A Christmas birthday party

Christmas excess was cancelled at Warrillow Towers this year; no presents, no decorations, no tree, no cards (to those of our friends who sent them - we will be making amends in the new year).

 There isn’t even that much alcohol in the house :( :(

 You only have to read the post below to realise why, of course; the afterglow of Sun Eden meant we were in no mood to prepare for winter festivities; summer, sun and the glories of the South African veld, still in our minds as we head into 2012, hopefully won’t go away for a while yet.

 That’s not to say that we didn’t have a family Christmas; although Mr W senior lives in Spain and is only arriving in the UK for a three-week visit on the day I write this, Christmas on the other half of the family was a very special time. My mother-in-law has tried for years to conceal her true age but an unfortunate encounter with her medical records this spring confirmed that she was, in fact, facing her ??th birthday.

 What made this even more special is that she was born on December 24. A perennial pain for those of us faced with buying two lots of presents for two consecutive days, the Yuletide financial grief is added to by the fact that one of her sons was born on December 16.

 Nevertheless, this year, we felt it was right to push the boat out for a special party, to be held eight days prior to the birthday. Relatives from the wilds of the Cotswolds and the far west of Ireland were contacted and cajoled into making plans to visit; friends in Tamworth were alerted; a venue was booked - and everyone was sworn to secrecy.

 Mrs W, of course, lay at Sun Eden for a fortnight, worrying whether anyone would bother to turn up on the big day and how and whether her mother could be cajoled out of the house. When the morning of December 17 dawned wet, cold and miserable, it seemed her fears might come true but when the phone started ringing mid-morning with calls from relatives checking that everything was still OK, she started to calm down.

 And we will never know whether Ma had the slightest inkling that something was going on.

 In the end, everyone played a blinder. The birthday girl’s niece and her husband arrived from Ireland while her sister looked a different woman from the sorry figure who lay in a hospital bed, gravely ill, earlier in the year; Mrs W’s brothers were on top form and the restaurant owner was totally relaxed about us sitting down to eat 40 minutes later than planned, then having to push an ever-so-slightly relaxed group of people out of the door four hours later.

 It was one of those afternoons which reminded me that you really must look after your parents as they get older. My own mother died at just 49 years and seven days, while Mrs W’s dad tragically got to nowhere near that age.

 Occasions like Ma’s birthday party are where lifelong happy memories are made. However much trouble planning such events may seem beforehand, you never know when it might be the last big thing you do for your parents.

 We wouldn’t have missed it for the world and the stunned, delighted, look on Ma’s face when she walked into the restaurant will stay with me for just as long as anything we did in South Africa.

 And it was definitely worth cancelling Christmas for. Happy New Year, everyone.

Two weeks of magical moments at Sun Eden

I have a pair of old slippers. The soles are coming apart, the inner lining is breaking up. They’ve been lying at the end of the bed for three days when I decide to tidy the room and throw them away.

 I casually mention my plan to Mrs W, who is standing not two feet away; half-looking at her and half-looking at my slippers, I plunge my hand into the shoe.

 Thirty seconds later, when I have finished screaming and scraped myself off the ceiling, I begin the search for the large brown frog who had been snoozing inside, cosy and undisturbed.

Welcome to South Africa; a country of wild contradictions, of boundless beauty, of unbelievable wildlife and, for the most part, genuinely friendly people.

 We are enjoying the holiday of a lifetime at Sun Eden (www.suneden.com), a naturist resort some 30 miles from Pretoria and 70 miles north of Johannesburg, deep in the bushveld of Gauteng (formerly Northern Transvaal). The nearest supermarket is at least 15 miles away, the new Dinokeng Big 5 game reserve sits just next door, supply of hot water to our otherwise outstanding chalet is hit-and-miss, to put it mildly.

 But the whole place is wonderful, even the frog (who vanished behind the king-sized bed and re-emerged unharmed 24 hours later, to be gently dropped into a nearby mud pool) and the shongololos (see here - http://www.focusonpictures.com/zuidafrika/insectplus/insect5.htm), brightly coloured millipedes who are ubiquitous on the floors and walls.

