Phinda and Rocktail Bay

by Alison Westwood

You're sitting in a dark, cold room. Outside it's raining and the wind is blowing. A siren wails. Somewhere out there, far away, there's a beach. The beach is long - too long to see the end of - and the soft sand glows golden in the sun.

The sea is warm. It froths and sparkles as it rushes up the shore and sends small white crabs scurrying. Waves roar; dried palm fronds rustle in the breeze; there is no one there at all. What a fool you were to leave!

Driving into the wild

I was almost late for the flight to Durban. My alarm clock went off, but it was a chilly morning, so black and bleak it might as well have been the middle of the night. It's hard to get up on mornings like that, even when you've got a flight to somewhere sunny.

At Durban, the city lay ahead of us like a twinkling bar graph with its long line of tall seaside hotels. But we slipped away before it could swallow us. Not for us the rickshaw men and bead sellers. No jostling with surfers for prime position on the waves or watching children build sand castles from a beach towel.

Instead, we followed the signs to the north. The suburbs, their houses piled up higgledy piggledy on steep hills, gave way to rounded green fields of sugar cane, and the sugar cane to luxuriant bush. As the scenery became wilder, so did the place names. We drove past Stanger and Empangeni, past Mtubatuba and through Hluhluwe (pronounced "shloo-shloo-weh").

Eventually the paved road ran out. Billowing red sand behind us like a small tornado, we passed through the gates of Phinda Private Reserve.

A gem of a game reserve

Now if, like me, you thought that KwaZulu Natal had nothing to it but beaches on one side and mountains on the other, it may come as a surprise that there are some top class game reserves in between.

Although it's more than ten thousand times smaller than the Kruger National Park, Phinda has seven distinct ecosystems, compared with Kruger's five. But of much greater interest to me was the fact that Phinda is probably one of the best places in Africa to see cheetah in the wild.

Africa's fragile predator

I've got a bit of a thing for cheetah. These extraordinarily beautiful cats are built on a greyhound chassis. Their long legs, flexible spines and permanently unsheathed claws allow them to accelerate from 0 to 70 kph in two seconds. That's faster than a Ferrari...

Their top speed is said to be 120 kph, but they can only keep that up for about 500 metres, or their brains will overheat.

The fastest mammal in the world, the cheetah is also one if its most fragile predators. The main reason for this is that the cheetah is a one-trick pony. Made purely for speed, it lacks the strength to defend itself, or its food, against its more rugged competitors in the bush: lion, leopard and hyena.

Cheetah were once spread over most of Africa, and even parts of India, but are now confined to just a few parks in southern and East Africa and to the sparse grasslands of Namibia, where they are frequently shot at by farmers. Scientists think that the last ice age may have wiped out most of the cheetah. It's even possible that all cheetahs alive today are descended from a single mother.

A Phinda cheetah experience

As we sat watching a mother cheetah and her four happy, healthy and very playful cubs, I asked our ranger why the Phinda Resource Reserve was so blessed with these usually elusive cats. In my many safaris, I had seen cheetah only once before - in the Serengeti, a few minutes before I left. Now here I was, an hour into my first game drive, with five cheetahs ten metres away.

Our ranger explained that Phinda has fairly dense vegetation for cheetah to hide in, and that it doesn't have a big population of lions and hyenas. Despite this, we had two lion sightings at Phinda in two game drives. One of them was also of a mother and her four cubs, all gorging themselves on a nyala.

On our second drive, we found cheetah in less than half an hour. Again it was a mother and four cubs. (The cats at Phinda seem to prefer families of four.) These cubs were older, but no less playful.

We watched them for ages, enthralled as they stalked one another, sprinted and pounced. Their mother sat still, alert and aware, looking faintly worried. Cheetah mothers have a lot to worry about.

Time for the beach!

I left Phinda very satisfied with myself. No longer would I wistfully ask every ranger if there was any chance, just possibly, that we might catch a glimpse of a cheetah, even in the distance, just for a moment. I had seen my cheetah - ten of them! Now it was time for the beach.

I was looking forward to staying by the beach at Rocktail Bay. I had seen photographs of this beach. It looked like it had been created by the frenzied imaginings of a stressed-out executive longing for peace, beauty, and the immediate disappearance of all other human beings.

Rocktail Bay Lodge

We reached Rocktail Bay Lodge after a long drive in a Land Rover through an idyllic rural farming community. The neat houses were made of poles and stones, with reed roofs, in the traditional way. Wonky fences of natural wood kept cows out of the vegetable gardens. Ragged children smiled and waved as we went by. I considered changing places, just for a month or so.

At the lodge, I lost no time in heading straight for the beach. I had to know if it was as good as the photographs. The lodge at Rocktail Bay is built on the land side of tall, forested sand dunes, in the shade of Natal mahogany trees, festooned with creepers and orchids.

Soft sandy paths wander between the trees; swing chairs are hung in quiet places; little wooden signs point to hidden places - Forest Trail, Bird Hide, Morning Glory Hammock Trail and, most importantly, Beach.

The roar of the ocean

I practically ran along the humped boardwalk that led over the dune, through the forest and deposited me suddenly on a sandy slope with the bright surf crashing before me. The beaches in KwaZulu Natal are magnificent. They are exciting, awe-inspiring, humbling, sometimes jaw-dropping. This one certainly was.

I stood still for a moment, taking it in, eventually remembering to close my mouth. Then I bounded whooping down the dune, tore off my shoes and buried my feet in the thick powdery sand. There was no one around to see me acting like a kid. So I did.

A world apart

I stayed on the beach until the shadows grew long and the last rays of sun left the tops of the white-capped waves. Slowly, I returned to the lodge and asked for an internet connection.

"Oh no, we don't have internet here," the manager told me. "We don't have television, and we don't have telephones. We don't even have mobile phone reception." I was dumbfounded. Everyone has internet these days, even in Africa.

"But...¦" I started, and then stopped as the realisation dawned. I was free!

Drinking buddies

I spent the evening curled up on the couch with one of the good books that the lodge provides for guests like me. People who arrive with laptops and mobile phones and television programs to keep them connected to everything but themselves.

I had the lounge to myself, and was sitting in a small puddle of light, sipping on an iced drink. A movement caught my eye. A strange monkey-like creature was creeping across the sideboard towards me. We regarded each other in surprise. It daintily lifted the lid off the sugar bowl and started eating the contents with gusto.

"You'll get fat," I warned it. "You'll rot your teeth." The creature looked at me warily but carried on eating. "Guzzle guts," I said. It hesitated, then ignored me. So we sat, eating and drinking and talking together until it finished the sugar and slunk away into the night. It's not often you have a drink and a chat with a bush baby.

A dream beach holiday

I took full advantage of my freedom. I made friends with a lovely family also staying at the lodge. We went snorkeling in crystal clear water and saw stingrays and moray eels and a sea snake. We walked along the beach for miles without meeting anyone else. We went for a nature drive to Black Rock and saw cycads and strange ants' nests sewn together like spiders' webs.

I played football on the beach by myself, but gave my football to some local children I met. I made up a story in which one of them ended up playing for South Africa in 2010. I even sat on the couch in the evening and waited for the bush baby, but he didn't return. I hope I hadn't insulted him.

I was almost late for the flight from Durban. They closed check-in a few seconds later and had to give me a stand-by seat. It's hard to leave somewhere like that sooner than you have to, even when you've got Cape Town to go back to.

Article © Copyright 2006 Go2Africa.

Print this page |  Send to a friend

Related content