So it Begins With the Animals

we were headed south to the Cape of Good Hope. you know -- the point of land immortalized by Vasco de Gama a half millennium ago. the peninsula leading down to the Cape is now park land. mile after mile of breathtaking emptiness. not barrenness, mind you. just endless miles of dramatic land and seascapes with absolutely no hint that humans walk the earth. fabulous.

apparently, alot of animals think so too since they pop up like "whack-a-moles" when you least expect them. on today's program, we had the pleasure of meeting up with baboons, penguins, ostriches, and dassies (more on these latter creatures later). First, the baboons. they are fearless. we came upon them first on the open road -- and I mean literally on the road -- where they nonchalantly occupied the center of the roadway causing something of a traffic back-up. I'm not thinking "cute" or "adorable" when in their presence. these guys are big, let me tell you. and, as the phrase goes, if looks could kill, these guys would be doing jail time. their laser-like stare would cause the most hardened mafia hit man to blink. people, such as myself, would get within a couple of feet of them, and we might as well have been invisible. they just didn't care. the signs in the area promised that baboons were dangerous and so we discretely ceded them the right of way until they would let us pass.

then came the penguins. not your regal emperor bird found in antartica, but the south african penguin. much smaller, but again, almost fearless. we came upon them on a path to the beach and allowed us to come within inches of them. I touched one and found how surprised I was at how feathery they are. like birds. (oh, right. they are birds.) what was more amazing, however, was a scene in which penguins and people shared a beach together. I'm talking sunbathers and their kids, with people playing paddleball. the penguins, while not exactly dodging beach blankets, would literally swim around splashing kids and scolding parents as if they were some sort of fixture, like a tree. amazing.

In a somewhat more secluded spot, we watched one penguin come up from taking a dip in the water to where his or her spouse was sitting on a couple of babies. while I couldn't be entirely sure of this, it appeared that the squawking going on between them was in the manner of one saying to the other, "where the hell have you been? I've been sitting on these guys for hours while you're out joyriding!" male and female penguins are very hard to distinguish -- at least for me they are -- so, it was hard to know who was griping at who. as if it matters.

a final word about dassies. I had never heard of these creatures before, but have been told they are genetically linked to elephants. this comes as a bit of a surprise to me since dassies look like small groundhogs and weigh about two tons less than their alleged partners-in-evolution, the elephant. additionally, the dassie's ears are tiny while we all know the elephant's ear to be the size of a small station wagon. with some skepticism, I cross examine a park person about this, and she assures me the organic structure and skeletal design of the two creatures are very similar. to my ear, this is like saying that I am biologically linked to a redwood tree. I'm not getting it.