 After a trying couple of months, it would have been all too easy for Mrs W and I to throw off all our clothes, pull up the sunloungers, pour a cold drink and spend 12 days watching the warm sun drift across the sky, with occasional visits to the swimming pool five minutes’ walk away.

 Had we been on desert-like Fuerteventura, we would have done. But you can’t come to a continent as magical as Africa and lie in the sun for 12 days.

 So we visited the Cullinan diamond mine, where some of the largest precious stones in the world, including some which lie in the British Crown jewels, have been found; we enjoyed a couple of quite spectacular drives around the game reserve, rattling around in the back of a truck while experienced game rangers pointed out wildebeest and zebra and giraffe and rhinos and some of South Africa’s thousands of bird species; we visited Mahela View lion camp, where the owner keeps three tame lions out in the wild while carrying out an extensive programme of educating tourists about this most magical of animals; we even enjoyed a wondrous day at the Tranquility Spa lodge (www.Tranquillityspalodge.co.za) , a new venue in a valley at the side of the Bobbejaansberg mountains with a fantastic view over the African landscape.

 The latter supplied two of the most memorable moments of the holiday. The owners, a former airline pilot and his Welsh-born wife are friends of our hosts at Sun Eden and we were invited, on just our second night in SA, to his 60th birthday party.

 As we enjoyed drinks on the terrace and watched a perfect sun gently slip below the horizon, a giraffe appeared on the other side of a fence at the end of the garden, gave us a disinterested glance and slowly bent his enormous front legs to drink from a pool of water.

 It was a breathtaking moment, a birthday party of a dozen people watching quietly as one of nature’s most extraordinary creations stood not 50 feet away in his natural habitat. At the time, I cursed myself for not bringing my camera; it was only when we got home that night that I realised it had been in Mrs W’s handbag all evening.

 The other great moment? We took advantage of one of Tranquillity’s reasonably-priced full day spa packages. If you’ve never spent a hour sitting nude and sipping cold lager with your other half in a jacuzzi in the spacious grounds of an African bush lodge before taking lunch and then undergoing an extraordinary full body massage, it is an experience I recommend wholeheartedly.

 Contradictions? This part of Gauteng is predominantly Afrikaans and although we did not discern any real sense of animosity between white and black neighbour (in fact, it was often the opposite), we didn’t have to look far to see white farmers living in opulent surroundings while their black employees went home to little more than tin shacks.

 We drove back to Johannesburg Airport down a four-lane highway which was quieter than an English country road on a summer afternoon, yet watched black workers walking miles down dirt tracks to catch one of the state-sponsored buses which ferries them to and from the big towns. And we were, of course, many miles from any of the cities where I am sure you will see a different South Africa - the one where the Minister of Justice has just been jailed for 15 years for corruption, for instance.

 Of course, this blog wouldn’t be complete without a mention of the naturist side of our holiday. For obvious historical reasons, naturism is still relatively new in South Africa; Sun Eden is one of just a handful of venues although a new British-owned resort, Vasnat, opened up in Cape Town while we were in the country.

 Strict attitudes to the human body, which were part of the religions of most South Africans for years if not centuries, are fading away and we found the members and guests at Sun Eden just as relaxed, friendly and non-judgmental as naturists all around the world; indeed, we can already count some of them as friends.

 And there is something about Africa which lends itself to naturism. Sitting in the garden in the nude, enjoying a vast breakfast, while impalas and springboks grazed in the grounds and brightly-coloured birds twittered in the trees is another great memory; South Africa’s fondness for braais (barbecues) meant we spent many an evening chatting outside into the late hours with an iced glass of wine in one hand, a barbecue pork chop in the other and not a stitch of clothing to be seen amid smiling, happy people. 

 We had no preconceptions about South Africa but now we have no doubt that we want to go back to the veld. Sun Eden, to which you can book accommodation direct without going through a British travel agent, is the perfect place to do so.