Inverdoorn game reserve

February 28: Still catching up on South Africa...

Aidan: At a game reserve, I saw many animals. I saw cheetahs, lions, zebras, springboks, a rhino, buffalos, a giraffe, ostriches, and wildebeests. It was pretty much like a safari that some other people took. The springbok is South Africa's national mammal. We rode around the three reserves in big, unsafe, loud, Jeep-like vehicles. The whole game reserve experience was great!

John: Today's adventure was a kind of safari-lite--a day trip to a game reserve called Inverdoorn, a three-hour bus trip away. This seemed to be about all we could do with a two-year-old in the party; others on the ship went on more ambitious overnights to much larger and more distant reserves. But as Aidan says, the experience was still pretty great; we saw all the animals he mentions, with the best pictures perhaps being of a cheetah:

and a giraffe:

The giraffe was peeved to see us, since she was protecting a week-old calf (which we didn't get to see; hidden too well in the bushes). 

Maeve had a great time, too.

"Look, everybody, I see animals!"

Inverdoorn actually has three reserves, as Aidan says--a large central reserve, and smaller ones, each for lions and cheetahs. The lions that they have have been rescued from places that raise lions for the purpose of releasing them into very small areas so that they can be hunted and killed by foreigners who want to pretend to be big game hunters circa 1895. Since the lions were not raised by other lions, they don't know how to track or hunt (though they are still very much able to kill--we kept our distance), and therefore can't live in the wild or the large preserve, where they would likely be killed by buffalo or rhinos. The cheetahs are also being rehabilitated, though some of them will eventually be released into the larger reserve. Inverdoorn also has begun a program of poisoning and coloring rhino horns, which are frequently poached in South Africa (killing the animal) since rhino horns are believed in some places to have medicinal qualities; poisoning the horn--which doesn't hurt the animal--makes them valueless.

Aidan drew this picture of the animals he saw:

On the long bus ride to the reserve, we got a look at what our bus driver called "informal housing"--the kind of shacks around a central town that most black South Africans live in:

"Informal" is one word for, I guess. Since the mid-1990s, the government has been building small houses to replace these kinds of shanties. They look like this:

Very basic, and not much bigger than a shanty, these buildings have running water, electricity, and sewage, so they're an enormous improvement in the direction of sanitation and public health. The government has built 1.6 million of these since 1994, as a first step toward raising the standard of living for the majority of the population. Cape Town feels like a prosperous western city, but when you pass by these townships, you realize that South Africa is still a developing country.