A South African Christmas

After nearly having to stay in NZ due to a passport expiration fiasco (Gary’s of course), we were thrilled to get off the boat and visit Gary’s relatives in South Africa. We flew into Durban and were based with cousin Bruce Mann and his wife Judy. They are both marine biologists with great jobs…Bruce sets up marine reserves and studies the impacts of fishing, while Judy is the Director of uShaka Marine World, a world-class aquarium and waterpark recently built on the Durban waterfront. Bruce gave us a behind-the-scenes tour of the amazing facility…check it out on the web!

We had written ahead of arriving to provide our hosts with some idea of the activities that we wanted to do, including: diving, fishing, spearfishing, hiking, mountain biking, climbing, and paragliding. After being couped up in the boat for 9 months, we were ready for some action, but that list was for intended for our WHOLE trip, not the first week!!! We had checked off the aquarium tour, diving, hiking, and paragliding all by day 4. The diving deserves a couple sentences of explanation.

After Bruce and Judy had taken us on a dive of a famous local shoal, we shifted our gear into their friend Mark’s boat. Mark’s job, believe it or not, is taking people diving with tiger sharks…we got a freebee to determine the feasibility of catching a small one for the aquarium. Mark had set out a chum can an hour before picking us up…judging by the HUGE splashes, the sharks had found the can. “Okay, jump in!” Mark said after his briefing. While he had made it sound so straightforward in the briefing, there was something terribly irrational about actually jumping into the water with a 3-metre long (not including the tail) female tiger shark (and we hadn’t packed spare underwear).

Nevertheless, we slipped in, not wanting to get them any more excited…“Don’t scream like a little girl” “Don’t scream like a little girl” Gary kept repeating to himself, especially when she came to within an arms length of my face before abruptly turning away. Lo had a similar experience when she drifted into the scent line…Gary watched helplessly from a distance as the huge shark swam straight for Lo (slowly kicking backwards) before turning…YIKES! We spent more than an hour watching the two tigers and twenty dusky sharks cruise around and take the fish that Mark was throwing out of the bait can…incredible! Mark has been doing this for 7 years, without any accidents and knows 25 sharks by name.

The holidays were great, seeing all the Mann cousins in a series of get-togethers. Christmas Day was spent in Durban with Bruce’s (Uncle Quin, Aunt Annette, and the twins Simon and Roger) and Judy’s (Rosemary, Sheila and Douglas) families. On Boxing Day, Bruce and Uncle Quin took us to the family farm where Gary’s Dad grew up. Uncle Quin’s trip narration was great, filling in the three-hour journey with numerous anecdotes of his childhood with Gary’s dad.

Cousin Arthur (and his wife Jill) is now the fourth generation of Manns to farm at Vectis (see photos above of old dairy barn and below of breakfast at the stunning new farmhouse). We spent a great afternoon of throwing the Frisbee around the yard with Arthur and his kids Tim, Rebecca, Lucas, and Callum. Aunt Priscilla joined us for dinner.

The next day we stopped in Pietermaritzburg for a great lunch with cousins Sally (Rob and baby Haley), Linda (Rob and kids Dillon, Megan and Matthew) and Tessa (husband Matthew wasn’t there, but had taken us paragliding earlier; see photo). New Year’s Day was spent at Aunt Annette and Uncle Quin’s house, with the same set of cousins as Christmas Day.

In between the holiday festivities, we managed a couple of days with Bruce and Judy at the Umfolozi Hluhlue (pronounced shlu shlu wee) National Park north of Durban. Interestingly, the park is situated in the area that Shaka, the king of the Zulus, used as a private hunting area back in the day.

Touring the game park with Bruce and Judy was like having your own talking animal and plant guidebooks…only they would usually spout off the latin names instead of plain English. While we were very impressed with their amazing knowledge (these were land critters after all), we of course teased them about being such big nerds. After some keen tutelage, we too became Nerds of the Bushveldt. Gary received the honourary Zulu name “Bona Undlovo”, which means seer of elephants, for his sharp eye. In 24 hours of viewing we saw over 50 species of birds and many large mammals including giraffe, white rhino, elephant, buffalo, wildebeest, zebra, warthog, impala, nyala, and kudu…very cool!

On the way home (to Durban), we dined with cousin Kenneth, his partner Jayne, their son Dane and his new wife Paula. Kenneth and Jayne gave us a demo of their prowess at dancing in Jayne’s studio in Balito – very impressive!