by Gaynor Paynter

G21 Africa Columnist

To read this article in Deutsch, Francaise, Italiano, Portuguese, Espanol, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Russian, copy and paste the complete URL ("http://www.g21.net/let16.htm") and enter it in the box after you click through.

Gaynor Paynter & her sons

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA - Greetings to all my American friends from a South Africa which is cooling in the evenings as winter approaches after a long, rather harsh summer. I hope that this letter finds you all well.

With the cooler days will come the end of the rainy season, and this, I hope, will make the South African roads a safer place to be - over one hundred people died in South Africa over the Easter season alone. In South Africa, we have recently had rather a lot of public holidays, starting last weekend with the Easter weekend, which was a four day one. The weekend which has just passed was a three day one and, in keeping with our family's lifestyle, we grasped the weekend with both hands and squeezed everything out of it, cramming activities into almost every hour.

The weekend began with a Saturday, and we used the day to take part in one of our favourite activities, ten pin bowling. There is nothing better than tenpin bowling to release your frustrations - you can really bowl that ball down the alley with all your might and no one will question you. However, as with all sports, you have your on and off days, and I passed the remark to my husband that I was rather grateful that all of our friends had something else to do that day because we definitely did not bowl to the best of our ability. We have reputations to uphold - no one should know the low scores we got that day! We came home cheered by having participated in one of our favourite sports, but chastened by our poor performances coupled with the rising cost of the game!

The following day was a Sunday and the advent of it brought with it my nephew Liam's birthday party. (He turned two this month.) Children's birthday parties have changed in nature since the days that my mother hosted them for my brother and myself.

In those days it was sufficient to invite a few friends over, put out a table of eats, maybe play a few games, and then send them home again, free to open any gifts they may have brought.

These days, birthday parties appear to have become more elaborate affairs. For one thing, because of the fact that so many children have to go to créche because their parents work, children seem to be having them from a younger age. They seem to be rather competitive affairs with the parents of each child in the créche competing with the parents of the next to make the birthday party more expensive, more frenetic, and in short, better than the next child's.

In praise of his mother, Liam's party was refreshingly different in that there was no competition, just a group of two, three and four year old children having fun on the jumping castle and enjoying themselves. These children are the future of our country and they deserve the very best.

The birthday party left us exhausted. (The fact that I have to plan one for my own son's birthday next month - he is turning five and wants a "racing car party" - is daunting to say the least.)

We decided that we would go ahead with our plan of indulging in another South African love the evening after the party: entertaining a group of friends for a braai (or barbecue) for supper. There is nothing better than sitting out in the garden with your friends, with the delicious scent of your supper cooking over the coals, each friend having brought a contribution of a salad or a pudding to add to the feast. We were filled with good South African cheer, enhanced greatly by drinking good South African beer! Fun is had by all, as this presents opportunity to talk with friends about all issues, while the children have the opportunity to expend some of their plentiful energy by charging largely unrestricted around the garden.

We were up rather late that night, but it didn't hold us back for the next day, the Monday, which happened to be last day of the long weekend. My son Andrew loves the outdoors, and watching wild animals in particular. Since we took him camping to the Pilanesberg Nature Reserve last year, he has just not been able to get enough of animals, and because of this, and of wanting to instil a love of the outdoors in my younger son too, we took ourselves off to the Pilanesberg Nature Reserve for a day trip.

My husband does the 150km drive on a regular basis, so the journey has lost some of it's magic for him, but I don't think that I will ever tire of driving that route. I cannot explain what it is about the drive itself, but it seems like as soon as you leave the corporate nightmare that moonlights as Johannesburg, the air is immediately cleaner, the colours immediately brighter, the sky is immediately bluer. And since we always drive the road early in the morning, the weak morning light picks out and heightens hues and colours that I don't believe I would have noticed on an ordinary day. It's almost as though someone has washed the world. I drink in this scenery as we drive, and the journey down always seems to go very quickly to me.

There are certain landmarks that I look out for, such as the cross marking the grave of a Boer General, which is mounted on a hill, and when you look up to it, it is silhouetted dramatically against the African sky; the boats and dinghies sailing on the Hartbeespoort Dam, which in itself is glorious in its stature with its marvellous old fashioned architecture and its culture of street hawkers who make their presence felt as you are waiting by the robot (that's traffic light to you Americans) which regulates the flow of traffic beneath the dam wall. The wares which they have on offer are diverse in their nature, ranging from tangerines (naartjies, to give them their South African name), to wire chairs, to leather pouches, to authentic or non-authentic African sculptures. Yes, the wares are diverse in their nature, but combined in one simple factor - their prices are geared towards tourists, not towards locals passing by.

And so we arrived at the game reserve itself. As I mentioned earlier, winter is approaching in South Africa. South African winters are dry, dusty, cold affairs, and the dry dust does nothing to help a person who is suffering from hay fever. It was with this thought at the back of my mind, being a hay fever sufferer, that we drove through the gates of the game reserve. I was quietly pleased to discover that although the park was indeed dry and dusty, it was also as green and beautiful as I remembered it to be.

I must admit that the Nature Reserve is becoming as well known to us as our back garden, that is the amount of times that we have been there, but it is not a place of which I will ever get sick. Today was not a good day for seeing animals, but we did have some good luck in coming up on a watering hole.

At first it seemed as if all the animal life had decided that our visit was not a cause worthy of them getting out of bed, but a closer inspection through that marvellous invention, the binoculars, revealed an amazing, calming scene - a brown hyena (which we had never seen previously) was happy to share his source of liquid refreshment with a huge flock of guinea fowl. We watched him intently through the binoculars for a number of minutes, and not once did he make any threatening advances to any of the fat birds. I guess he had already had his lunch and was simply washing it down now. Sadly, although we were some fifty or one hundred meters away, our presence seemed to threaten him, because he turned to stare deeply at us and then slowly turned and sidled away, presumably to rejoin his pack.

That episode alone made the trip entirely worthwhile for us, and so we were greatly rewarded when, some time later, we came upon a herd of giraffe. ("Giwaffe" - Brandon, two, or "Giraft" - Andrew, almost five). At first we only saw the one, the sentry, as we called him, but with further scrutiny we realised that there were at least five more, and I was able to point out a giraffe eating the leaves from the top of a tree to my sons. It was the sentry, however, who fascinated me the most. As we drove along the dirt road to get a better view of the group, he walked nearer to us along the same route, almost as though he was shadowing us, and I can only imagine that he feared that we were some type of predator, and this shadowing us was his way of ensuring that should we launch any type of attack, he would be ready to defend. He definitely was the most tall, statuesque creature, and we admired his beauty, picked out in orange and brown, before moving on.

Basically, the end of our day trip brought with it the end of our fantastic weekend which we were fortunate in being able to spend in this great country.

Good bye, and God bless you all.