Two Worlds, One Week: World 1 Amakhala

Our second weekend trip was to Amakhala game reserve, about an hour from Grahamstown. I had had a late Friday night spent dancing at one of the clubs with some of my classmates from political science who were all feeling a little celebratory after finishing an essay. The club, Slipstream, was having a supposedly “indie music night” but it was more like an ‘American music from the 80’s night’ which was also good. Music in South Africa can be a strangely touchy and racialized subject, actually. The music that is usually heard in clubs or blasting from a student’s open window is very different from the music usually heard in America. Not that its not American, most of the music is- but hiphop and rap which are often heard in clubs in America are still considered “black” music and only the “black” clubs and bars play it. Clubs and bars that are more frequented by white people play techno and often old American songs that were popular in middleschool. We Americans, not being picky, will go to any of them, although sometimes we have had trouble getting white South African friends to go with us. No one admits they don’t want to go to a black club, they just say its in a bad neighborhood or its ‘dodgy.’ Slipstream, seems to not have as much of a reputation for being either black or white, but to attract more of the offbeat crowd.


Any ways I didn’t really want to get up early to charge my cameras and pack but I dragged myself out of bed and we arrived at Amakhala in early afternoon. This huge lodge was no backpacking hostel. A huge white house with a living room and five bedrooms was all for us. I got a beautiful room to myself with flowers on the pillows and a white claw bathtub in the bathroom. We walked up a little path to the building that held the dining room and we were served lunch. Then our ranger came and picked us up in an open jeep and we took a three hour drive through the park. I can’t name or count the animals we saw. We saw a herd of giraffe hanging out with zebra, we saw a mother and son white rhino and an extremely rare black rhino- only 3,000 of them exist in the world. We saw two cheetahs lying in the grass. It was an amazing experience.



When we got back we went to dinner and then downstairs to the tiny room that had been converted to a pub to hang out with the other rangers and the owner of the lodge, Bill. Sitting in the little room, surrounded by animal head trophies (most of which I think were killed for overpopulation reasons or found dead- but still not the decorations I would have chosen) and leafing through the scrapbook one of Bill’s granddaughters had made for him, I started to feel like I had stepped into some completely different reality. A version of South Africa, with ‘high tea’ and black servants that had existed long ago, and some people had just decided to stay in. I looked at the photo of Bill in his highschool uniform in the 1940s, pictures of the gamepark fields covered in flowers and at the old man, sitting at the bar, drinking his gin and water. It would be so easy, I thought, to never leave here. To sit in this bar every night, and go look at beautiful animals every day.



We all somehow managed to get up the next morning for a 6am boat ride down the river where we saw monkeys, gorgeous birds, and a humongous lizard, and then a drive over to the lion side of the park. The lions were being shy though, so we didn’t see them, but after everything else we hardly felt disappointed. I didn’t want to leave, but as we drove out of the gate I was glad. Even Alice couldn’t stay in Wonderland forever.