Johannesburg and Pretoria

 

We are packing up tonight and, in the morning, heading to the Punda Maria rest camp in Kruger Park. We'll be in the park for about 3 weeks moving from rest camp to rest camp, working our way from north to south -- game drives, sundowners, and delicious braais are in our future. We should have a lot of animal pics/videos soon.

The last few days we've had a chance to relax and get things done in the Jo'burg/Pretoria area--the horn on the rig now works and it's had its 10K service 😊. 

Yesterday, after we dropped off the rig for service, we took an Uber to Johannesburg's Maboneng district, walked around, had a beer, and had a great Ethiopian lunch (injera and veggie/meat wat). The district itself seemed intriguing from the online descriptions, so we were especially interested in seeing it, but the restaurants were unfortunately much emptier than we thought they would be and other things (Arts on Main, etc) didn't appear open. It seems COVID has taken its toll; however, we were there early in the day, so things might be busier in the later afternoon and evening, or on the weekends. The neighborhood is largely defined by the Ethiopian immigrants who have settled there (hence our delicious meal). 

Today we took a trip to the Cradle of Humankind Sterkfontein Caves. The earliest human remains in South Africa have been found here, and scientists are still excavating. Mrs. Ples was found here -- the oldest complete skull of an Australopithecus Africans yet found in SA. (many SA discoveries rival the East African discoveries of skeletons like Lucy). It is amazing to be on the site where pre-homo sapiens wandered. Unfortunately, some of these early humans wandered through high grasses as high as they were and into sinkholes that they didn't see, trapping them in cave systems many meters below ground. It seems that this might have been Mrs. Ples's fate. We toured the caves 60 meters underground. A deep, oxygen-deprived river runs through and the passage ways run for many kilometers in different directions. Most of the tour was of areas that were like high-vaulted rooms (see pictures below). However, going from one part of the cave vault to another required a bit of agility, as some very squat passages were only 2-3 feet high. I'm somewhat claustrophobic and don't have the best flexibility anymore. I was an unapologetic hand-knee crawler through a few of these.

Ready to go underground

The vaults were huge

More of the cave vault

Exploration partner 💛

This is the underground river/lake. It's so still you don't know it's water unless you threw a rock.

And I couldn't resist, given my snake fascination:

I actually have an app on my phone that tells me what snakes are native to an area based on my GPS. I always check. If you're curious, the one's that have come up are cobras (spitting and non spitting), puff adders, other adders, boomslangs, pythons, black mambas and others. I still don't understand how you actually get the antivenom in time. Black mamba? I think you've got like 20 minutes. It sounds like the most troublesome snakes will be puff adders and, at this point, Mozambique Spitting Cobras (we've escaped, I think, the Cape Cobra area). Well, absolutely fascinating, really.