINK ELEPHANTS

Some time this week I saw an advert on TV featuring five or so pink sheep and it reminded me of my friend Wikus when he lived in Windhoek for a few years, not that he is prone to seeing pink sheep, or pink elephants!  It was in the old days when we still had compulsory military service for young people and one of his nephews was doing his training at the military base in Walvis Bay, at that time still a part of the Republic of South Africa.

The youngster had been there for a few weeks and then he got leave for a whole weekend and decided to visit his uncle and aunt in Windhoek.  Having of course no transport of his own, he decided to hitch hike to Windhoek and felt very lucky when two sergeants of the SADF stopped their LDV and said they were going to Windhoek and would he perhaps like a lift.  He of course jumped at the chance and got onto the back of the LDV and settled down for the 3½ hour ride to Windhoek.  After they had covered a good portion of the way, one of the sergeants asked him whether he was thirsty and handed him a bottle of beer and the same happened twice more on the way to Windhoek.  This was the first time the young man had ever tasted beer and he thought he was quite sober when they dropped him in the street in front of his uncle's house, but as he was climbing up the stairs to the stoep, he saw before him two pink toy poms who started barking at him!  And then a lady came out, gathered the pink doggies in her arms, invited him in and took him to his Uncle Wikus an Aunt Bertha.  After greeting them he asked whether he could lie down for a while and they took him to his room where he soon fell asleep.

After waking up, he sought his uncle and said to him: "Uncle Wikus, I apologise for arriving in such a condition and I promise I will never again drink so much, seeing two pink dogs was quite enough for me!  Next time it might be pink elephants!"  His uncle the explained that their other guest was the owner of two white toy poms and that she now and again washed them in a dye, and last time it was a pink dye, and that he accepted the humble apology which was quite unnecessary as he did not think his nephew was drunk at all!

What I want to know, do drunks really imagine they see pink elephants?  Let me know if you find out.

Oupa

NO NAME BLOG

"The time has come, the Walrus said
To speak of many things …" (Lewis Carrol)
And today I want to 'speak' to you about my granddaughter, the originator of this blog! She was born to be an organizer and leader, and to prove this, I will have to give you some details about her life. When she was about three years old she was too young to accompany her parents on a walking trail and she visited us for a while. At that time my Mother was staying with us and Maria became very fond of her great-grandmother who was born about 90 years before Maria. My mother was regarded as a very difficult old lady by most of her children and by all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but of course Maria did not know this. She was very punctilious about addressing my Mother as Great-grandmother and would approach her saying: "Great-grandmother, you are not feeling well, I must give you an injection", and in spite of any protests from my Mother that she was feeling very well, Maria would just reply "No, Great-grandmother, you are ill" she would go ahead with the ritual of 'cleaning' the upper arm, injecting with a small brass pestle we have, rubbing the 'wound' again and saying: "You will soon feel better!" A few years later we were living in Pretoria, as were the parents of Maria and she was in a nursery school and we sometimes had to fetch her at lunch time and while we were driving away, the children would shout "Maria, whose turn is it at the swings?" and she would shout back a string of names in the order of the use of the swings!

When she was at high school, she was a member of a youth organization and she attended quite a number of camps held on a farm near Brits and we had to fetch her once or twice and there we found that the had earned the nick name of "Bek" (Large Mouth). When her parents moved to Marloth Park, she was at school in Polokwane and did not want to join them at once, but in the second quarter of her second last year she relented and joined them, only to be chosen as deputy head girl the next year and I felt like ringing the head master to warn him that they had made a terrible mistake as Maria was probably going to tell him how to run his school!
After school she joined the family business of running a lodge and now she is the manager, not only of the lodge, but of all of us living here, and that is why I started writing "something for the blog", she simply instructed me to do it!

Keep up the good work, Maria.

Oupa

COMMUNICATIONS

Looking up at the sky this morning I saw the vultures circling and I realized they must have spotted something somewhere.  Years ago I attended a lunch at which we had a speaker who had to "work for his free lunch": it was the ornithologist of the Transvaal Museum, Mr Otleff Prozesky who talked about vultures.  Most of us have seen vultures, if not in the flesh, then on TV, and perhaps wonder how they tell each other: "Food! Come!"

He started his talk by explaining that the vultures do not smell the carrion, but that it is purely a matter of their wonderful eyesight.  They roost overnight in trees and well after sunrise they start flying.  They are of course top experts in this: they use thermals (funnels of hot air rising) as their ladder and they use this natural lift to conserve energy, as they then just spread their wings and glide upwards until they are just black spots to the normal human eye, and each vulture patrols a particular piece of ground which he knows as well as you know the palm of your hand (perhaps better!).  The vultures also keep track of their friends, each patrolling his own bit, and whenever one of them sees something lying still where there was nothing the previous day, and, when he is sure that it is a carcass, he starts descending and his pal flying next door sees that and he also starts descending and within a couple of minutes ten to twenty vultures, who have been watching each other, can be seen circling a particular part of the bush, looking for a place where they can land.  If the bush is dense, they prefer to land in a tree, just to make sure that the original owners of the carcass are not around any more, but in more open savanna they land near the carcass and immediately start tearing it to pieces.  The "hows" and "whys" of this tearing process can be the subject of a separate blog!

Enjoy your meal as much as the cleaners of the bush enjoy theirs!

Oupa

Phumula Kruger Lodge

Maloth Park