It has been a while that I was able do some postings, but here we are. After my first days in Johannesburg, I spent two days in Kimberley, a kind of a sleeping city build on the wealth of diamond mining, long time ago.
Writing this while I am in a little village on the Mozambiquan coast, Kimberley seems so long ago and far away.
Nowadays not a lot is happening in Kimberley. They don?t even have a rush hour. In the supermarket, people are sleepwalking on background music buying charcoal and boerewors for their braaij and the main tourist attraction is a giant hole in the earth where, according to Lonely Planet, people moved 28 tonnes of earth to win 3 tonnes of diamonds.
Apart from visiting a farm where a San(Bushmen)-community is being trained as a security guard, I had an conversation about hunting and shooting with a local white South African who called himself a real nature lover and? a real hunter only minutes later.
I was a bit surprised, to say the least. I am not and I will never be a hunter. But I realised in South Africa, hunting is quit popular.
As a tourist, you can go on a hunting trip and pay a lot of money to shoot an elephant, a lion, or any animal that is on the menu of the company that offers the trip. ?What is the fun about shooting a lion for a huge amount of dollars??, I asked the South African nature lover opposite me.
?What you are talking about is not the real hunting?, he said meanwhile putting his knife in a juicy-medium-rare-500-grammes-t-bone-steak. ?Hunting is about being in nature, with your backpack, sleeping in the field, walking for days, making your own fire, taking care of yourself. Tracking the animals.
If you get hungry, you are trying to track an animal, kill it, for the purpose of the food. You try to take as much meat as possible in your backpack to wind-dry it for billtong at home. That is what I would call hunting.? That, also, is how every young white South African learns it from his father.
But there is a difference between hunting and shooting, I was told by my conversation partner. ?These so called hunting safari?s have nothing to do with hunting?, he said. ?That is all about money.? After our meal together, I had to catch a bus to where I initialy started my trip up North to Nairobi: Johannesburg.